Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/23/2000 5:03:03 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote:

>I suggest the Lord's Prayer for the text sample
>since it was extensively recorded in various languages over a long period
>and later examples are not required to be archaizing copies since the text
>is a translation of a fixed text and the translator is trying to render
>the original in his own language.

Actually, I did sort of go through a similar exercise - perhaps before the
archive - on this very list.  If it's in the archive, you'll see I even
compared the Lord's Prayer in Italian and OFr to 'Silver Age' Latin (Saxo
Grammaticus 1200AD) and OCSl to Pol and Polabian.  I was trying to make a
point about the degree of divergence in Slavic and was beat up quite nicely
by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal.  The fact that you are sending me back to that
lesson may just indicate that I am one of those slow learners. :)

Let me make the point I was making in my original post more explicit:

I wrote:
> Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US
> Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but
> not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800
> years later!

whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied:
>Yes, and that's how you can tell that it's a dead language.  Living
>languages change; dead ones don't (at least not to the same extext or in
>the same way).

Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on
ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such.  If you
recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham
sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in
inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions
on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in
inscriptional Latin.  To the extent that these ogham sticks had some
religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' -
communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible.  Tacitus
describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred
words might tend to preserve anachronisms.

Hope this clarifies things.

Regards,
Steve Long