Re: Latin and Oscan

In article <1151586481.901650.252410@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Marco Pagliero <martesi@xxxxxx> wrote:
John Atkinson schrieb:
"Marco Pagliero" <martesi@xxxxxx> wrote...
But you can maybe explain how it came that at the end of the first
century, while short before conquered Gaul was already speaking Latin,
long before conquered Campania was still speaking Oscan?

Like, today, while the indigenous inhabitants of recently conquered
California are already speaking English, long ago conquered Wales is still
speaking Welsh?

The indigenous inhabitants of California were few and had
many languages. After Mexico got its independence from
Spain, California was essentially ignored, and the number
of Mexicans there was estimated at 5000 in 1948, while the
number of English speakers was easily 5 times that much.

Well, I'm not sure one can compare California and Gaul that simply.
Caesar didn't exterminate 80% of Gaul's indigenous inhabitants to begin
with, did he?

But yes, I think this is the question underlaying this thread: why do
sometimes happen for a conquered nation to adopt quickly (say within
two or three generations) the conqueror's language while sometimes it
takes hundreds of years or even it never happens?

So did Etruscan as a language disappear completely very quickly while
other languages in south Italy were still spoken after centuries.

No. It was still around after Caesar. Unfortunately,
bilinguals are rare.

Welsh is still being spoken because there are many people
who speak it and believe it should be continued. When
the Irish government relocated native Gaelic speakers in
the hope that Gaelic, with official approval, would spread,
the Gaelic speakers instead learned English.

But Hawaiian has been revived, even though there were
efforts to essentially eradicate it, and I have read
that Cornish has been revived.

I propose some possible reasons of losing a language (beside the
obvious situation where the conquered nation has no survivors):
- The conquered nation was or became a very small minority and could
not maintain the own culture (Etruscans? Amazonian Indians?).
- The conquered nation saw the own culture as inferior and was willing
to give it up (I don't give examples in order not to get my throat cut
open).

Some possible reasons why a language would survive:
- The conquered nation simply refused to accept the idea to have been
conquered (Oscans? Sannitians? Brittany's Celts? Basques?).
- The conqueror saw the conquered nation as culturally superior (Greek?
Latin?).

My pet and own theory is: if your land is very very mountainous, very
very cold, or very very hot, it will take much longer for anyone to
conquer you and afterwards if the conquerors only succeed in collecting
some symbolic taxes from you they will be happy to let you alone with
your impossible language and your atrocious customs (Oscans? Greeks?
Brittany's Celts? Basques? Inuit?). Till the day they find oil in your
garden, of course.

No, the above examples show otherwise. The Romans made no
attempt to change the other languages, and in the Roman
Empire, the other languages to the West died out with the
exceptions of Celtic in Brittany and Basque, while in the
East, the only Latin inroad was Romanian. The Eastern
Roman Empire did not succeed in spreading Greek to any
extent. Neither Latin nor Greek replaced Albanian.

The Persian Empire never imposed Persian, and Persian did
not spread to the west to any extent, although Aramaic,
which was already the lingua franca of the western Assyrian
Empire, became the local language.


Marco P



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are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
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