Re: Latin and Oscan


Joachim Pense schrieb:

Were Latin and Oscan mutually intellegible?

I have also read this dictionary and I find that many words are just
the same, just made unrecognizable by them crazy pronounciations. It
says anyway that the grammar was almost the same and that possibly some
theater pieces ("Avellana" comedy) were played in Rome in the original
Oscan, so I suppose someone had to understand the language.

I remeber also that many people in Rome did understand Sannitian and
Etruskan, and that not because they were mutually intellegible with
Latin, but instead because in the world of the time everybody has
occasions and motivation to snap some words of the many languages were
spoken around in that time.

But if in reality we are talking about this argument: to be an
inexplicable paradoxon that in the first century Gallia was speaking
Latin and Campania was speaking Oscan, this is in my opinion not an
argument, is not inexplicable and is not a paradoxon.

I am sure Gallia was never speaking Latin, not in the first century and
not afterwards, because things don't go that way.

What appened was that, after Romans had conquered Gallia, the Galli
kept on speaking whatever Gallian dialect they were speaking before.
Some of them had to learn some Latin, if they wanted to make businness
with the Romans, and the Romans got to learn some Gallic, if they
wanted to go and dance with the girls. After many Romans had married
their girls, they had to talk together at home and I'm sure they talked
not Latin and not Gallian but the same pidgin as the baker and the
shoemaker did. After some generations most people were fluent in this
pidgin and it became the French language.

So Gallia did never speak Latin, instead they spoke some Gallic before
and some French afterwards and both in the time between. Just the same
happened in Campania, Hiberia and Pannonia and so on.

Some conquered people kept speaking (at home) their original languages
for longer, some for not so long. And some quickly gave up their own
language and adopted the conquerors' completely without building a
pidgin, as is the case in Hungaria. But this is very rare indeed and
did not happen AFAIK for Latin in the roman empire, so there is nowhere
any language one can call a "modern Latin".

Not even in Italy, by the way. I'm from there, and if you live in any
large town today, you have to learn someway the "universal Italian"
(spoken on the TV), the local version of "standard Italian" (spoken
between the natives and the foreigners and between foreigners to each
other), plus the local version of the "snob language" (Like French in
Turin or Aosta, for instance) plus the local version of the "standard
dialect" (spoken by the cultivated natives to each other) plus two to
five local dialects they talk in the villages you drive to on weekends
to eat in the trattoria or to swim in the lake.

None of them are mutually intelligible, but if you live some time there
(say twenty years or so) you will be more or less fluent in all of them
and some more, and I imagine exactly this was the situation in south
Italy after the Romans had conquered it and also in Gallia and you name
it.

Marco P

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Romaion (not "Byzantine") Coins and Culture
    ... Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman empire. ... Latin was its ... We know that Hebrew was only the local language. ... even while calling themselves Romans is ...
    (rec.collecting.coins)
  • Re: Passion of the Christ, languages
    ... >> in the film jews conversed in Aramaic, the Romans in Latin, and Jesus ... The language spoken by the people, as opposed to the Classical Greek ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: OT: Traveling experiences (was: Re: Berlin Redux)
    ... > "Latin is a language, as dead as it can be. ... > It killed all the Romans, and now it's killing me." ... My only exposure to Latin was at Mass and in choir/chorus. ...
    (rec.equestrian)
  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... that vernacular terms can't follow scientific usage. ... None of which has to do with language or with the present case. ... of this seems to have anything to do with birds or dinosaurs. ... Latin was used for philosophy and science until the late ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: what is etymology? (linguistics and biology)
    ... Life and language, part 1, what is language? ... words in ancient Greek and in Latin). ... calamities, to face them directly when they occur, ...
    (sci.lang)