Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (68 page)

Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thüle is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.
⁴⁰

The mention of Thüle here, which as far as the Romans were concerned might have been the North Pole, shows that Juvenal is thinking in terms of extremes. This is the condescension of the Roman establishment, showing much in common between old and more recent imperialisms: the conquerors might well tell subject minorities that their only hope lay in civilising themselves, but would never take them seriously when they tried to make good on this aspiration.

There is direct evidence that Latin did spread beyond formal and government uses. Odd tiles with scribbled Latin graffiti have turned up on sites, most amusingly at Newgate in London: AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATUR SIB COTIDIM, ‘Gus has been wandering off every day for thirteen days’, an example of ancient whistle-blowing. The waters at the health resort and holiday centre that the Romans developed at Bath have yielded over a hundred ritual curses and oath tokens, written in rough Latin (sometimes backwards): DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICTLIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLA VI VT MENTES S VA PERDET OCVLOS S VS IN FANO VBI DESTINA, ‘Docimedes has lost a pair of gloves. May whoever has made off with them lose his wits and his eyes in the temple where [the goddess] decides.’

And Welsh, that modern descendant of the British language which was being spoken in and among this colloquial Latin, has preserved over six hundred words borrowed from it, including such household terms as
mur, ffenestr, gwydr, cegin, cyllell, ffwrn, sebon, ysbwng
(wall, window, glass, kitchen, knife, oven, soap, sponge) and
ceirios, castan, lili, rhos, fioled
(cherry, chestnut, lily, rose, violet). There are many more words in more intellectual domains such as law and Christianity.

In the modern era it has been argued, from some phonetic properties of these borrowings, that Latin as spoken in Britain was more conservative than in other parts of the Roman empire.
⁴¹
Conceivably, this could suggest that it was less well established in ordinary currency, remaining instead a stiff and formal means of expression. St Patrick, who grew up on the Scottish borders in the early fifth century, complained that his Latin was always weak, because having been captured by Irish raiders when he was sixteen, he had missed out on the crucial years of education. Evidently Latin was not an everyday means of expression even in his well-to-do family.

But whatever the glimmer of truth that may have been detected here, our reliance on written records distorts our sense of the role that must have gone on being played by British. This absence of written British is quite surprising, and has not been explained. Gaulish was often written down on the Continent, but British was evidently not: in Britain, only two inscriptions from the Roman period in a language other than Latin have ever been discovered. They are two of the inscriptions on tin/lead sheet from the waters of Bath, and seem to be in something like Celtic, but are not decipherable at all.
⁴²

Latin persisted after the Roman conquest as the language of learning: in Britain, as elsewhere, essentially unchallenged until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries gradually made the use of European vernaculars acceptable for serious factual writing. But somehow, some time in the fifth century, between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and the Saxon conquest of England, it got lost as a language of the British people.

There is no point in contenting ourselves, as some have, with non-explanations, such as a general retreat, visible in the period, from the cities, something that is evidenced by a run-down in developed services such as aqueducts, and part of the decline of the empire as a whole before the incursions from the east. This may indeed have happened, and may have weakened the areas in Britain where Latin was most likely to be used. But it does not discriminate between the situation in Gaul and that in Britain: we would still need to explain why only in Britain did Latin remain a language of the cities, leaving British strong in the country, whereas Latin spread to every corner of the land in most of Gaul.

We shall return to this when we consider what became of British itself, over most of what is now England. But however weak British turned out to be in competition with English, it must be remembered that British had outlived Latin in this island, even if it had never been seen as a language worth writing down. There is no trace of any Romance language assuming a life of its own in Britain after the departure of the last Roman garrisons from Britain to defend Italy in the early 400s.

einfallen: (a) to collapse, to cave in; (b)
in ein Land
~ to invade (a country); (c) (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (d) (beams of light) to be incident; (e) (game birds) to come in, settle; (f) to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (g) (thought) occur to somebody…

Collins German Dictionary

einfallen:… loan translation of Latin
incidere.

Reklams Etymologisches Wörterbuch von Lutz Mackensen

The end to the Roman occupation of Britain, when it came, was determinate and sudden. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, was threatening to invade Italy. In 401 Stilicho, himself a Vandal but the empire’s commander-in-chief, withdrew the garrison from Britain to reinforce the empire’s heartland. This left Britain itself defenceless against the steadily increasing incursions of Germani along its ‘Saxon shore’, the coast facing Europe. In 410 the Britons sent an appeal to the emperor for reinforcement: his reply was to order them to look to their own defence; somewhat surreally he added that the raising of local forces would not be taken as hostility to Rome. That was the last they heard. Within a generation, there was no British province to defend. The Saxons had come to stay.

The end of the Roman empire in the west was soon to follow. On 31 December 406 there had been a mass crossing of the frozen Rhine: Suebi from the east side of the Rhine, together with Vandals originally from farther east, and Alans (not German speakers at all, but Iranians, driven out of the Pontic steppes by the Huns), then cut a swath across Gaul and entered Spain. The Vandals kept going, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (then still known as the Pillars of Hercules), and by 439 were established at Carthage in North Africa (where they built a navy and became the new power in the Mediterranean).

Alaric had succeeded in entering Rome in 410 (although the centre of government had moved to Ravenna), and committed the ultimate horror of sacking it, but died shortly after. The Visigoths then continued an advance that took them across southern France and into Iberia, constricting into its corners the preceding Suebi, Alans and Vandals. There they founded a new kingdom that lasted 250 years, ruling first from Toulouse, and later Toledo.
^*
Ultimately, in 711, their reign was terminated by something completely new for Europe, a Muslim (Arabic-speaking) invasion from the south.

But back in the east, the generation following Alaric had seen Attila, king of the Turkic-speaking Huns from 435 to 453, bring the Hunnish domain west to include all of Germany.† He was held off from Gaul in 451, and when he died soon after, his empire disintegrated into a mosaic of German tribes in the west, and a Slav area in the east, with the Huns dominant only back round the Black Sea.

By 476 the political centre of Rome had fallen, and the last emperor, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus, had been humanely deposed by Odoacer, who had once been a German-speaking follower of Attila, but most recently one of the empire’s own commanders. Different tribes of Germani then spread and settled with bewildering speed across the corpse of the old empire. Within fifty years, the Franks (who for two hundred years had been settled in the area of modern Belgium, even employed by the empire as border patrols) had assumed control of most of Gaul, spreading from the north, with the Burgundians holding a large, but diminishing, area in the south. The Ostrogoths, soon to be displaced by the equally Germanic Lombards, held Italy, the south-west of Gaul and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast. After this the west of Europe began to settle down; but the east of Europe had yet to undergo incursions in turn from Avars (from 550) and Bulgars swiftly followed by Khazars (from 650) and Magyars (from 750).§

Amazingly, the linguistic effects of this political and demographic turmoil, which lasted 150 years in the west of Europe, were slight. Certainly a polyphony of new languages must have been heard, if briefly, west of the Urals between 400 and 850. But west of the Elbe there can have been precious little change from the state of affairs essentially brought about by Caesar’s conquest of Gaul around 50 BC, other than the vanishing echoes of Germanic languages, Saxon, German and Gothic, as they passed rapidly across the central plains of Gaul and out of hearing in the farther reaches to the south and west.

^*
Their ascendancy was notable for unending struggle against the Basques: each king making the proud, but apparently empty, boast in his annals
’domuit Vascones
–he tamed the Basques’.

† Strangely,
Attila
is really his nickname in Gothic, and means ‘Dad’.

§ Of these, only the language spoken by the Magyars is clear: it was Hungarian, related to the Uralian languages of northern Siberia. As for the others, Avar was probably a Mongol and Bulgar and Khazar Turkic languages. Old Avar does not seem to have been the same as what is now known as Avar, which is a language of the north-east Caucasus, spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan, and quite unrelated to Turkic. Bulgar may survive in scattered pockets across Siberia to this day, known as Chuvash. (This name is identical with
Tabgach
, the name of a people famous for their fourth-century conquest of northern China.) (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 140.) The Khazars ruled from the Caspian Sea to Kiev for a century (
c
.650-750), and are chiefly famous for their choice of mass conversion to Judaism in 861. Today’s Karaim are their descendants. Another Turkic group, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, moved across in the thirteenth century.

When the dust from galloping hoofs had cleared, the creak of covered wagons had died away, and the gilt had dried on the palaces of the newly self-appointed royal families of medieval Europe, language boundaries were eerily familiar. The edge of Germanic had possibly slipped a little to the west during the long period when the empire’s borders had still been defended, not least because neighbouring Germans had increasingly been invited across it, as
foederati
, ‘treaty people’, or
laeti
, ‘joyous ones’, to serve in the army, or on the land, for the benefit of Roman society. But the line between Germanic and Romance was still drawn from the western end of the mouths of the Rhine in a south-eastward direction. And the repeated falling of parts of Gaul under German domination, and ultimately being firmly settled under the Franks, did not serve to translate it or rotate it further.

The failure of Frankish domination to replace the language of Gaul was paralleled in the other new German kingdoms. In Italy under the Ostrogoths and Lombards, in Iberia under a succession of Vandals, Suebi, Alans and Visigoths, in coastal North Africa under the Vandals, the language established under the Roman empire persisted.
^*
Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled Spain for 250 years, one cannot even detect a significant number of Gothic words borrowed into Spanish from this period. Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish historical linguist, writes:

It appears that the Germanic elements in Spanish do not proceed, in general, from the Visigoth domination of the peninsula, as might have been expected: the number of invaders was relatively slight to have much influence; moreover, the Visigoths, before reaching Spain had lived for two centuries in intimate contact with the Romans, now as allies now as enemies, in Dacia, Moesia, in Italy itself and in Gaul, and were very much permeated with Roman culture.
⁴³

^*
Latin bore a charmed life in North Africa, for a century (428-533) under the Vandals, and then controlled by the Roman empire resurgent from Constantinople until 696. The career of the most famous resident, St Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, would have been unthinkable outside a Latin-speaking milieu. Remarks he makes in some of his sermons provide evidence that bilingualism with Punic, the old language of Carthage, may have persisted until the fourth century (Sznycer 1996). Evidently the common people continued to speak Berber (as they do to this day). But the Arab takeover in the eighth century, backed up by the conversion to Islam of the Berber-speaking hinterland, would be much more quickly influential in changing the region’s working language than the Vandals had been (or perhaps even the Romans, in the 750 years since the destruction of the independent Carthage).

Our explanations have to be
post hoc.
No doubt the majority of advancing Germans would have been fighting men, and no doubt they would have taken brides from the populations among whom they eventually settled. The language in the new homes, so far from Germany, would have been set by the local mother and her family. But the same could have been said about the Roman invaders of Gaul five hundred years before, or indeed Mexico and Peru after the Spanish conquests a millennium later. Yet there, the conquerors’ language, spreading no doubt through the opportunities it gave to be part of the new economic order, soon began to win out. Here, apparently, the conquerors had no wish other than to put the old order under new management. But after beating its defenders, they ultimately depended on their victims to provide the life they sought. It is a tale more familiar in China than anything in the history of the West.
^*