docoflove1974
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Posts posted by docoflove1974
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Either that, or they think that most poeple wouldn't be interested...a false idea, to be sure, but who knows.
Maybe it will take a monumental new finding--a long-lost manuscript, or the discovery of a building--that changes some element of what we know about the Romans.
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On the BBC News webpage today, on their Magazine section is this interesting tidbit of an article by Mary Beard: "Does Caligula deserve his bad reputation?". The article is in anticipation of her show which airs tonight on BBC 2.
For our colleagues who are able to watch it tonight, I'd be curious to hear what she really has to say in the show tonight, if she expounds upon this topic a bit more, or if it's all general fluff like we get here in the US on the History Channel. (I'm really hoping it's not the latter; I do respect her written work.)
The article essentially states that Caligula in all probability was not a nice dude--after all, his assassination after only 4 years on the throne would tend to lead one to think that he wasn't exactly benevolent. But her argument is that the historians of his reign did not discuss the atrocities that are attributed to him, nor anything close to it. Essentially, Caligula was demonized by Suetonius and others beyond what he probably did.
I've held the belief for some time that both answers are probably true. He probably did some outrageous things, and was probably psychopathic in his actions. These actions were probably the basis for the gross details that come out of the historians that wrote some 50-100 years after his death. But my gut reaction is that it probably isn't all true...could someone really be that demonic and sociopathic, and still be allowed to rule for 4 years?
Either way, hopefully the program will play over here in the US, or I can watch it at a later time. But for those in the UK or who have access to BBC 2 tonight, it might be worth a watch.
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As far as I'm aware, it's not nearly the number that people think it is. Americans have a fair amount of difficulty reading Elizabethan English, to varying degrees of course. It really depends on which American dialect you're talking about, but most of the ones that would still carry those vestiges are dying out.
I'll have to do some more digging when I get home from this business trip, but I believe that the number of phrases and words are diminishing.
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Well, that's a bit exaggerated. There are pockets of the Appalachians, the Carolinas, and Georgia that are quite remote, and there might be a few Shakespearean-era phrases that they still use today, but these speech communities are shrinking as Internet access and 'city folk' look for other places to live. The other area is New England, particularly Martha's Vineyard and the Boston Brahmin, but this speech community has almost completely died out or has homogenized to a more standard Boston/Massachusets dialect.
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@guy, the maximum upload limit was 40 MB, i increased it now to 80 MB, you should be able to post images, let me know if it works...
for all members that struggle with certain parts of the color scheme;
there is at the bottom a link called "change theme" , just click on it and choose IP board, it will have the default colors of invision, maybe that helps as a temporary solution...
cheers
viggen
Yes, that change in color drastically helps things, especially in the 'View New Content' page.
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I'm also using Win8, but I use FireFox. I'm not seeing problems so far with the WYSIWYG, but I'm still testing things out.
That being said, it is still frustrating to hover over a link in the 'View New Content' page, and the color of the link changes to black, not white or another light color. That needs to change; it's too hard to see links.
Viggen, any reason given for the massive delay?
EDIT: I just tried the editing function, and that seems to work ok, too.
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That was so cool...and the funny part is that, as a child and a teenager, I used to try to do something like that on my own. Little did I know that I was trying to be like a Roman!
Oh the days of long, flowing hair... *sigh*
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By the way, I'm loving that link, because you can set it to 'new posts since I last logged in'. Great for when I go a couple of days between log-ins.
I'm guessing there might still be some tweaking yet to do (i.e. the color of the links on that 'new content' page mentioned above...it's too dark and hard to read), but I do like this set-up.
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It's a topic that has been in one version or another for many, many decades. Honestly, I don't think it holds much water. While the English language is an odd duck, true enough, its historical changes are definitely within the Germanic vein; proof for many similar changes can be seen in Dutch, which is English's closest relative of all the Germanic languages. Additionally, you can attribute other major changes to the Norman Conquest and its introduction of Normal French to the island--pretty standard superstratum influence patterns are shown.
The argument that 'there is no record of the language change' isn't exactly true; it just depends on what you're looking for. The written language of the time by the few who could write was Latin--and continued to be so for many hundreds of years, even after English was a common language by most all levels of society. And even that isn't 100% accurate; frequently we have texts transcribed in Latin by monks, with 'vulgar' translations of notes in the side margins. It was the monks' way of trying to figure out what they were writing; they were translating Latin into the language of the people. We have examples of these from most of the monasteries across Europe, including Britannia. Most of what we have from the early period of Old English (700-900 CE) comes from various sources, and many of them wouldn't remark about 'Oh, lookie here! We have a new language!' They simply would use the language.
Place names are not a good way to verify or even trace a language's origin, as they are always going to hold some remnant of languages that are no longer spoken. If a certain town/village/etc. has always been called a name, that will usually be carried on for generations in one form or another, just because of trade. If you don't know the name of the place you've been trading with for generations, that's not good for business...it's why toponyms aren't the greatest of resources.
And the Saxons didn't bring Old English with them...they brought their language, Saxon. It was a Germanic language that was very similar to that of the Angles. When the two groups came and conquered the island, eventually their languages meshed. There is documentation at the monasteries of how the various regions of Britannia had quite different languages--they weren't so much different languages, as different stages of evolution of the Anglo-Saxon, Jute, and Norse languages that were in the process of becoming what we know as Old English. Beowulf, for example, is a late Old English text that shows much more regularization that earlier documents and glosses.
Lastly, when tracking the origins and evolutions of a language, simply looking at toponyms and words isn't enough. You have to look at the grammatical structures, as those are much less likely to change at random. Despite the very thorough dominance of Norman French for many hundreds of years, what the English language got mostly out of that was lexical items--little if any grammar (syntax and morphology) came from there. In fact, we got more from the Vikings/Norse than we did the Normans/French! Why? Because Norman French has a very different syntactical and morphological structure than does Old English and the other Germanic languages of the time...to make such drastic changes would have required that all peoples, regardless of status, use Norman French and be completely bilingual. But we don't see that in the records; rather, Norman French was mostly kept to the higher levels of society, which explains why the more learned words of English have a Romance tendency. (Others came in during the Renaissance...but that's another story). If one were to compare the Norse language of the time to the other West Germanic languages spoken in Britannia at the time, we see much more similarity in the grammar, and the changes affected peoples of all levels of society. We see that those changes continued on; the object pronouns that we use in Modern English have their roots in both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse.
Regardless, English is very clearly a Germanic language whose origins came in with the Germanic invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire.
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Generally speaking, Rosetta Stone doesn't work for most people, and it's a very pricy option. It truly only works as an ancillary tool to supplement coursework. As a tool on its own, there haven't been results showing that it works for the general populace.
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Thanks, guys! It's still early here in sunny (and cold!) California, but already I'm feeling the love!
Hopefully 2013 will see me more active on here...couldn't be less so, really!
And hope everyone on here has a happy, healthy, and fortuitous New Year!
Saluti a tutti!
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Merry Christmas, Buon Natale...Io Saturnalia! Hope everyone has a most wonderful season!
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The funny part is that I have been sitting on this question...mostly because in the US there have been really 2 schools of teaching Latin: the philologist/linguist school (which teaches the pronunciation of Classical Latin as faithfully as we know) and the Church Latin school (which bases its pronunciation on the Medieval Church Latin system). And the textbooks that are most often used (Wheelock's and Oxford) are of the philologist/linguistic variety...and this is what I know.
In the UK? I have no idea what system has been used over the years.
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You could find either in a good university library. Otherwise, you might have to purchase them.
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Philip Baldi's Foundations of Latin is a good place to start to read about how Latin came to be.
Latin is an Italic language, which is a branch of Indo-European. Baldi also has a good book on IE languages, Introduction to the Indo-European Languages.
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Well, it depends on your point of view. Most linguists don't believe that Latin died out; we believe that Latin evolved. Even the daily language of the Empire wasn't Classical Latin; it was Vulgar Latin, which was a further evolution of Classical Latin, of sorts. The modern Romance languages are just an even further evolution of that change.
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I think that the best explanation for Poles and Finns is the absence of analysis for Eastern Europe. Finnish is linguistically related with other Uralic languages like Estonian and they may have a genetic relation as well. Polish people should be more related with Lithuanians, Belorussians and Rhutenians from deep historical connections.
Anyway, I find this type of studies troubling because they try to overlap a biological community to a cultural one.
Agreed, and with Viggen. When I show people a picture of my mother and her family, no one believes that she, my grandmother, and my great-aunt are Italian. I know they are, not just because of the genealogy, but because most northern Italians don't look like the swarthy Mediterraneans that everyone thinks of. The fact that they have light skin and blue eyes throws people off...until you look at others from parts north of Tuscany.
Also, as others mentioned, just thinking of the Germanic invasions and intermixing, the substratum of Celtic tribes, let alone the Slavic combinations in the northeast, and there's no question that 'Italian' isn't one sub-group, but a mixture.
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and how are "DIVO, DIVVS, DEVS" Pronounced
If you look at post #3 of this thread, I have offered up links that are excellent in describing the Latin language--both the grammar and the pronunciation. I use them to this day with my students.
In addition, any good Latin grammar text (such as Wheelock's Latin or Oxford Latin Course) have sections on how to pronounce Latin.
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It's been interesting, and controversial on the linguistic side. It certainly has helped in the case of the Basques, proving that their linguistic uniqueness also corresponds to their genetic uniqueness. But with respect to the Americas, the controversy of their results (if I recall correctly, that there were only 3 waves of migration: Inuit, Na-Dene, and everyone else) doesn't entirely match up with what some linguistic researchers are continuously reconstructing. On the other hand, other studies have shown that the 'other' group of Americans has several linguistic similarities. I'm not sure of the research beyond that, but it is a controversial, and ever-evolving, area of linguistics.
At the same time, I've been reading this NYT article more, and I agree with some of the skepticism on the part of the linguists. I'd have to delve into the original article in Science more, but as I said in my earlier posts, there is a very strong risk of using only lexical items for reconstruction, because words can be borrowed--in particular, those for technology, which is what words for 'chariot' are. It's one thing to analyze terminology for family members, the basic body parts, numerals 1-10, native flora and fauna--this is commonly used in reconstruction. But equally important is basic sentence structure and morphology--what time of affixation is used on basic words, possessive constructions, and similar core elements of a language. That's what they are missing in this study of Proto-Indo-European, and until they do include it, it's not going to convince many historical Indo-Europeanists.
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Well, it's been done before, particularly with reference to the Basques and the American population from Asia--although that's admittedly using genetics.
I find it interesting that they're using traditional reconstruction tactics in a different way. But as the end of the article accurately points out, using simply lexical items, even core vocabulary, isn't as strong as including the evolution of the syntax and morphology.
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Thanks so much, Maty! I agree with Bryaxis, it would take a full team to update such a great and thorough reference.
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I read the article, too, and thought it was a curious read. I have no doubt that Roman parents were pushy, although somehow I don't think they were quite as demanding as Spartan parents <grin>
I'm curious to see if/when this is coming to the US; I'd be curious to see how she portrays the different aspects of Roman life.
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Clearly Irish grammatical structures have influenced modern Irish English, just as African languages have influenced 'black' dialects in the Americas. I'm not a linguist, but I wonder rather about woods for trees. I have lived in areas subject to quite recent language change (West Shropshire, for instance) and I think there is very clear influence from 'substratum' languages. I doubt that Germanic 'peoples' conquered eastern Britain - I see it more as a mercenary revolt.
Incidentally, for what it's worth, there is a long - and to my mind adequate, article on 'Brittonicisms in English' in Wikepedia - though I can't say that is a place I usually look to for confirmation!
I didn't mean to suggest that it *never* happens...just that we would need evidence for it. And because there is little evidence of the Britannic Celtic languages of that time, I make that hesitation again.
For what it's worth, African American English is a whole other ball of wax, so to speak. The differences between it and Standard American English are frequently attributed to a creolization effect that has continued to evolve over the centuries. If you listen to, for example,
, you can hear the creolization effect between the various African languages and Elizabethan English. This, and other such creoles spoken by the slaves, has evolved into what we now recognize as African American English.Yes, there are many who have postulated that English is really the result of a creolization, but I don't recall the Celtic languages being used in the argument. Instead, the Old Norse, Angle, Saxon, and Old Norman French are frequently offered as the contributing languages of the 'creole'. I don't have any sources with me right now, so I'll hold off on making stronger claims.
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Interesting. Most of what I've read lately seems to agree with Fleming's approach. The population of Roman Britain was clearly much larger than was proposed when the British were seen as American Indians (three million and rising) whereas the 'Anglo-Saxons were probably not much more numerous than 10,000. Clearly there was some sort of disaster which allowed the mercenary troops to seize power in the two eastern provinces, but I read an interesting Finnish book once that pointed out that modern English differs in a number of ways from any other Germanic language and that every one of these is native to British Celtic,suggesting a mass language shift like that which occured in Ireland centuries later: changes of language, pace so many English Germanists, do not mean survivals of words but of grammatical structures.
It is true that a language is classified into a language family based on the grammatical structure, particularly the morphology and syntax, and not on the lexicon. I'd love to see this book you mention, just to see these differences being linked to Britannic Celtic. I say that because not as much is known about the language as it was spoken at that time, and unless there has been a sudden influx of data, I don't know that one can officially link any specific change in English to Britannic Celtic. We have the most data from Old Welsh (800-1200 CE), but Old Breton would be the closest to the Britannic Celtic languages of England spoken at the time of Rome and of the time of Germanic invaders. The problem is that we have just a few toponyms of Old Breton, which is not enough data to make such claims. What is more, the Romans were not interested in documenting the languages of the peoples that they conquered, so without that contemporary data I don't know that one could say that the language of the Celtics influenced the languages of the Germanic peoples who conquered and settled in England.
There is another reason why I am hesitant to say that the Britannic Celtic languages influenced the Germanic languages, thus creating Old English: are we talking phonological changes, or morphological and syntactic changes? It's not particularly common for a substratum language to influence the superstratum language, even in the Indo-European languages. There are some thoughts of phonological influence--think the Latin [f] > Iberian and Gascon [h] phenomenon--but very little on morphology or syntax. The one possible exception is the Balkan sprachbund, where there seem to be quite a few common traits among the languages of the Balkans that are not shared with the other languages of those families. However, many have refrained from saying outright that there is a substratum influence, simply because the history of these languages during Medieval times is somewhat unknown, especially for Rumanian.
In addition to having a West Germanic grammatical structure, there has been influence on Old English by Old Norse--both in lexical items and object pronouns. But the greatest changes came at the time of the Norman Conquest--although it seems that the changes were already underway before 1066 CE. All one has to do is compare the Old English in Beowulf to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and note the grammatical changes, and not all of this is due to influence of the Norman French spoken in the courts of the day. Similar changes can be seen in the history of Dutch, English's closest sibling, which (as I recall) has not had much influence from French or other Romance languages.
There are several books, and many that have been published or updated in the last few years, that chronicle the history of the English language. Charles Barber's The English Language is one handbook that just got updated this year, and one that I would recommend. (There are others, but I'm not as familiar with them...perhaps there are others on here that are.)
UNRV's brainchild is born
in Colosseum
Posted
Congrats, Maty! Can't wait to sink my teeth into it!