[LMB] OT: Medieval language gradations

[Francis Turner]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 12:29 PM,  <alayne at twobikes.ottawa.on.ca> wrote:
[SNIP]>  Your argument made me think of the Roman Empire -- whuch was not a
>  argument in favour. That empire had writing as a widespread skill, and a
>  normalized form of Latin.
>
>  These days, Spanish doesn't sound all that much like Italian, and
>  neither of them could even be called a pidgin form of Latin. And Italy and
>  Spain were in the heart of the Roman Empire.
>
>  Language shift is inevitable IMHO.
>

Last month I drove to Barcelona from our home near Cannes - a distance
of ~640km or 400 miles - and it got me thinking. Thinking that was
added to by driving the other way to Milan sometime afterwards. I
drove the distance to Barcelona in 6 hours, including stops for fuel,
food etc. Part, actually quite a lot, of the drive is along the Via
Domitia - the roman road that went from the Rhone valley to Spain (and
some earlier parts are close to the Via Julia Augusta and later parts
close to the Via Augusta in Catalonia). Roman roads c. 50 AD say were
well maintained and hence soldiers could march on them at speeds of
around 25 miles a day. And assuming reasonable fitness and load anyone
else could go at about the same pace too. In other words a Roman could
repeat my journey (more or less) in around 16 days. I suspect that
even though many of these roads were maintained to some extent in the
post Roman era it was never possible to do much better than 16 days
until the arrival of the Turgotines (stage coaches) in the mid 18th
century.

The turgotines might have reduced the  time to a week or so. But to do
that journey in a day or so required the arrival of the train. And now
we can do it in 6 hours of steady and not terribly fast driving.

What you notice is that these days the gradual dialectical blend of
languages is now much more discrete. In the past one could see a
spectrum of language starting with Protuguese at one end and
(arguably) ending with Romanian at the other. Starting in Protugal and
then going Gallician, (Castillian) Spanish, Catalan, Provencal
possibly split into 2 or 3 subdialects, Monagasque (Ligurian),
Lombadian Italian, Venetian Italian, before the final hop to Romanian.
These days Provencal and Gallician and most of the Italian dialects
are dying, subsumed into the greater Spanish/French/Italian langauges
and Catalan is clearly a "semi-artificial" langauge that is only
maintained through Catalan nationalism. So where once there was a
dozen or so distinct dialects now we have 3 or 4 languages one of
which (French) is really an invasive newcomer from the North

-- 
http://www.di2.nu/blog.htm
Faber's Fourth Law:
 Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.