Something I’ve been wondering about: when the Romans conquered Gaul, the inhabitant spoke Gaulish , a Celtic language. Gradually, Latin replaced Gaullish as the vernacular, and then gradually evolved into proto-French or Latin rustica (don’t know if I’ve got those terms right, but I hope you understand what I’m getting at - see Joanna’s post #13 in this thread).
Then as the Empire fell apart the Franks, a Germanic people, invaded Gaul. They gave their name to the region, but their Germanic language, Frankish didn’t replace proto-French.
How come? why the different results? was it because the Romans stayed in occupation for so long? was it because the Franks weren’t a literate people and so had to rely on the literate Roman-French that they’d conquered, who tended to use proto-French? or something else?
That’s an excellent question. Why Germanic replaced vulgar Latin in England but not in France, Italy, Spain, and Wallonia. I’m guessing that the Germanic invaders were few in number compared to the indigenous peoples of these lands, and that in the Continental European countries these indigenous people stayed put, but in England they were ethnic-cleansed… killed or assimilated or fled to Wales.
I suspect the relative level of social disintegration of the two different areas contributed to the loos or retention of Latin. The Franks moved into Gaul fairly gradually, serving as auxiliary troops and making several small-scale invasions, some successful enough to be eventually recognized and incorporated as vassal states. The Roman social infrastructure tended to be taken over rather than destroyed, by a people that was already familiar with and influenced by the Romans, so the use of Latin in daily life would eventually spread to the new rulers, much as English did after the Norman invasion.
The Anglo-Saxons were more of a classic barbarian invasion, by non-Romanized peoples who tended to destroy and replace the previous infrastructure and drive out the locals.
I was thinking about this the other day. Was Latin actually the spoken language of a significant number of people in England at any time? I always assumed that it was just the Romans, and maybe a few Romanized Celts, but that most of the regular folks didn’t speak Latin. But I really don’t know.
Given that Celtic languages survived in Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria after the Germanic invasions, I would have thought that most people spoke Celtic languages closely related to present-day Welsh in most of England in the 5th century AD, though Latin would have been the language of the church and the second language of a small educated elite.
I guess that just leads to another question - why did Latin replace Gaullish in Gaul, but apparently did not replace the Brythonic languages in Britain?
I can’t remember which book it is, but it’s one of the “History of English” types. The book has a list of which English as opposed to French and Latin terms appeared in court proceedings after the Norman conquest and when they first appeared.
On a very strong hunch, except for the four coloniae (Verulamium [Bury St. Albans], Chester, Caerleon, and one other I forget) and perhaps Londinium, I would suspect the actual Latin speakers were sparsely distributed in Britannium – largely the legionaries and their families and support facilities. On the other hand: (1) The Gallic War shows dispersed tribes for the most part outside Gallia Cisalpina and the Narbonensis – not having the Channel meant the pre-Roman Gauls probably tended to keep more clustered and defensible; (2) Gaul was conquered a century earlier and had Roman presence substantially longer; there were still quasi-Roman successor states in places like Lyons and Soissons well after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain; (3) purely hypothetically, Gallia was a more hospitable place for colonists from Italy that would spread out and farm and maintain small communities – a combination of weather and a sense of security being elements of my hypothesis.
Not totally a WAG, but kind of a Feral-Donkey Guess
Also worth noting is that what little we have preserved of Old Bryythonic, plus the extensive data on medieval and modern Welsh, there is a very strong admixture of adapted Latin words, and not just technical or ecclesiastical terms, though those are very heavily Latinized. Something as mundane as “fish” (pysg < piscis) is clearly from Latin.
While Welsh grammar, most of the syntax. and whatever you call that weird modification of initial sound (Mair [=Mary] > Fair) are typically Celtic, Latin apparently had a massive impact on Brythonic vocabulary, which continues in modern Welsh.
I would have ventures a very similar feral-donkey-guess as Polycarp – Galia and Iberia would have been suitable lands for larger colonization by Latins, and the native populations could have been more thoroughly integrated/assimilated, so in the end you would have large societies of both Latins AND culturally-Romance people in those provinces. (And the Latins in Gaul and Spain had to be conquered where they were, because by now it was their home.)
