Multiple characters continue to interact, a potentially endless process:
the legendary Grallon or Gradlon, fictionalized as Gratillonius, and the fictional Runa find domesticity;
the names, "Grallon" and "Gradlon," both present in the legend of Ys, are explained as respectively the Ysan and Armorican versions of "Gratillonius";
the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages and the historical Flavius Claudius Constantinus clash and negotiate;
two fictional characters, Governor Titus Scibona Glabrio and Procurator Quintus Domitius Bacca, continue to conspire against Gratillonius and will write to the historical Flavius Stilicho;
Gratillonius converses with Olath Cartagi, Apuleius, Maeloch, Vellano son of Drach and Riwal from Britannia and expects a grandchild from his daughter, Julia, all fictional;
Evirion Baltisi returns from Hivernia and visits Gratillonius' other surviving daughter, Nemeta.
"A cast of thousands" - not literally, but it feels like that.
This happens throughout literature, of course. I am about to return to reading a novel in which fictional characters converse with historical early heads of Special Branch, MI5 and MI6 and with Winston Churchill whom we remember as a guest in the Old Phoenix.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Constantine the Usurper to be and Stilicho really frustrate me! They were strong and able men made decisions that contributed massively to the downfall of the Western Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that by this period, final -s and -m in words with -us and -um endings were no longer pronounced in spoken Latin, which in this period was edging into the "Proto-Romance" period.
A Latin-speaker would probably have pronounced it something like -Gratillonio'- in this period. Tho' it was noted at the time that British Latin sounded "old-fashioned".
That is, in Gratillonius' time all the Latin dialects were still mutually comprehensible, but there had been a lot of linguistic changes since the period of Classical Latin.
Most of them had been shared across the whole Latin-speaking world, which is a testament to the good communications under the Empire.
After the Empire fell the dialects began to diverge sharply, and by about the 8th century were starting to be mutually incomprehensible at their extremities.
Though they weren't really separate languages, since they were linked by a 'dialect chain', each link comprehensible to the ones on either side, except for the ancestral dialects of Romanian, which had been cut off from the others by the post-Imperial migrations. Of the Slavs and Bulgars particularly.
(Note that before the Empire fell, spoken Latin stretched all along the south bank of the Danube, and had replaced native languages like Illyrian and Thracian everywhere except in some mountainous redoubts.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And what you said about how those "us" and "um" endings no longer being pronounced in spoken Latin by AD 400 might have been also the case during Marcus Aurelius' reign. The stranded time travelers in your TO TURN THE TIDE spoke what was thought a bookish, old fashioned Latin.
And many people these days don't realize how the Balkans north of Greece was once a Latin speaking region, before the Slavic invasions supplanted Latin (except in Romania)>
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: if the Empire hadn't fallen, Latin might have remained a single language, as Greek did, but of course ones that had undergone changes. And Latin would be overwhelmingly predominant outside the Greek-speaking zone. That would probably have expanded further south and east, too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I'm reminded of Turtledove's GUNPOWDER EMPIRE, set in an alternate world where the Empire did not fall and a recognizably unified Latin evolved roughly as you said.
Ad astra! Sean
Harry knows linguistics quite well. His "NeoLatin" in that series is recognizably similar to the actual evolution of most Indo-European languages, which is from highly inflected to less inflected/analytical grammar.
This is particularly characteristic of 'contact languages' like English. English is an extreme example, not quite a 'creole' language but sharing many features with them. Afrikaans -is- a contact creole language, and it's even more stripped of inflectional grammar than English is. Eg., here's the Afrikaans version of the verb "to be" compared to English:
English Afrikaans
I am ek is
I was ek was
you are jy/u is
you were jy/u was
he is hy is
he was hy was
she is sy is
she was sy was
it is dit is
it was dit was
we are ons is
we were ons was
you are julle is
you were julle was
they are hulle is
Afrikaans is a close relative of English, from Proto-Germanic via West Germanic; all the modern Germanic languages have simplified their grammar, but English is #2 in that process and Afrikaans is #1.
Hence those IE languages that remain highly inflected, like Lithuanian, are characteristically spoken in small homogenous communities that haven't moved much.
The Lithuanians have been where they are now since the Corded Ware period (3000-2500 BCE), and the Proto-Indo-European speakers who made up their ancestors arrived in a pre-agricultural environment, and introduced farming and stock-rearing themselves among a very thin, scattered population.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I hadn't realized how closely related Afrikaans is to English till you sent us these illuminating comments.
It's no surprise Harry Turtledove speculated so convincingly on how a Latin which remained unified might have evolved into a Neo-Latin. He specialized in Byzantine history, the Eastern Roman Empire. And must have included a solid knowledge of Latin and the history of the Earlier Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
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