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.

Latin and Continental Celtic in contact

They had to have been, and the contact had to have lasted a long time. Ultimately, Latin displaced all speakers of Continental Celtic languages in Gaul (France and Northern Italy) and Iberia (Spain and Portugal). All of them.

Latin and Celtic languages were in contact in Italy since at least the early 4th century BCE, quite possibly longer. By the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the mid 1st century BCE, there were "friends of the Roman people" on the far side of the Alps. It is hard to believe that there wasn't at least some degree of bilingualism between Latin speakers and Celtic speakers at both of these points in time.

These two data points suggest centuries of widespread contact between Latin and Celtic languages. At first they may have been on more equal footing, but as time progressed so did the relative power of the Latin speakers.

Obviously there are Celtic words in Latin: raeda (carriage), lancea (javelin), sparus (spear), bracae (pants) and ambactus (serf) are all examples (Palmer 53). So we can be sure that there was lexical exchange, but there are other questions. Since I don't have handy access to the proper scholarship, some of these may be quite settled matters.

Some questions
•Is Italo-Celtic an artifact of linguistic interference due to much language contact between the Celtic and Italic languages? Or is it real?
•What was the tipping point for Latin's total replacement of Continental Celtic languages?
•How long did Celtic languages persist in Gaul? In Iberia?
•Why didn't Latin also wipe out Basque?

Bibliography
Palmer, R.L. (1964). The Latin Language. London: Faber and Faber.

Language contact in the ancient Mediterranean

I saw an call for abstracts that got me thinking.

There's all sorts of languages in contact today. People are bilingual with varying degrees of skill. They carry their languages forward. And nothing is new. People were doing those exact things thousands of years ago. The differences are two. One, we can't interview or record any of those people. Two, what evidence they did leave us has problems.

The evidence is often in the form of the literature of the elite layers of the societies. Evidence that comes from more ordinary people is often fragmentary in nature. Broken pottery, graffiti, papyrus fragments. Some of that evidence is so fragmentary that we don't even have complete languages. For example, Venetic is a relatively poorly known language. Some are relatively well known in scholarly circles, like Oscan. Others are more commonly known, like Latin.

All of these languages were in contact with each other. They were affecting each other. Just like languages today. And there is little easily available information on this topic. There is some work being done on the topic, but it is expensive. For example:

•Early Civilization and Literacy in Europe from $164 used
•Bilingualism and the Latin Language from $57.98 used

Some of the nearest copies of these books are in libraries that are difficult to get to—or as I'm starting to think of them, walled gardens of scholarship. Articles about these topics are in databases that cost real money to have access to—or at least that's what my tuition costs would lead me to believe. It is a disgrace that in 2012 that credible information on obscure topics is so difficult to find in easily accesible ways. Forget that. Keep an eye on this blog. (And if you bought either of those books to you, I'd write a haiku for you on this blog.)

Say ah!

Little Boy and I were playing yesterday. He's become quite the chatter box, though he's only starting to grasp words. Because he loves to make lots of noise with his voice, he opens his mouth really wide. So wide that I saw his tongue move down and back before he started yelling /ɑ/ at me. Every time he went to yell, down and back went the tongue.

I mention this because I had been having a hard time picturing the front/back and high/low distinction when producing vowels. I can hear the distinctions, well, insofar as any native English speaker can. This is to say I can hear the distinctions English makes quite clearly. Others may be a bit more difficult, but I digress. It was good to see the actual mechanics of speech production put in front of me so accidentally.

It was nice to see that. 

Sanskrit isn't Indo-European?

I just ran across an article—maybe excerpts from a vanished article—that suggests that it is colonial to claim Sanskrit as Indo-European. Please note, I may refer to things with rather strong language, but pseudoscience deserves no less.

Some further reading (here and here) makes me think that this is some sort of reaction against perceived erroneous history. The gist of it is this: the Brits when colonizing India saw that Sanskrit shared deep similarities to Ancient Greek and Latin. If that is the case then there must be some common language. Since white people—according to the grossly misinformed thought of the time—were superior, and people in India come in a variety of skin colors, then there must have been white invaders who brought Sanskrit to India. Apparently the colonizing Brits couldn't imagine that maybe, just maybe, the initial Indo-European population had skin darker than theirs. Pity their lack of imagination.

The problem with the old notions is that they are junk. This junk in turn, rightfully, raises a horrified reaction among Indians. So far so good. One should be outraged by bullshit pseudoscience. The problem is when one reacts to junk by inventing more junk. The pseudoscience starts off with a howler.

For instance, in Hungary, there is a growing body of scholars who are extremely uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the manner in which Hungarian was excluded from the Indo-European framework.

I feel bad for the Hungarians who want in on the IE, but that's how science goes. It doesn't always come back with the answers you want. Tough. Believe what you like, the science is the science.

there are some Indian language scholars who have suggested that a computerized analysis of Sanskrit and Latin lexicons might yield a far more limited overlap than would be rationally implied by the “Indo-European” classification.

Of the tiny bits I know about  Sanskrit, I know that counting to ten is an awful lot like modern Persian and telling your name is an awful lot like Latin. This is daily use, low rate of change stuff. I also wouldn't expect there to be massive overlap between Latin and Sanskrit—particularly when getting into descriptions of local flora and fauna. This book has a whole chapter about non-IE words borrowed by Sanskrit. Fancy that, a language that borrows words.

…Building primitive lexicons that show similar roots for certain common words can hardly be an adequate basis of linguistic classification.

Actually this is what I'd expect. Quick, say the past tense for see and dive. What were your answers? Saw and dived are the correct answers as of this writing, though dove is making inroads. Highlight the blank if you are curious. One is not being changed, the other is. Care to guess which? If you said that see is maintaining its historic form, you'd be right. Why? Because it's a basic word in heavy use. Dive? Not so much.

Moreover, it [IE theory] has strengthened the now increasingly untenable view that there is no continuity between the Indo-Saraswati Harappan civilization and Vedic civilization, and that India’s languages (both in the oral and written forms) must have been brought to India by more “civilized” outsiders.

The same way that English sprung up in England without any help from continental invaders? While I have no doubt that language displacement can also disrupt cultural transmission, I don't know that language displacement necessarily causes cultural discontinuity. One (cultural discontinuity) has happened without the other (language displacement) in Greece. But I'm not an archaeologist. Until you've got better evidence, stick with what the data tells you. The data, so far as I can see, tells me that there was some sort of linguistic invasion. These things happen, otherwise I might be writing this in a Celtic language.

In this entire body of work stretching, from Sakatayana to Panini, there is virtually nothing to link Sanskrit to any European influence.

No shit. I wouldn't want to put words in Sir William Jones's mouth, but I'd venture to say he didn't know about the connection and was surprised at the similarity too. Oh, why don't I just let him speak for himself.

…yet [Sanskrit] bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…

I hate it when that happens. I also hate this too.

both Sanskrit and Tamil are syllabic languages and both treat consonants and vowels very similarly.

All languages have syllables and treat consonants and vowels very similarly, when viewed through the lens of being syllabic. Well, except for maybe a pesky example or two in the Caucasus mountains. Nice try though.

From the point of view of classifying languages based on the organizational principles that govern their written scripts no logic would permit the Sanskrit-derived North Indian langauges to be placed in the same language group as the European languages.

Writing systems don't count at all when comparing languages. Just the spoken end. I get the sensation that the author isn't a linguist.

Writing in Language in India (9, Jan, 2002), G. Sankaranarayanan observes how repeating words and forms is a significant feature that extends across the Indian subcontinent and includes not only the Sanskrit and Tamil derivatives but also Munda and languages from the Tibetan-Burmese group.

It's called sprachbund. It happens all over. The interesting part here—to me anyway—is that the Indian sprachbund includes non-related languages. Nothing to see here.

Note too that Indic languages permit the dropping of pronouns (which become implied). …would be impermissable in English.

Dropping pronouns—even obviously assumed content words—is fine by Latin. No one disputes that Latin is IE. Spanish also thinks dropping subject pronouns is fine. Dammit. I hate it when I pick bad examples like English to almost but not quite make my point. Moving along, our pseudoscientist goes on to talk about word order.

In this respect, Indian languages are similar to each other [in regards to a more free word order] but not to less flexible “Indo-European” languages like English. On the other hand, Russian and Czech (like Hungarian) [no cheating, you need to compare IE to IE] do not require a fixed or default word order.

Oops. I think you're hurting your own argument there.

In conclusion, it might be stated that the present scheme of bifurcating Indian langauges into the “Indo-European” and “Dravidian” scheme is unsatisfactory in many ways.

For whom?

…it has also precluded comprehensive comparitive studies between these Indic languages and other Indic langauges such as the Munda or those from the Tibetan-Burmese stream.

Who is being stopped? These studies might actually be fruitful, but they only count when peer-reviewed.

Sh Thadani [the author, has] a Post-Graduate degree in Computer Science from Yale…

Aha. I was right. Not a linguist. Look, I'm not claiming authority here, but if you're going to write a "research" document it may help to have some formal training in the subject at hand. I don't trust my plumber to fix my car, why does a computer science guy get to look like a linguist?

Anyway. This has put some fire under me to learn Sanskrit. I think I'll put some effort to it over the summer. Well, once I've got True Story read. 

Final project

As part of the class I took last semester, we each analyzed a language that we had not studied. While my intention was not to choose a Romance language, French is where I had a native speaker willing to help. So French it is.

The point of this exercise was to tease out the way the language works as spoken. I don't know that I did the best job in the world, but I did learn a bit about French. I added a section on the history of French, since I knew a little about that. In all honesty, that may be the best portion of the project for non-linguists who are curious about French.
  French linguistics project

μέν and δέ

I've recently learned about switch-reference markers. Since I'm a native English speaker, I don't really know about know about such things. We don't have them (I don't think).

They're not traditionally shown as such in Greek, but I'm beginning to think μέν and δέ are switch-reference markers of a sort. Or if they aren't, they're very similar. For those who are familiar, consider what this means:

οἱ δὲ [non-noun]…

It should signal that whoever οἱ are, they are not the subject of the last sentence. Hopefully I'll learn more about switch-referencing and will be able to say more about this topic. So far as I know, this would make Greek and odd man out—so far as I am aware—in Indo-European languages.

Greek compound nouns

Since I'm reading some Greek, I might as well inflict a little Greek on the world. That and I've got some serious dislike of traditional Greek grammar—parathetic and synthetic compounds being the sort thing that the classics have too much of. Let's remedy that.

I'm at the halfway point in True Story, and the sheer promiscuity that Lucian tosses out compounds wholly invented for his book astounds me. For whatever reason, it makes the work seem less alien. Anyway, back to my point. He makes compounds, and for sake of reducing assumptions let's assume he is following the standard patterns of forming compounds that Greek uses. Let's see what we can learn from these compounds. Specifically, N-N compounds in book 1. Anything that looked questionable or that I couldn't find, I ditched. First up: pre-existing words.

Right headed endocentric compounds

γαστρο.κνημίη – calf

Ἡρα.κλέης – Hercules
Λυχνό.πολις – Lamptown
οἰνο.φαγία – feast
πελτ.αστής – light shield bearer

Right-headed do-er compound
σκευο.φόρος – porter


Copulative
Νεφελο.κοκκγ.ία – Cloudcuckootown

Well, um, yeah
οἰκο.δόμημα – building

Seriously, this thing means something like househome. Anyway. From the looks of these pre-existing words, it would appear that Greek uses right-heading as its main strategy when compounding. Sound like another language? That's right. English tends to use right-headed compounds as well. Yet another reason, Ancient Greek is more like English than you may think.

And here are Lucian's made up words. He used a lot of these, and they're fun.

 Right-headed endocentric
Ἀερο.κόρδακες – sky dancers
Ἀερο.κώνωψ – sky-mosquito
ἀερο.μαχία – air battle
Ἀνεμο.δρόμοι – wind walkers
Ἱππο.γέρανοι – crane cavalry
Ἱππό.γυποι – vulture cavalry
Ἱππο.μύρμηξ – horse ant
Κεγχρο.βόλοι – Millet throwers

Λαχανό.πτερος – Grass plumer

Νεφελο.κένταυρος – cloud centaur
νησο.μαχία – island fight
Σκοποδο.μάχοι – Garlic fighters

Right-headed do-er compound

Θαλασσο.πότης – Sea-drinkers

Copulative
Ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archer

Exocentric compounds
θυννο.κέφαλος – tuna headed

Καθλο.μύκητες – stalk mushrooms
Κυνο.βάλανοι – dog acorns
Στρουθο.βάλανοι – Sparrow acorns

Ψηττό.ποδες – Sole-feet

In a book like this, you can't tell if he means that the creatures are just heads (κέφαλος) that look like tuna (θύννος) or some sorts of Doctor Who style tuna-headed alien. I prefer the latter interpretation.

Sadly, not everything was a compound. Drat.

Τριτωνο.μένδητες – Mergoat

When I saw this, I was truly hoping I could find how this was a compound. The Middle Liddell failed me. Of course, given Greek culture, there was almost no way that there aren't all sorts of words having to do with every facet of boats and seafaring. Which brings me to the most glaringly odd omission. All of these other things are  compounded, but this one isn't despite the free way Greek compounds.

χείρ σιδήρεος – hand iron

But you might like to call it a grappling hook, and I think it's cool. Even if it isn't a compound.

UPDATE
And then in Book 2, section 4, Lucian spells out exactly how he makes his compounds.

ἅπαντα ἡμῖν προσεοικότας, καὶ τὰ σώματα καὶ τὰμεγέθη, πλὴν τῶν ποδῶν μόνων· ταῦτα γὰρ φέλλινα εἶχον, ἀφ᾽ οὗ δή, οἶμαι, καὶ ἐκαλοῦντο Φελλόποδες.

…entirely similar to us in both body and size, except for their feet: those are cork, from which I suppose, they are called Cork-feet.

Greek compounds and English phrasals

I'm working my way through Lucain's True Story and the realization is hitting me again. Ancient Greek and English have some odd ways that they are alike. The biggest to me is in how compound verbs are interpreted. (And I'm sure as soon as I hit publish, I'll realize otherwise.)

I should be clear. The morphology of the verbs are completely unalike. English is virtually inflection free, whereas Greek has inflections for person and number that are much more like Latin. But the interpretation of the compound is more likely to be transparent to English speakers than Latin compounds. For example:

καταγράφω – I write on

The morphology breaks down like this:

/kata.grap^h.o:/
κατα.γράφ.ω
against.write.I

Ok, so maybe I'm cherry-picking a definition for κατα. But there are more. I'll divide the morphemes up with dots like I did above—they are in the same order.

περι.πλέκ.ω – I fold around
ἐπι.σκοπέ.ω – I look at

In most cases, the Greek compound fits more or less with its English phrasal counterpart. This is completely at odds with Latin. Latin forms its compounds exactly like Greek. Preposition + verb root + person/number inflection.

pro.mitt.o – I send for?
in.veni.o – I come into?
con.st.o – I stand with?

No, promise, find and agree (though that last one kind of works). It is almost as if you have to learn each Latin compound as its own new work, but in Greek you can guess and wind up close to the mark. The other nice thing about Greek is that it is a bit more promiscuous about noun-noun compounds. Latin does this to an extent with words like crucifer (cross bearer), but it usually prefers to phrase things like that as a phrase—typically with genitive case.

Greek is far more promiscuous with compounds, particularly in the right- vs. left-headedness of the compound. You're familiar with some of them already. Here are a few left-headed compounds.

ῥινό.κερως – rhinoceros (nose.horn)
ἱππο.πόταμος – hippopotamus (horse.river)
φιλο.σοφία – philosophy (love.knowledge)

You may not know my new favorite from Lucian, which is right-headed.

ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archers