I wish that I had made some attempt to learn Latin, French and Irish when I was at school in the Republic of Ireland but how could I have acted then on the basis of interests and motivations that I have now? I also wish that we had been taught a lot better.
The police chief introduces himself as Cadwaller Mac Barca and adds:
"'The general hight Cynyth ap Ceorn.' Or so, at least, Everard's Anglo-Saxon mind interpreted the noises picked up by his ears." (2, p. 182)
How much is hearing and how much interpretation? I heard a woman speaking comprehensible English but her accent seemed to veer back and forth between American and French. She was French-Canadian. Was she speaking in some intermediate accent that I interpreted first one way, then the other?
The general does not respond to:
"'Loquerisne latine?'" (p. 183)
A bad sign: a timeline where "latine" is not even recognized.
When Everard asks:
"'AeeaiBaeaeo?'" (ibid.)
(Everard does not ask this but that is the nearest reproduction that I can make of what he does say.)
- the general responds:
"Hellenach?'" (ibid.)
Everard concludes that they have at least heard of Greek. Indeed, they bring in a Classical scholar to converse with the prisoners. I would like to be of some help if I were in such a situation: at least to recognize languages and suggest ways to establish communication.
"I am Air-Sea Rescue. Do you speak English?"
"Cu vi parolas Esperanton?"
8 comments:
There's a big difference right there. A huge tract of the world speaks languages derived from Latin; as spoken languages, the Celtic family is nearly extinct; Greek is spoken only in Greece, as a majority language.
That's a flip from early historical times. Celtic tongues were spoken all the way from Ireland to the Black Sea at one point, and Greek from what's now southern France to India.
NB: the earliest recorded forms of Erse show an inflected language, very similar to Latin in its structure. Most of the distinctive features of Irish Gaelic were medieval developments.
So in, say, 300 BCE you could probably have walked across Ireland, landed in Wales, walked to Kent, taken a boat to what's now Normandy, and walked all the way from there to the mouth of the Danube, and you'd be in a continuous dialect-chain of mutually comprehensible versions of Celtic. That would include the whole of the British Isles.
They'd all have practiced local variations of the same religion, too, and had rather similar social structures.
Oh, and I forgot: at one point "Galatian" (Gaulish, a Celtic language) was widely spoken in what's now central Turkey.
That's brought out in THE GOLDEN SLAVE, by Poul.
Interestingly, the Cimbri mentioned in that book do seem to have had a Germanic-speaking core, as Poul depicted, but it was a form of Germanic where Grimm's Law, aka the First Germanic Sound-Shift, was still underway and hadn't completed its transformations yet.
That means that that Proto-Germanic and the forms of Celtic common elsewhere in Europe wouldn't have been mutually comprehensible, but they'd have been close enough to make a speaker of one able to learn the other in a couple of months by immersion.
About the degree of difference we see today between, say, German and Danish.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I was esp. interested in what you said about proto-Germanic was once quite closely related to various Celtic dialects.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's a matter of all the Indo-European languages being related if you go back far enough. Germanic's specific changes developed comparatively late -- things like p ==> f, so you get pater ==> fader.
Before that it was more a matter of a late Indo-European dialect undergoing grammatical simplification -- reduced inflections. It's called pre-Proto-Germanic.
There are a number of ways you can tell the changes are late; the fact that they're not complete with the Cimbri around 100 BCE, and the fact that the early strata of Germanic loans in Finnish is Proto-Germanic; kunningaz (king), etc.
Celtic's closest relative in the IE family is Italic, the proto-language from which Latin and Samnite and so forth derived. It's been a point of dispute with reconstructive linguists whether or not there was an Italo-Celtic protolanguage between PIE and the separate Celtic and Italic sub-families.
The very earliest recorded proto-Celtic (late Bronze Age, around 1000 BCE) is still undergoing some of the very basic Celtic sound-shifts; loss of initial "p", for example. (Hence "athair" instead of "pithair"
Latin and Ancient Greek are fairly similar, but that's more a matter of them both being fairly archaic and so closer to the PIE source.
Pre-Proto-Germanic borrowed words from Celtic -- you can tell because the borrowed words underwent the early Germanic sound-shifts. So they were taken up sometime around 500 BCE.
To clarify the timing, Proto-Indo-European(*) emerged in what's now the Ukraine about 4000-3500BCE, then spread. It spread in bursts, usually by migration, and very very fast.
That's a simplification but accurate according to the latest data; the details take up many, many very large books.
In 3500 BCE it was limited to the Pontic Steppe; by 3000 BCE it had extended into Central and Northern Europe and as far east as the Urals or even the Tien Shan; by 2500 BCE it went from what's now western China to Ireland, though some parts of that (the British Isles, frex) had only become part of that speech-zone quite recently. At that stage it was probably still a single language with regional variations, pretty much.
Probably it was still a dialect-chain of intelligible neighbors as late as about 2000 BCE, stretching by then from Ireland to the Tarim Basin or even western Gansu in China.
That is, each dialect would have been comprehensible to the neighbors on either side at that time, but the easternmost and westernmost parts wouldn't have been, if you'd walked the entire distance.
By 2000 BCE, the separate families -- Indo-Iranian, etc. -- were emerging and linguistic innovations were no longer shared throughout the sphere of IE speech, because it had simply gotten too big for enough contact to do that, given the communications available.
But at that time, all the IE varieties in Europe would still have been mutually intelligible, more or less, roughly like the various dialects of German now.
Bavarian and Mecklenberger are very different, if you haven't learned the Standard German compromise, but they can understand each other on simple things if you speak slowly.
By a thousand years later, 1000 BCE, the various language families had emerged -- Vedic Aryan, Greek, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic, etc.
Some of the most conservative "core" languages, like Proto-Balto-Slavic were mostly different from the others because they -hadn't- changed all that much -- Lithuanian is still as close to PIE today as Sanskrit was 3000 years ago, and back in 1000 BCE it's ancestor was even more so.
Pre-Proto-Germanic wasn't quite as conservative, but in 1000 BCE it hadn't acquired many of its later distinctive features -- the ancestors of a German and of a Lithuanian could probably have understood each other at least a little in that year.
(*) leaving aside the Anatolian IE languages like Hittite which are a special case.
And all this was important plot points in the Nantucket series.
Jim: yup. Having a Lithuanian-speaker around would be a -massive- advantage in 1250 BCE! It would be the difference between an English-speaker learning Latin and an English-speaker learning Frisian.
(From SM Stirling.)
Post a Comment