Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [176]
* Compare these pronouns in Old English (hē, hit, hēo, hīe) with Old Norse (hann, that, hon, their/thau/thær—using English th for the Norse ō). Mix-ups between rather different systems of endings, well preserved in both Old English and Norse, may also have caused the breakdown of case marking for nouns.
* (These asterisks show forms that have been reconstructed by linguists, but are not actually found in some text.) This absence of P is not as strange as it might seem. It also seems to have afflicted the indigenous language of Iberia, and even early Basque, and is typical too of modern Arabic. But Celtic did not remain a totally P-less language for long. At least some of its variants, including most dialects of Gaulish, and also British (leading to modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton), later started to pronounce the sound qu- as p. Hence its presence in the words for four and five (pedwar and pump in modern Welsh, probably *petuar and *pinpe in Gaulish, on the evidence of some kiln records, mentioned in note 22 on p. 566). As a result, where initial qu- had been the mark of question words in the original language (cf. Latin’s conservative quis, quid, quando, ‘who, what, when’), initial p- has this role in this variety of Celtic language (cf. Welsh pwy, pa, pam, ‘who, which, why’, and presumably much the same in Gaulish). The other Celtic languages also changed the qu-, but just simplified it to a k- sound. Hence Irish ceilhir, cóic (’four, five’), and cé, cad, cá (’who, what, where’). What evidence there is for Celtiberian suggests it was more like Irish than Gaulish in this respect.
* The earliest known Etruscan inscriptions date from about a century earlier, c.700 BC. The Etruscans had themselves learnt how to write from the Greeks, though probably through contacts much farther south, round Cumae in the Bay of Naples.
* Contrast Lusitanian, spoken farther south: we know hardly more than two words of this language, but those two words are enough to disqualify it as Celtic: porcom tavrom, ‘pig bull’. The first has a P; the second has its V and R in the wrong order: compare Gaulish tarvos. Old Irish tarb, Middle Welsh tarw.
* By contrast, Germanic has the same underlying root for ‘bronze’ as Latin: Gothic aiz, Old English ār, Old High German ēr versus Latin aes, suggesting that this technology was already an established acquisition before the common ancestors of the Italic- and Germanic-speaking tribes went their separate ways.
8
The First Death of Latin
Philosophantem rhetorem intellegunt pauci, loquentem rusticum multi.
The rhetorician philosophising is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many.
Gregory of Tours, Preface to Historia Francorum (C.AD 575)1
The history of western Europe after the German invasions is the tale of how the kingdoms established by the conquering tribes went on to become distinct nations. Dialectal differences in the Latin that people spoke widened, and wide-ranging travel became less common, as the road system decayed and public order became unenforceable far from cities. No longer was there a Roman army with a common tradition, and troops that might expect to be transferred anywhere. Where literacy survived, principally in the Church, so did written Latin. But this was not enough to maintain any spoken standard. The gap between spoken and written language widened, but without people having any sense of what was really happening, namely that the spoken language was changing. Little by little Latin spelling came to seem more and more irregular and perverse: but this obscurity was acceptable, even desirable, as reading and writing were the preserve of a small elite, mostly clerics and lawyers.
This period, the second half of the first millennium AD, gives us our main evidence of what happens to a universal language in the western European,