Renfrew and IE Overlords

[Stanley Friesen]

At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived.  Latin's
>main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship.  Mallory has something to
>say about all this in ISIE and given the subtle nature of your argument, I
>think something is worth repeating:

And, even *after* the conquest, the main reason the Celts had for adapting
Latin was NOT the Roman army.  As long as you paid your taxes and didn't
incite to riot, the Roman government didn't much care what language you
spoke.  But Latin was the language of education, trade in luxury goods, and
election campaigns (even in imperial times there were still elections of
local officials for many years).

>I don't know what this has to do with anything.  The point was that there
>have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing
>language.

Quite so, and also vice versa.  It is hard to come up with a hard and fast
rule.  Britain, with its late crop of Roman loyalists, still dropped Latin,
despite having few successful invasions by outsiders.  France, with
numerous successive conquests by various outside groups (mostly Germanic)
retained Latin.

Go figure.

>The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek
>or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of
>various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated
>by Russian.

On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of
a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time.

Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often
hard to predict.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com