Re: invading languages (was Re: Herr Radu: Balkans : some nonsense of the armchair cartoonists

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:06:19 +0000 (UTC), "Francois R. Velde"
<velde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In medio alt.talk.royalty aperuit jan.bohme@xxxxx os suum:
>> Francois R. Velde skrev:
>
>>> In medio alt.talk.royalty aperuit jan.bohme@xxxxx os suum:
>>> > In comparison, Britannia was
>>> > held for more than four hundred years, and no civilians were evacuated
>>> > together with the legions when Emperor Honorius called them back in
>>> > A.D. 412. Still, those four hundred years were not enough to replace
>>> > the Celtic substrate with Latin there.
>
>>> Why is that? Gaul was occupied for just about as long, and French barely
>>> has a few dozen Celtic words left.
>
>> More impressively still: Celtic was essentially extinct within
>> present-day France when the legions left Gallia. (Gallic language
>> lingered on the longest to the east, near the Rhine. The tribe that is
>> known to have kept their Gallic tongue in the s6th century is the
>> Treviri, living around Trier/Trèves.)
>
>> Why? Nobody knows for sure. But Gallia was a much more central and
>> important province than either Britannia or Dacia. Also, it might be
>> that Kent and East Anglia, the parts of England that were first and
>> quickest conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, were a bit more Romanized than
>> the rest. What we do know was that the effective resistance against the
>> Anglo-Saxon invaders was carried out by people who spoke Celtic, not
>> Romance.
>
>>> And, if the Celtic language was not
>>> replaced in England, why was it replaced by Anglo-Saxon in a shorter period
>>> of time?
>
>> That one is simpler to explain: The Roman occupation was about military
>> control, and only to a very limited extent about colonising. The
>> Anglo-Saxon invaders coming from A.D. 450 and onwards were looking for
>> land for themselves, largely expelling and enslaving the previous
>> population as it was conquered.
>
>But somehow the Franks were kinder, gentler invaders, and Roman occupation
>in Gaul had involved a lot more colonization?
>
>What is the direct evidence that we have on what was spoken in England
>at the time the Romans left?

There is no surviving written record in any language but Latin - not a
single word, apart from the names of a couple of gods, and even those
are Latinized. Plenty of Latin, including things like obscene graffiti
on wall plaster and inscriptions on unfired tiles which indicate that
literacy in Latin was found even among artisans.

The main evidence for the continued extensive use of Celtic even among
the educated is the large number of loan-words from Latin found in it
in post-Roman times. They "derive in the main from experience of the
middle and upper clases rather than from the agricultural peasantry",
according to Frere, "Britannia". The other piece of evidence is that
the Latin used in Britain was more traditional, even archaic, than the
Vulgar Latin found elsewhere in the West, which can be taken to
indicate that it was learned in school rather than at home. This
hypothesis is associated with Kenneth Jackson, "Language and History
in Early Britain", 1953.

All this seems fairly confusing, if not actually contradictory. It
might be fair to say that both languages were in reasonably widespread
use, but beyond that we don't know. The earliest Welsh manuscripts are
from several centuries after the Romans left; Latin probably continued
to be the only *written* language for a long time after it ceased to
be spoken to any great extent.

--
Don Aitken
Mail to the From: address is not read.
To email me, substitute "clara.co.uk" for "freeuk.com"
.

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