No Proto-Celtic?

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Sun May 6 06:47:22 UTC 2001


In a message dated 5/5/01 9:06:24 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
sarima at friesen.net writes:


> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

-- it does happen, but Gaul may not be such a good example.  Recent
investigations indicate a much more dramatic settlement of Italian
Latin-speakers in the western provinces than previously thought.  Something
like 30% or more of the citizen population of Italy was resettled in the
provinces during the reign of Augustus alone -- and there had already been
hundreds of thousands before him.  This represented the migration of
something like 2-3 million Latin-speaking individuals.

Further, since they were settled as communities, they had the all-important
_local_ majority in areas of intensive colonization, even where the
represented minorities of the overall provincial populations.

Also, with the Roman state, there were institutions of Romanization (and
hence Latinization); the army, particularly, where people from many
linguistic backgrounds were taken away from home and submerged in a
Latin-speaking environment, and then released back into the civilian world
as veterans, with their families.  That would have been at least several
thousand familes in Gaul, every year -- and concentrated in the northern
districts where civilian colonization wasn't so heavy.

The Roman institution of mass slavery, with manumission, also tended to act
as a linguistic forcing-house.

Last but not least, some recent archaeological evidence indicates that Roman
conquest in the Imperial period in NW Europe was accompanied by wholesale
confiscation of farmland and the imposition of Roman settlers

> not to mention the "all roads lead to Rome" economic influence
> that Rome had in the empire.

-- this is a good point.  An imperial state-structure of Rome's enduring
kind, combined with a uniform literate elite culture make for a different
linguistic situation than the putative expansion of PIE in Neolithic times.
 A caste of bards does not act as the equivalent of a common schooling
system with a canon of written works, or the imposition of a administrative
command language which must be mastered by anyone seeking to rise socially.



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