Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [171]
* Their ascendancy was notable for unending struggle against the Basques: each king making the proud, but apparently empty, boast in his annals ’domuit Vascones–he tamed the Basques’.
† Strangely, Attila is really his nickname in Gothic, and means ‘Dad’.
§ Of these, only the language spoken by the Magyars is clear: it was Hungarian, related to the Uralian languages of northern Siberia. As for the others, Avar was probably a Mongol and Bulgar and Khazar Turkic languages. Old Avar does not seem to have been the same as what is now known as Avar, which is a language of the north-east Caucasus, spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan, and quite unrelated to Turkic. Bulgar may survive in scattered pockets across Siberia to this day, known as Chuvash. (This name is identical with Tabgach, the name of a people famous for their fourth-century conquest of northern China.) (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 140.) The Khazars ruled from the Caspian Sea to Kiev for a century (c.650-750), and are chiefly famous for their choice of mass conversion to Judaism in 861. Today’s Karaim are their descendants. Another Turkic group, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, moved across in the thirteenth century.
When the dust from galloping hoofs had cleared, the creak of covered wagons had died away, and the gilt had dried on the palaces of the newly self-appointed royal families of medieval Europe, language boundaries were eerily familiar. The edge of Germanic had possibly slipped a little to the west during the long period when the empire’s borders had still been defended, not least because neighbouring Germans had increasingly been invited across it, as foederati, ‘treaty people’, or laeti, ‘joyous ones’, to serve in the army, or on the land, for the benefit of Roman society. But the line between Germanic and Romance was still drawn from the western end of the mouths of the Rhine in a south-eastward direction. And the repeated falling of parts of Gaul under German domination, and ultimately being firmly settled under the Franks, did not serve to translate it or rotate it further.
The failure of Frankish domination to replace the language of Gaul was paralleled in the other new German kingdoms. In Italy under the Ostrogoths and Lombards, in Iberia under a succession of Vandals, Suebi, Alans and Visigoths, in coastal North Africa under the Vandals, the language established under the Roman empire persisted.* Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled Spain for 250 years, one cannot even detect a significant number of Gothic words borrowed into Spanish from this period. Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish historical linguist, writes:
It appears that the Germanic elements in Spanish do not proceed, in general, from the Visigoth domination of the peninsula, as might have been expected: the number of invaders was relatively slight to have much influence; moreover, the Visigoths, before reaching Spain had lived for two centuries in intimate contact with the Romans, now as allies now as enemies, in Dacia, Moesia, in Italy itself and in Gaul, and were very much permeated with Roman culture.43
* Latin bore a charmed life in North Africa, for a century (428-533) under the Vandals, and then controlled by the Roman empire resurgent from Constantinople until 696. The career of the most famous resident, St Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, would have been unthinkable outside a Latin-speaking milieu. Remarks he makes in some of his sermons provide evidence that bilingualism with Punic, the old language of Carthage, may have persisted