The Catullan corpus

The other day, I finished typing in the whole of the Catullan corpus as part of my Catullus project. Sure, I could have just cut and paste, which would have been a lot faster, but then I wouldn't have been able to get a sense of the whole thing. I'm glad I did it. To be sure, Catullus didn't leave volumes of poetry or mountains of prose. I wouldn't have wanted to do this with Cicero.

In the process I got to appreciate why people have enjoyed his work over the centuries. He's not just a love poet, but he does that very well too. To modern readers, his poems about his life come across as ordinary. What poet wouldn't write about his life? Heaney does. Except that in antiquity, to write about some aspect of your life wasn't the thing to do. You'd write about something epic. Like the Iliad. Or the Odyssey. Or the Aeneid. Or, well, you get the idea. Catullus, along with the neoteric poets broke the norms. Can you imagine poetry as familiar as Catullus's being avant garde? It's really hard to imagine. I also got to see the changing norms of how we present ancient texts, which I blogged about already.

So where to go from here? I don't know. This is kind of where I want to go, but I'm not sure about doing that for each poem. I'll probably want to do a few more movies where I recite the poems. That would be cool. I enjoy the challenge of writing vocabulary in Latin. But am I fired up enough about Catullus to do the whole mess?

The odd morphology of remembering and forgetting

I realized that the verbs for forgetting and remembering have odd morphology.

oblīvīscor, ī, —, oblītus sum – to forget
—, —, meminī – to remember

That forgetting should be deponent doesn't surprise me given the origins of Latin's deponent. It is somewhat a folly that happens to you by you. Easily explainable with the stop at middle voice before heading off to deponent. But why on earth should the verb for remembering be odd? It's only perfect?

Yeah, I've seen the explanation in Gildersleeve's. I'm not sure I buy it 100%.

Anyway, just one of those I was in the shower realizations.

Utopia as a political attack

So this is the result of my discourse analysis class. It might be the best class I've ever taken. Don't get me wrong, the other classes in the program so far have been good and useful, but discourse analysis might be one step better than that. Better even than the Coastal Ecology of the Florida Keys class I took as an undergrad.

Of course it could just be that I had the chance to talk about Utopia.

More's Utopia as a political attack on Henry VIII of England by Peter Sipes

Word frequency lists

One of the things a Latin nerd is up against is poor word frequency lists. In English, there are lots of good lists. The frequency data from COCA is top notch.

If you look at their big list, you'll see that somehow they manage to deal with inflected forms: be, which is English's most inflected word, is in second place. Properly so. But then you go to a pre-cooked Latin frequency list and the various forms of esse are scattered. And to a degree I understand. It's easier to build a frequency list that ignores these sorts of things. Quo could belong to quo or qui/quae/quod or quis/quid. I suppose there are ways around it, but then you start getting into having to program a computer to know the difference. I don't want to think about teaching a computer the difference between cum₁ and cum₂. But to some degree that's small potatoes.

Perseus has a word frequency tool buried in the results page of the word study tool, and it's pretty cool. But as a frequency analysis for fax shows, it's got an idiosyncratic approach to defining the corpus (i.e. de senectute is its own corpus and so is epistulae ad familiares and so on and so on). So at Perseus you get an idea of frequency, so long as you're not interested in a broader vision of Latinity. Other lists give you an absolute ranking and no more. Some give you the lemma others give you the assorted word forms. And then there's a super list that I love (it's true) from Dickinson College Commentaries.

In any case, I've not found one that's good at tracking down collocations—its own can of worms. Oh, woe to someone whose interest in Latin goes beyond the literary, historical or pedagogical. 

Building a crane to the vocabulary spurt

In the third chapter of Becoming a Word Learner, Linda Smith talks about how children build a crane (her term) to make themselves better word learners.

The notion is that when children learn their first words, they start to notice patterns about those words and create templates for future learning. Her main point is that children seem to fix on shape, rather than some other property, to signal an object's class. For example, chairs—prototypically anyway—have four legs, a seat and a back. This shape cues children in that a CHAIR is a chair. What's interesting is that when researchers cue very young children in on the shape bias by training them, their vocabularies grow faster.

So whatever the exact mechanism may be, children are learning how to learn words by—and this is truly shocking—learning words. Once they get to a certain point, the biases and patterns they've developed seem to take on a life of their own.

How might this relate to learning a second language? I'm not wholly sure, but allow me some speculation. One of the things that foreign language learning materials seem to focus on is inflectional morphology, which makes enough sense. You can't speak the language if you don't know how speakers expect things to be ordered. Latin wants case inflection on nouns. English wants word order. Spanish wants you to be clear about which object you are talking about via definite and indefinite articles. Russian couldn't care. And so on.

But one thing that foreign language materials, so far as I've seen anyway, don't worry too much about is derivational morphology. How do you get from civil to civility? And why can't you go from polite to politity? I'll be reading a paper—and thus blogging about it later—about this subject exactly.  I could be wrong, but I suspect that adult learners are given vocabulary lists that they then create a derivational morphology from. Or at least that's how it felt to me when I was learning Latin all those years ago. Civis became civitas. Aestus became aetstas. Could moralis become mortalitas? And the connection is made, though not without flaws. I think it was then that my grasp on Latin vocabulary started to really firm up from a list of words to memorize to things that behaved in similar way. In other words, I had made a derivational morphology crane for myself. 

Complementizer development in Latin

As most Latin folks know, oratio obliqua doesn't have a complementizer in classical Latin.

1. Puto    Dalleca a   Doctore     vici.
    I.think Daleks   by the.Doctor to.be.defeated
    I think that the Daleks are defeated by the Doctor.

First, because Doctor Who. Second, there's no complementizer, which is to say that there's no word that corresponds to "that" in English. It's not a big deal. We certainly can skip using the complementizer in English.

2. I think the Daleks are defeated by the Doctor.

Completely grammatical. We might even be able to parallel the Latin syntax and switch to an infinitive.

3. I think the Daleks to be defeated by the Doctor.

Though some native English speakers may feel I'm pushing the bounds of acceptable on that one. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that at some point Latin picks up a complementizer. It presses quod, which is a conjunction meaning because, into service as the complementizer. So our first sentence might become something like this if it were to show up in the Vulgate.

4. Puto   quod  Dalleca a   Doctore     vicuntur.    I.think that    Daleks   by the.Doctor they.are.defeated
    I think that the Daleks are defeated by the Doctor.

And that's no small matter. Aside from adding the complementizer quod, we made two other shifts. One is invisible, because I couldn't resist the notion of the Daleks in Latin. The noun is neuter so we don't see it shift from accusative in 1 to nominative in 4, so you'll just have to trust me that it works that way. The other thing I did was to shift vici from an non-conjugated infinitive to a standard conjugated verb, vicuntur.

The reason I bring it up is because in my preparation of de Senectute for publication as a reader for intermediate students, I've noticed that quod seems to behave oddly. It's like you could interpret it as either because or that. (And if I think of it I'll dig up an example of this, but not today.)

Adjective order in Latin

Warning: speculation follows, hopefully not all baseless

As we all know, you can graduate from college magna cum laude or summa cum laude. Latin students can skip ahead, but for those of you who don't know: here's the story. Both of those expressions are prepositional phrases. We'll skip some of the fine points, but here's the outline

1. magna cum laude    great    with praise
    with great praise

Now, you might notice that the adjective is before the preposition, and that's odd by English standards. In ordinary Latin you might get

2. cum laude magna

Yes, the adjective is prone to coming after its antecedent noun, hence the name antecedent. In previous entries, I've mused as to what is going on here. And I don't know that I've got any stunning new insight about why the preposition should move to where it does. In fact, it probably doesn't move to the spec P position. Oh well. Here's an example

3. Cytoriaco radium de               monte      tenebat (Met, 6.132)
    cytorian    shuttle  down.from mountain she.held
    She held a shuttle from the Cytorian mountain (i.e. boxwood).

The adjective Cytoriaco is separated quite a way from its antecedent noun monte, which is behind the preposition—as it should be. And this made me wonder whether there was some rule in how to separate an adjective from its noun. Latin is famous for this sort of word order play in poetry: noun and adjective bracket a line. It's picked up a name: Latin sandwich. Here it is in the Metamorphoses.

4. et    rupit         pictas      caelestia crimina vestes (Met, 6.131)
    and she.broke decorated celestial  crimes   cloths
And she [Minerva] tore apart the tapestry decorated with the crimes of the gods

Just what I want to show you. In 4, the adjective, pictas, comes well ahead its antecedent, vestes. Once again, I've done some casual looking around. The pattern seems to hold. If a noun and its adjunct adjective are separated, the adjective comes first. 

But so what? It is even real? I don't know I'll have to file this under: things to look into.

Show of force

In the morphology class the professor dropped the first two lines of the Aeneid on me to analyse for morphology. And I realized a few things in the process.

1. I don't use a consistent parsing order. Case, number and gender were never ordered the same way twice.
2. I'm not sure how transparent compounds were to native Latin speakers.
3. I have absolutely no idea how to analyse qui.

For #1, that's probably just me being put on the spot. I don't think I'd do that in writing. For #2 I suggested a morphological breakdown of profugus as follows.

pro-fug-us

But would a Latin speaker say that pro- had some specific meaning in the same way that re- or ad- had when prefixed to a verb? I know we're taught about Latin compounds as being this way, so I suspect so. I'll leave it at that. #3 was by far the most interesting. The professor was trying to get me to analyse qui (nom, s, masc). Now, if it had been qui (nom, pl, masc), I'd have had it. Obviously.

qu-i
who-nom.pl.masc

But how does the singular version break up? One possible solution.

qu-i
who-nom.s.masc

But it's not very satisfying. After all, how does -i signal nom.s.masc? I'm not thinking of anything off hand. So the solution I took in class was to not analyze it. Qui (nom, s, masc) is qui is qui. The professor pushed a bit, but I couldn't justify it so it stood as unanalyzable. 

Dickinson College Commentaries

Ok, if you have a sick love of Latin the way I do, you need to know about the Dickinson College Commentaries. Especially their vocabulary list. Especially that. To that end, I've made a spreadsheet version available for download and thus offline access.

Since discovering it, I've made good use of it in student materials. It also provides a manageable list for (high-school level) students to master over their two years of introductory courses. The DCC blog says this about the list:

The Latin list contains about 1000 of the most common words in Latin. These are the lemmas or dictionary headwords that generate approximately 70% of the word forms in a typical Latin text.

Mind you, 70% is not enough to get fluent reading going on, but it's a good start. I've seen a video that shows that 95% coverage is needed for a student to guess at unknown words. So the DCC list, in conjunction with same page vocabulary support, is a good starting point for students to build their vocabulary.

Given that I've written a three-year curriculum for the younger students at the school I work at, I should probably give a look-see at my vocabulary list and see how it matches up. My gut feeling is that in some ways it matches up pretty well, but in others it doesn't. 

Stress-based meter in Latin

It's not all about complicated mora stuff. Post-classical Latin uses a simple stress-based meter. Here's an overview of stress-based meter before I get into how mora might be a better way at figuring out meter in Latin.

Reading Plautus

I've read Plautus before, but this time I'm doing it 21st century style: on a computer. Well, not entirely. I'm also using a Bristol commentary. Anyway, it's new for me.

My problem is that I really like reading on paper. I grossly prefer a book. Call me old school. But I've also been spoiled by Geoffrey Steadman. Have you seen his Greek commentaries? While I don't need the extensive support in Latin, I like having it available. Especially for vocabulary. I understand the value of looking up words, though the power of extensive reading outweighs that. Call me crazy.

Anyway, I'm reading Pseudolus. For fun. My goal is to finish it this week. Here's my progress bar, so you can hold me to my goal. I'll be updating.

1337 / 1337
(100%)

So why do we set up our readers in such a way as to discourage reading for fun? Why do the very people who love Latin the most seem to be publicly hostile to reading for fun?

End note:
75 / 1335 on Monday
137/1335 end of night Monday (not strong progress, is it?)
230/1335 end of night Tuesday
370/1335 end of night Wednesday, I may not finish this week
537/1337 Thursday evening, I may read a bit more tonight
766/1337 end of night Friday
904/1337 Saturday evening
1337/1337 following Wednesday, holidays got in the way, but I'm done.

Mora and accent

Since I'm on about Latin phonology as of late, I might as well talk about accent and mora. I found a paper talking about it. Lehman says this:

P12.  Latin word accentuation
     1. The weight of the last syllable is stipulated to be one mora.
     2. Word accent falls on the third-last mora.
     3. If the word is shorter, word accent falls on the first mora.
While this does not answer the question of whether the mora is a primitive or a derived unit of Latin phonology…

But I don't like the notion of counting the last syllable as one mora for accentuation purposes. It screws up poetic scanning and junks up the whole rest of the system of mora counting. It also fails to account for words that have exceptional accent locations, like illūc.

Making a slight modification to Lehman's rules clears the whole mess up. I propose this:

1. From the last syllable onset position (whether filled or not), count back two moras.
2. Stress the syllable with the mora penultimate to the last onset.
3. If no penultimate mora, stress the mora before the last onset. 

Here's why I like this: No exceptions. Here it is in action. To make things clear, I've turned the ultimate syllable onset red as well as the moras that are counted.

	Standard orthography	IPA with syllables	IPA with moras indicated	Onsets and mora count	Stress placed
Antepenultimate stressed syllable	paenitet	paɪ.nɪ.tɛt	paɪμμ.nɪμ.tɛμt	paɪμμ.nɪμ.tɛμt	'paɪ.nɪ.tɛt
Penultimate stressed syllable	amāre	a.maː.rɛ	aμ.maːμμ.rɛμ	aμ.maːμμ.rɛμ	a.'maː.rɛ
Ultimate stressed syllable	illūc	ɪ.lːuːk	ɪμlμ.luːμμkμ	ɪμlμ.luːμμkμ	ɪ.'lːuːk

Presumably the first two rows look like standard action. The last row needs some explaining. First, the /lː/ is part of the second syllable, but it is also a participant in the previous syllable for the purpose of mora. I split it in the IPA with moras indicated column to make the bisyllabic participation explicit. So where do I get off on calling the final /k/ the onset of the ultimate syllable?

Well, for those of you paying attention to your Bennett's, check this:

6.3. When the enclitics… -ce… are appended to words…

And that is exactly what the situation with illūc is. The -c at the end is a remnant of the -ce enclitic. So the actual situation is that the word was originally illucce. Both the ll and the cc, as /lː/ and /kː/, would be ambisyllabic. Ok, so there's some sleight of hand going on by invoking the /k/ at the end of illūc as part of the onset of a non-pronounced syllable, but it kills the irregularity in Lehman's mora-based rule and syllable-based accentuation rules generally. (That said, now we've got a violation of *μμμ. Dammit, nothing works.)

Or am I missing something? I can't help but feel like I'm missing something when I'm putting forward a new idea.

*VVV? No, *μμμ

Well, I found what I was looking for. I was down the right trail with my suggestion that *VVV was a constraint in Latin. The problem is that I wasn't going far enough: I needed to take it all the way to the mora.

While searching, I found a research paper that focuses on six constraints. Brennan, the author, clearly has sunk more time in than I have. He went far enough to get to *μμμ (at least in syllables that aren't word initial). Makes sense to me. What's cool is that it fits in nicely with what Allen suggests for syllable weights.

canem ➝ [kanẽ:]

And that is ok. The [e] is one mora and the [:] is the other. But then

canēs ➝ [kane:s]

Wait. Isn't that last syllable e_μμs_μ? No. According to Brennan, /s/ and /n/ aren't moraic. So we've really got is e_μμs. And that's not violating *μμμ. So far so good. It gets better. Sort of.

*μμμ solves the [ju:li:] problem quite nicely. In the nominative we lose nothing, and the constraints explain it all.

/juːlɪʊs/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːlɪʊs
juːlʊs		*

After all [ju_μμlɪ_μʊ_μs] never has more than three moras in a row—even if the /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ are in separate syllables. But in the genitive we violate * μμμ, though admittedly across the syllable line.

/juːlɪiː/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːliː		*
juːlɪiː	*!

So /ju_μμlɪ_μi_μμ/ packs three moras into the last two syllables, which, while it is allowed, seems not to be favored. But when we move to the dative we get this.

/juːlɪoː/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːlɪoː
juːloː		*

Three moras. No deletion. My suggestion is that /ɪ/ and /i:/ are somehow considered to be the same. And their orthography and presentation in textbooks would suggest that. The existence of stuff like nihil/nīl, pronounced [nɪhɪl̴] and [ni:l̴], also suggests that /ɪ/ and /i:/ are related quite closely.

The constraint of *μμμ  answers some questions, but brings me back to my initial question of just what is the nature of the relationship between long and short vowels in Latin? Something is afoot. 

Deleting the perfect v

In the last post I looked at syncopation in perfect verb forms. And then I remembered poor īre. It syncopates too, but it doesn't seem to have a theme vowel. So we get this.

īvī → iī
īvistī → īstī
īvit → iit

This reveals something about the v-deletion. First, *VVV is seemingly broken by iī. Second, if v deletes and takes ī to i, then something really odd, though by no means without parallel elsewhere, is going on with īstī. But then it doesn't happen with iit. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

But I got another reminder yesterday in class. v-deletion is even more widespread. Remember nōrit? That's right.

nōverit → nōrit

So now we've got -vi- and -ve- deleting. Now we've got some patterns to go hunting for. The question is this: can I find a -vī- or -vē- that deletes? If so, this is really simple. It's about front vowels. Will I find -vo- or -vu- deletion? Then it is short vowel deletion, but for now all I can say is -vi- and -ve- delete.

/wV+front+short/  → Ø / V_C

If only -vi- and -ve- deleting, then there are, as I said before, strange things afoot at the Circle K. Then it is confined to front short vowels. (And I really don't care for the terminology long/short since it also is a vowel difference.) What is is about v and these vowels that are prone to deletion? While something like nōrit isn't ambiguous, it isn't wholly clear either. 

You say Iuli, I say Iulii…

There is something to this *VVV constraint in Latin. If you remember, as I did this afternoon, there is an alternate genitive for 2nd declension -ius nouns, the constraint gets some more evidence for its existence. Exhibit 1: the most famous gens Romana: Iulius. But in the genitive it can be either Iulii or Iuli. Curious that. (And thank the dead language phonologist's friend, Latin grammarians, that surface forms got written down.)

What is interesting—to me, and since I write the blog, we look at what I find interesting—is that even though the /ɪiː/ at the end is two syllables, it is close enough to violating *VVV that the underlying /ɪ/ gets deleted.

/juːlɪiː/	*VVV	MaxIO
☞juːliː		*
juːlɪiː	*!

While both forms pick up one violation the *VVV violation is worse, so [juːliː] is favored. Now tell me that doesn't make sense and give some strong evidence for the existence of *VVV in Latin.

Constraints in Latin phonology

In phonology we're moving away from rules, which seem to be language-specific, and towards constraints. I've got my objections to constraint-based phonology, but it also seems elegant. Or at least clean.

So here's a rule in Latin. It's not a hard rule, but it seems to be frequent enough that it works. And good enough to get to modern Spanish. Maybe some more tinkering would make it solid, but then the number of rules multiplies. Anyway, the rule. Or something really close to it. There's probably a morpheme boundary involved, but let's ignore that for now, shall we?

/w+ɪ/ ➝ Ø / Vː__

It is at least productive enough to yield parāstī from parāvistī. So that's the constraint table I'll put up. I'm going to focus on just a few forms to keep things under control.

Clearly there is a *VVV constraint in Latin. There are long vowels and diphthongs, which are effectively VV. There are short vowels, which are V. But no VVV—extra long vowels or long vowel diphthongs. Ever. So that's an easy constraint. It even seems fatal in all situations—unless you can somehow kludge in hiatus. That would violate DepIO (the constraint that says not to add things in), so I feel pretty safe in ignoring that possibility here.

There also seems to be a constraint against eliminating the conjugation's theme vowel going on. I can't put my finger on any scientific reason you'd want to do this, but it seems like a way to avoid creating ambiguity. In any case, syncopated forms in Latin preserve the conjugation's theme vowel in the perfect. If there's no theme vowel in the perfect stem, there's no syncopation.

On to the tableau.

/pɑrɑːwɪstiː/	*VVV	*theme vowel deletion	MaxIO
☞pɑrɑːwɪstiː
pɑrɑːstiː			*
pɑrɑːɪstiː	*!		*
pɑrɪstiː		*!	*

An ugly problem turns up. The tableau predicts the wrong winner. We want to get [pɑrɑːstiː] as the clear winner so that it is the favored colloquial form to get passed to Spanish. The problem is that we need to violate MaxIO by deleting [wɪ] and still get the win. Meanwhile the full form [pɑrɑːwɪstiː] violates no constraints in the above tableau, but needs to lose. 

Or maybe no such problem existed in 1st century BCE Latin. You could use either form. The MaxIO violation must have been so weak that something like [pɑrɑːstiː] could start competing with the winner [pɑrɑːwɪstiː]. After all, [pɑrɑːstiː] doesn't take information out of the verb: in fact, it eliminates redundancy. The -istī ending is unique to the perfect tense, so dropping the perfective -v- couldn't create ambiguity. From there all you've got to do is push the first i in -istī over to the stem and get an underlying second person perfect morpheme of -stī. Then there's no good reason to keep the first i. (Sounds simple when I put it that way.) But that's beyond phonology, no?

EDIT: I think there's something to all of this. Some goodies about SR in Latin orthography that may provide a springboard for further investigation. Some evidence for *VVV.

Double EDIT: Nemo Oudeis tells me that the v-deletion can also occur in other places (divitior > ditior; divitissimus > ditissimus), but not remembering these for sure I understated the matter.

Note about the table: Support for tables in Blogger poor. Nay, non-existent.

Using the language vs linguistics

I find myself struggling with a balance. Maybe you don't, but I do. Here it is: I'm fascinated by language, but I also enjoy learning new/firming up already-known languages to put to use. And it's hard to say which is more fruitful—personally and professionally. 

I've got some skill with Latin. One of my things with Latin is teaching it. And I'm exactly self-important enough to think you might want my help in reading Latin. What follows is a treatment of Cicero's de senectute chapters 6 through 9 (if the title didn't give it away) aimed at Latin students just wading into their first bit of classical Latin. 

Let me know what you think.

de senectute 6 through 9

Cisalpine Gaul's modern existence

I"m sure it's occurred to others, but am I the only one to notice that Cisalpine Gaul's border roughly corresponds to the La Spezia-Rimini Line?

On the east side of the red line, Italy juts north. Toward the middle Gaul just dips south of the line. On the west, the Rubicon flows to the Adriatic just north of the line. Of course this isn't quite the course the line takes on this map, but it's a reasonable first approximation.

Is it possible that this is some sort of relict of the Celtic language speaking population that lived here way back when? (Don't you hate these Latin/Celtic language contact posts? I always bring up questions and never give answers.)

Wrong about the Romans

In the last post, I suggested

The Romans didn't care too much what language you spoke at home as long as you spoke Latin where it mattered—in official capacities. 

And I was wrong. Sort of. On p. 46, Whatmough says:

The frame work of the native cantonal organization was respected by the Roman imperial administration, but for all official purposes Latin was required almost from the beginning.

Which seems pretty reasonable given common sense. If you come in and conquer a territory, you pick the language of administration (usually). But this isn't an entirely correct picture.

Commonly, then, as Latin must have been adopted after the conquest by Caesar, Keltic doubtless lingered on in rural districts perhaps as a second language… (70)

So far, so good. The Celtic languages even hang on in rural areas. This pattern is visible here in the United States when we look at English vs. Native American languages.

…a reasonable estimate puts the date of its complete disappearance, even from remote country districts, not earlier than the fifth century after Christ. (70–1)

Ok, so this answers when continental Celtic languages finally disappeared. Or at least an early date. But  Whatmough goes on to say something else.

From the Digests of Ulpian (222–228 A.D.) it is clear that Gaulish must still have been current in many places in the third century, for its use in pledges and trusts (fideicomissa) was expressly permitted… (71)

So it looks like I'm somewhat wrong. Though I don't know the legal standing of pledges and trusts, I would assume that they would be along the lines of modern contracts (correct me in the comments if you know I'm wrong yet again). This would give them standing in courts, which, according to Whatmough on p. 46, would be in the territory of official purposes.

So it looks like the officialness of Latin is somewhat complicated. For the most part, you've got to use Latin when dealing with the administration. On the other hand, when your primary purpose isn't official, you can use a Celtic language.

A hope dashed
I had been hoping that the Celtic language experience with Latin would play out something like the Native American languages with English. There would be some nice parallels to be drawn—and perhaps an idea of how the contact progressed. But no dice. There are some very key differences. The United States government had a policy of English-only boarding schools (and I've just brushed a host of human rights violations under the rug there). The other is that Christianity came earlier in the story and—at least in the case of the first Bibles printed in the English colonies—in the native language. Both of these are at odds. In the first, the Romans didn't care much what language you spoke at home. In the second, Christianity wasn't language flexible in Gaul the way it was in America.


Bibliography
Whatmough, Joshua. (1970). The Dialects of Ancient Gaul: Prolegomena and records of the dialects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Speaking of Celtic Gaul

And of course some of the choicest nuggets are tied up in a musty-smelling book. Initial copyright is 1944 and a reprint date of 1970. The author cites sources from the 19th century as vital scholarship. It is a trip. And I found it in the stacks at my university's library.

And it is enlightening. Whatmough suggests that in southern Gaul—Provincia to the Romans—had a linguistic situation that progressed something like this:

Ligurian (supposedly Indo-European language of some sort or another)
Celtic languages of the continental variety
Greek
Latin

Though the Greek part of the stream is, I'm sure, a trading language with few native speakers as a portion of the population. Though the Romans had a bigger military component, I'm sure they were also traders. And also a small portion of the population. But that doesn't explain the how of latinization. From p. 24:

In its main features the history of the latinization, this term being used in its strictest (i.e. linguistic) sense, is very similar in Gaul to what it had been in Italy. In both lands there are records of languages spoken before the spared of Latin, and some hints, but no actual records, of still others. Moreover we do not suppose that the ancestors of the people whose linguistic remains are the oldest known to us in either Gaul or Italy were dumb. What we have to ask is the question what languages, so far as we can now tell, were spoken in the several regions of Gaul, and its frontier-districts before the spread of Romance (that is Latin) or Germanic speech. This ultimate fate of the pre-Latin dialects of Gaul, as in Italy, was that at last they were abandoned, almost everywhere, in favor of other forms of speech, usually Latin. And if, as some hold, modern Greek is in Italy nowhere descended from the ancient Greek of Magna Graecia, a view mentioned here only for the sake of comparison and not because it is thought to be truer than the opposite theory, no more is Breton in France descended from the ancient Keltic dialect of Brittany, but (like Albanian in Italy) was introduced there from outside. But Basque, spoken in the arrondissements of Bayonne and Mauléon, is usually maintained to be descended from Iberian, spoken in the ancient Aquitania and presumably anterior to Keltic. 

So I suppose to really get to the heart of the matter, I'm going to have to learn about the latinization of Italy too. Vae mihi! I seem to have opened a can of worms. As for the origin of Greek spoken in Italy today, I have zero information to allow me an opinion. More about the latinization of Gaul, from p. 29:

There is, however, a great contrast between Narbonensis and the three Gauls, where latinization was affected much more slowly and was not in fact complete before the sixth century of our own era. The spared of Christianity had much to do with the introduction of Latin into the remoter parts of Gaul, and, outside of the towns and permanent camps, Christian preachers must have played at least as large a part as Roman soldiers, traders, and officials in spreading the Latin at the same time that they spread the faith of the Church. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that a large proportion out of the total number of dialect inscriptions preserved to us in Gaul have been discovered in southern Gaul, which was earlier and more rapidly latinized, and not from Tres Galliae, which maintained their Keltic speech longer and more tenaciously, thoroughly latinized as the whole of Gaul was in the long run.

Well. That's a surprise. I wouldn't have expected that the church was the final nail in the coffin of Celtic Gaul, if for no other reason than the Romans had latinized the rest of the Celtic-speaking areas under their control. Interestingly though, it does help explain why Insular Celtic does survive. Want to make me guess? Here goes: The Romans didn't care too much what language you spoke at home as long as you spoke Latin where it mattered—in official capacities. The other curious bit is that there is a lack of Celtic-language inscriptions in the north. I've got no explanation.

Some questions
•When did Ligurian die out as a spoken language?
•When did Greek die out in Gaul?
•What was the proportion of Greek speakers in Provincia?
•When did continental Celtic die out in Gaul?
•Do we know the route of the spread of Latin?
•Why did Breton manage to reverse the trend of latinization?
•And why did Breton come from Britain instead of Gaul itself?

Bibliography
Whatmough, Joshua. (1970). The Dialects of Ancient Gaul: Prolegomena and records of the dialects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.