Can ancient names in ancient languages handed down to us in Latin be de-latinized to give us the original names? Has I ever been done successfully. I’m thinking of Germanic names that have only come down to us in Latin. Can these names be ‘reverse-engineered’(perhaps there a better linguistic term) to give us the original Cherusci or Celtic names ? Martin Luther called Armenius ‘Hermann’ but what was his real name in Cherusci?
Well, Germanic and Celtic languages still exist and there is much scholarship in them and their evolution. I mean, some words are even traced beyond that and all the way back to proto-IndoEuropean. That works if the Latin usage is a transliteration or latinization (or second generation hellenization) of the original word and we know the original language well enough. It falls apart if the Romans just came up with their own Latin name for the place or person and don’t give us even a clue of what was the original.
In the specific case of Arminius that is part of the problem as it it may not be transcription or latinization of his actual birth name or the title the Cheruschi called him, but a cognomen given him by the Romans, perhaps acquired during his time serving with them in his youth.
If it was only handed down to us in Latin, how would be know we’d been successful?
I’m not a linguist, but I’d think at best, you could make guesses about what the original name might have been.
I mean, look at it this way… without knowing Arabic, it would be hard to conclusively know what the original Arabic words were for a whole bunch of Spanish words that are used in English, like “alcohol” or “algodon”, which was further modified into English as “cotton”. FWIW, the roots are “kohol/kohl” and “al-qutun/qutn” depending on whether you are looking at Spanish Arabic or classical Arabic.
You wouldn’t know about the “al-” prefix, for example.
There are linguistic techniques to try and “reverse-engineer” languages but it’s hardly an exact science. it often relies on being able to identify the oldest version of the language still left, and without written records it can be extremely difficult to figure out. For example, in speaking of Latin, we have almost no Etruscan left because Latin basically over-wrote it almost entirely, along with Latin-related dialects or Languages such as Sabine. Etruscan also happened to be a bit of a rare and poorly-understood language family, and we can only imperfectly guess at the nature of the language. There simply isn’t enough of it left. And we actually have infinitely more evidence for Etruscan than many more languages which simply faded from existence with no written records at all.
[Look for the “A Word on the Etruscans” section. Please note that I have a few small issues with the information as presented in the article but it’s more of less factual, and at my minor objections ares mostly about not needing to add bad points onto good evidence. For example, Cathaginians would have visited Rome but were never, as far as we can determine, part of its community until wars brought Carthaginian slaves into the Roman sphere.]
Wow, I have been speaking Portuguese for decades and never saw the link between algodão and cotton, even though I was aware of the al prefix in words like alcohol.
Reading your note makes it clear that someone could mumble “al-qutun” or “al-qutn” in a way that sounds like algodón, or in a way that sounds like al “cotton”.
I wouldn’t even think it would take mumbling. Just everyday accents might morph the pronunciation of a word over time.
Thanks smilingbandit. Is it known whether the Romans ever learned the languages of the peoples they attempted to conquer. Did Tacitus get his information on the Germanic tribes second-hand or did he try to communicate with the Germanic tribes he wrote about. Perhaps the Romans had no interest in the languages of the barbarians they were conquering.
I’m sure they did, sometimes. They weren’t paranoid about learning other languages. We have evidence that Roman traders were often buying and selling in regions years before any Roman soldiers came through. However, we don’t get a lot of clear records because those were written by elite Romans. The elites spoke Greek very often, and if they commanded or interacted with other cultures like Gauls or Germans they undoubtedly picked up the soldier’s slang or the local lingo. it wasn’t made the focus of study.
You could point to cultural chauvinism, but a more simple and direct explanation is that most of languages under discussion had no widespread written form. There was no literature that could be shared of disseminated apart from the immediate people speaking the language. In addition, Greek served as a kind of “bridge” into many of these other cultures, because they had at some point contact with Greek-speaking merchants or cultures.
Other than as a rather obscure Doctor’s Thesis topic, I see little reason to even try to discover the names. It’s not like there are any Etruscans around to bitch about what we call them these days.
Gaulish is probably the best-case scenario. It’s easy to reverse-engineer because (1) it is very similar to Latin: not so closely related as to be a Romance language, but about as close as you can get outside of that; (2) we have a number of attested short texts, including bilingual inscriptions in Latin and Gaulish; (3) Gaulish was occasionally written in Greek letters, which helps with the pronunciation. In many cases, a Gaulish name in a Latin source just needs the ending changed (Brennus was probably Brennos), and sometimes not even that: Gaulish for Vercingetorix was probably Vercingetorix.
Most languages are somewhere between a little to a lot more speculative.
Is this correct. I thought Gaulish was a Celtic so not particularly close.
Gaulish is a Celtic language, but the Italo-Celtic hyphothesis is now being taken more seriously, so that Celtic and Romance languages are closer to each other than either is to any other I-E subgroup. There are certainly dissenting expert voices, though; wait another ten years and revisit the question.
I know it’s not what you’re asking for, but we do know what the original names of characters in Egypt and the Middle East were before the Greeks and Romans shoehorned them into the forms they were familiar with. So Ozymandias was really User-Man-Re, and Ramses was Ra-Mose and so for4th.
I remember when I first encountered the names of Persian kings in the original – they have a far more “Indian” flavor than the worked-over Greek forms
Cyrus … Kurush or Koresh
Xerxes … Kshyarsha
Cambyses … Kambushya
Artaxerxes … Artakshathra
Darius … Daryavahush
Avestan and Sanskrit are sister languages, they are very similar. Persian is derived from Avestan, the language Parsees spoke. Only a few Avestan speakers survive in India, after they took refuge in India in the 8th century. They were driven out by Muslim conquest of Persia.
You may also be surprised to know that the Parsee holy book, Avesta, has a lot of similar stories as the bible. The Avesta was around a few centuries before Christ, though.