Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (64 page)

^*
In fact, this word is borrowed from Germanic. Besides
breeks
or
britches
, it underlies the Celtic word for footwear,
brogues.

† Such differences would in fact not be sought until 1599, when Joseph Justus Scaliger classified Latin, Greek, Germanic and Slavonic languages through their different words for God.

We now know, on the basis of contemporary Gaulish inscriptions, and the subsequent development of the languages into the distinct families of Celtic and Germanic, that there were substantive linguistic divisions between Celt and German. There are monumental inscriptions in discernibly Celtic languages (in Iberian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman scripts) from the first centuries BC and AD from all over northern Iberia, Gaul, northern Italy and even (though only of Celtic names) in southern Germany, at Manching on the Danube. Likewise, discernibly Germanic inscriptions (written in the runic alphabet) have been found on small portable items such as weapons and safety pins (
fibulae
), from Slovenia in the first century BC to Denmark two hundred years later. From the extremely sketchy evidence we have, it seems that Caesar’s Gallic/Germanic distinction was real, but that there was a major overlap of the languages’ spheres in the area that today comprises western Germany and Austria.

More interesting than the Greeks’ failure to distinguish the essence of the Gaul and the German was their evolving attitude to the Romans, the third contender for linguistic spread over western Europe.

There is nothing to pre-figure the destiny of Rome in classical Greek literature. The first surviving mention of the city is from the fourth century BC, in a fragment of Aristotle.
⁸
He also mentions their neighbours the Oscans (
’Opikoí
, also called
Aúsones’
) in a global discussion of the origins of communal dining, quoting chroniclers of the Greek colonists. But he does not mention the radically new constitution that the Romans had adopted in the past century, abolishing kings and instituting a republic under the balanced equality of two elected consuls.

Evidently, the first Greeks to encounter Latin speakers would have been colonists: they probably saw them as a bit of local colour among the Etruscans who controlled the landward side of the Greek settlements at Pithecusae (Ischia) and Kyme (Cumae). It would have been Greek colonists then who, over five hundred years, witnessed the gradual emergence of Rome, chief city of the region of Latium, from domination by Etruscans to independence and then commanding influence among the indigenous nations of Italy. There is a story
⁹
that in 323 BC the Romans sent one of the many deputations that went to Babylon to congratulate Alexander, the new master of the Persian empire. If true, it probably shows that they had heard rumours that he next planned to turn his conquering attentions to the west. This was 150 years before the Romans had any serious interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

Greeks were fascinated by Rome’s winning ways in global politics, and characteristically began to theorise some sort of explanation. Polybius had made the best of his deportation from Greece to Italy in 167 BC (his father had been a prominent Achaean politician) by getting to know the Roman elite: he then devoted much of his life to writing an account of ‘how and by what kind of government almost the whole inhabited world was brought under Roman rule …’
¹⁰
In the event, although he knew many of the Roman protagonists or their children and grandchildren, and reconstructed a meticulous narrative of events and motives since 220 BC, he offers no simple answer to his question. But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: ‘Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their institutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.’
¹¹
He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superstition though it may be, as fostering honesty: ‘At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.’
¹²
Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.

Two hundred years later, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Gaul had been added to Roman domains, and Roman dominance must have come to seem a fact of nature. Nevertheless, even then Greeks did not think of the Romans as quite on a par with themselves. Strabo, in the midst of a review of the geography of the whole world, still sees southern Italy outside the remaining Greek enclaves of Tarentum, Naples and Rhegium as barbarian territory, explicitly because it has been taken over by Romans.
¹³

Ironically, this southern region was the area of Italy that had retained its own language until the first century BC, a language known as Oscan to the Romans, Opic to the Greeks. This language, related to Latin but as different from it as German is from English, had once been spoken far more widely than Latin; it had been the language, for example, of the Romans’ early rivals, the Sabines (whose women the Romans had famously stolen) and the Samnites.

In fact, when they wanted to put them down, the Greeks liked to refer to their Roman masters as
Opikoí.
‘They keep calling us barbarians and insult us more foully than others with the name of
opics,’
the proverbially stiff Marcus Cato complained.
¹⁴
The point of this slur seems to have been lack of education, since the word was being borrowed back into Latin as a byword for illiteracy. Juvenal talks about a pedantic lady telling off her ‘opic’ girlfriend for using the wrong word.’
¹⁵
‘Opic’ was malapropic. This was another cruel irony. Had they forgotten that the first poet to adapt Greek metrics for use in Roman poetry had himself been an Oscan speaker, Quintus Ennius? Ennius had liked to boast that his three languages gave him three hearts.
¹⁶
His mother tongue had been Oscan, as he grew up in Calabria, in the heel of Italy; he knew Greek, because his local big city was Tarentum; and he had learnt Latin serving in the Roman army in the war against Hannibal. Two hundred and fifty years later, the last faint echoes of Oscan could still be heard, in the annual mime shows at Rome.
¹⁷

In a way, trying to get a Greek view of the Romans to compare with their view of the Celts or Germans is unrewarding. The Celts and Germans may have been entertaining strangers, but after the second century BC the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans became more like a marriage (see Chapter 6, ‘A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture’, p. 250). The Slavs, on the other hand, became a factor in the language map of Europe only when they forcibly made their presence felt on the Greeks. Understandably, there is little sympathetic insight in the early Greek descriptions, which were in any case written much later, when they were bearing down on the Balkans and Greece itself (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 262). Prior to this, though, Tacitus (in his
Germania
, AD 98) has some remarks to make on their ancestors, the Veneti (latterly known as the Wends, or Sorbs) and Fenni (whose name was later given to the Finns, but who may have been Slavs).

The tribes of Peucini, Venethi and Fenni, I hesitate whether to classify as Germans or Sarmatians…
¹⁸
The Venethi have brought many customs from them [the Sarmatians]: they prey on the whole range of woods and mountains between the Peucini [in the south] and the Fenni [in the north]. But they are more like Germans, since they build houses, use shields, and like to move on foot and fast: this is all very different from the Sarmatians who live in wagons and on horseback. The Fenni’s savagery is amazing, their poverty appalling: they have no arms, no horses, no homes: they live on grass, dress in skins, sleep on the ground; their only resource is arrows, sharpened with bone for lack of iron. The same hunting sustains both men and women: they accompany each other everywhere, and claim their share of the prey. The children have no shelter from beasts or showers beyond the covering woven from branches, and this is where youths return, and old people take refuge. But they think this is happier than groaning in fields, working in houses, and trying their and others’ fortunes in hope and fear; they have no care for people, no care for gods, but have achieved something of outstanding difficulty, not even to need to wish for anything.
¹⁹

The Veneti also appear in the pages of Ptolemy, mid-second century AD, as the
Ouenédai
, a ‘very large nation occupying Sarmatia along the whole Venetic Gulf’. Apparently then they were living along the Baltic shore.
²⁰

Celtic origins are obscure, but when first heard of this culture was already seated at the heart of western Europe.

Archaeologically, they are identified with the culture, or rather succession of cultures, typified first by the Hallstatt site in Austria (dated thirteenth to sixth centuries BC), and then by the La Tène site on Lake Neufchštel in Switzerland (from the sixth to the first century BC). Together with comparable sites, these defined the Iron Age way of life as experienced in central Europe. Their material goods, well preserved by salt and by marshland respectively in the two sites, include weapons, bronze and ceramic vessels, jewellery, clothing, wooden tools, pins, buckles, razors and wheeled vehicles. The decorative style with elaborate swirls and spirals, which we still see as Celtic, is very much in evidence.

This, then, defined the home life of our Celts. What of their linguistic existence?

The longest-lasting, and most widely broadcast, evidence of the spread of Celtic languages is given by their place names: Celtic place names have a certain feel to them. Towns set up by Celts would often have suffixes such as -
dūnum
, ‘fort’, -
brīga
, ‘hill’, -
magus
, ‘plain’, -
brīva
, ‘crossing’, -
bona
, ‘settlement’ or ‘spring’. There is also a recognisably Celtic tendency to self-congratulation:
sego
-, ‘powerful’,
uxello
-, ‘high’. Such names can be found from the north of Britain (Uxellodunum to Segedunum at either end of Hadrian’s Wall) to the very south of Iberia (Caetobriga—Setúbal, just south of Lisbon), and from the English Channel (Rotomagus—Rouen) to the Danube (Vindobona—Vienna, Singidunum—Belgrade). The snag is that such etymologising is so easy it may even have led to some towns being given a Celtic name for purely sentimental reasons. It is noticeable that many of them were created under Roman rule: Iuliobona, Augustodurum, Caesaromagus in Gaul, Flaviobriga, Augustobriga, Iuliobriga in Spain. A single place name is hardly evidence that the language from which it is drawn was spoken when the name was given.

It is also possible just to take the testimony of people, usually Greeks or Romans, who met or knew of Celts in different parts of Europe. Strabo records that three tribes of Gauls, the Boii,
^*
Taurisci and Scordisci, were mixed up with the Thracians, which would place them towards the Balkans. He also says that the Scordisci lived near where the Noaros, the river swelled by the Kolapis, flows into the Danube.
²¹
Now a look at the map shows that the river swelled by the Ku(l)pa is in fact the Sava, and it flows into the Danube at Singidunum, modern Belgrade. Strabo is quite careful to distinguish Gauls from other races, for example noting that the Bastarnae may be considered Germans (vii.3.17), and that the Dacians and Getai speak the same language (vii.3.13). Although he makes no explicit reference to the language of these Gauls, it would seem that in the first century AD some form of Gaulish would have been spoken not just in southern Germany, but down into what is now Croatia and Serbia.†

Finally, there is the evidence of what languages are spoken where today. The Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles up to the present day are the direct descendants of the indigenous tongues that the Romans heard about them over the four hundred years when Britain was occupied, and Ireland was visited occasionally. There is also a continuing Celtic-language tradition in the Breton corner in the north-west of France, even if it remains unclear whether this has been strictly unbroken; i.e. whether Breton is a continuation of Gaulish, or a reimport of the language from Cornwall in the first millennium AD. Perhaps it is both, remixed.

^*
The Boii were well known as a far-flung tribe of Gauls, having connections with Bohemia (etymologically ‘Boii-home’, though in Germanic not Celtic) and having a major settlement in north-eastern Italy (around such modern cities as Bologna, Parma and Modena). Somehow they also showed up as allies of the Helvetii in southern Gaul, and were defeated by Caesar at Bibracte in 58 BC. The name means ‘hitters’, according to Lambert (1997: 44).

† How they were related to the Celts in western Europe is quite unclear. Yugoslavia and Hungary are in fact the heart of the so-called Urnfield culture, dated by archaeologists to the first half of the first millennium BC, and so preceding the high points of Hallstatt and La Tène. The Urnfield culture had been on the path of the spread of Iron Age civilisation from the Aegean; and so it is quite possible that Celts had been in this area even longer than in western Europe. But as historians of Celtic-language speakers, we can only be agnostic about the link to these prehistoric material cultures.