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kruna posted:Being a Slav myself (squatting while typing) I've always wondered why digging up Slavic history seems to be difficult? Also am I wrong in assuming that many Slavic historians have a pro-Slavic bias when it comes to Slav history while Western historians seem to have an anti-Slavic bias? Sorry, not meaning to invade the Roman/Greek thread here. If you mean in general why it's difficult to find Slavic history in English, the long answer condensed is: Slavic history didn't effect English/North American history that much, and it was only very briefly the hip thing to study (had its glory day with Soviet studies). Otherwise it's not big on people's radar. I wouldn't call that an anti-Slav bias though. If you mean why is it difficult to dig up Slavic history around that time? It's as others have said. A lot of cultures don't really 'show up' until they encounter a culture with a writing system. Before that they're ambiguous assemblages of pots, graves and leftover settlements. Using a variety of different theories and techniques we can get a very good picture of where the Slavs were and what they were like, but as is the case with other non-literate peoples, until they enter the literal historical record, a lot of it can be hypothesis. The Germans suffer the same problem until the Roman invasions.
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Sep 26, 2014 03:35
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Mustang posted:Why are there so few Celtic loanwords in English then? It is often considered that we've simply overlooked how Celtic languages may have influenced English, especially in methods of sentence construction and of course the assloads of Celtic placenames all over Britain which have themselves led to words.
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Sep 26, 2014 05:22
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My opinion is that Roman Britain was simply not that urbanized, not that populated, that the overlay of Roman civilization was so light that it got rather pushed away by the migrations. Also, with a smaller base population, the migrating peoples were a larger percentage of the whole. It's still amazing how we go from great Constantine's father using the place as a base to arguing over when exactly the historical Arthur existed within two centuries.
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Sep 26, 2014 05:33
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Thwomp posted:But since this is the very fringe of the Empire, as soon as Imperial control in the West began to break down, you see the breakdown of strict Roman-style culture/language/norms in Britain as local rulers assert their own rule/get invaded by barbarians. A while back, I watched a documentary with Francis Pryor, and the dudes in it argued that there probably wasn't any sort of military invasion of Britain during the post-Roman period and there's archeological evidence that shows that most of the "Romans" didn't really even leave since they were mostly locals. For example, there's evidence that points towards forts at Hadrian's Wall being continually manned despite Rome writing Britain off. The "no military invasion" theory is sort of interesting because while it's the traditional view, there's very little evidence of an actual invasion, i.e. no telltale marks of destruction from a specific era.
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Sep 26, 2014 09:09
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Roman Britain wasn't that urbanised comparitively, when we're talking about Asia Minor, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and even Gaul, but at the peak it still had a number of good-sized settlements which are very very identifiably Roman. The issue is not that Britain was especially unRoman, more that the Roman way of life (especially among the non elite) was persistently slipping for a good time before the actual abandonment, so what seems like a sudden wiping away is actually the result of a long decline. Basically, the archaeological record shows that Britain was hit particularly hard by interruptions to trade during various crises of the Empire. During these times, the elite would move to or invest in large countryside properties as best they could, rather than staying in cities, and the general population also couldn't sustain the city sizes as they were, without the encouragement of mass trade flowing in and out of them. We find huge abandonments of the outer districts of cities in the third century, never mind the fifth at the point of actual severance, and the partial replenishments in better times for Britain are much less convincing than elsewhere, quite possibly because of the mentioned lower population. The move, by stuttering steps, is toward what we will later see in the rest of the Empire and what will turn out to characterise the early medieval period - population dispersal, deurbanisation, goods being produced far more for local trade and use, greater wealth inequality, a less-available stock of slaves being replaced by nominally free workers, etc. And since urbanisation is one of the particular hallmarks and enablers of a classic Roman way of life, Roman-ness is in a decline for a very long time before the actual loss of Britain and the big migratory invasions. The wealthy in their country villas can keep up some of the Roman country aristocrat ideal until Britain starts going under, or at least try to keep up the appearance of it, but there's very very few people trying to play at being part of the urban rich and great. Most of the rest of the population haven't been able to live it up as Romans should for decades or centuries beforehand. Sleep of Bronze fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 09:45
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Kemper Boyd posted:A while back, I watched a documentary with Francis Pryor, and the dudes in it argued that there probably wasn't any sort of military invasion of Britain during the post-Roman period and there's archeological evidence that shows that most of the "Romans" didn't really even leave since they were mostly locals. For example, there's evidence that points towards forts at Hadrian's Wall being continually manned despite Rome writing Britain off. Do you mean to say that terrible movie The Last Legion is true?
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Sep 26, 2014 09:46
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Octy posted:Do you mean to say that terrible movie The Last Legion is true? The Empire Never Ended. Nah, the Britain AD doccos mostly talk about how local roman authority evolved into something new, namely minor chiefdoms/kingdoms but on a local level, the soldiers didn't just pack up and leave because they were local boys who had no real connection with the rest of the empire..
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Sep 26, 2014 11:30
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It's basically the ambiguity of the term abandoning. When you hear it you tend to imagine the Romans packing up and sailing away. Well, no--lots of them had been there for centuries. The empire abandoned it as a province, you guys are on your own, and they pulled out the legions stationed there. That still left plenty of Romans living in Britain.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:35
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Romanised celts, or Romans? If the latter, then the question asked was why latin died in Britain?
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Sep 26, 2014 11:37
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cheerfullydrab posted:My opinion is that Roman Britain was simply not that urbanized, not that populated, that the overlay of Roman civilization was so light that it got rather pushed away by the migrations. Also, with a smaller base population, the migrating peoples were a larger percentage of the whole. It's still amazing how we go from great Constantine's father using the place as a base to arguing over when exactly the historical Arthur existed within two centuries. There's absolutely no chance the invading Anglo-Saxons outnumbered the native Britons. The late imperial population of Britain would've been in the millions, while the most generous estimates for the number of invaders have been like 100 000, and more typical estimates suggest like 5 - 50 000 migrants. Nintendo Kid posted:It is often considered that we've simply overlooked how Celtic languages may have influenced English, especially in methods of sentence construction and of course the assloads of Celtic placenames all over Britain which have themselves led to words. I think the proposed Celtic roots of English do-support are becoming like a historical urban legend. The timeframe is really bizarre, with do-support appearing in texts in like the 1300s, so it requires a fair bit of imagination to explain the gap of some 800 years. Ras Het fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 11:38
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Ras Het posted:There's absolutely no chance the invading Anglo-Saxons outnumbered the native Britons. The late imperial population of Britain would've been in the millions, while the most generous estimates for the number of invaders have been like 100 000, and more typical estimates suggest like 5 - 50 000 migrants. Are you talking about English's weird do-dependency? Do the Germanic languages not share that feature? Hehehe I used a sentence that has do in it by no right of god or man. But yeah someone earlier in the thread said genetic analysis has the English as an phylogenetic group that migrated from Iberia during the Younger Dryas period, about 12,000 years ago. So that seems to confirm that the people of the British Isles remained genetically the same through the Celtic, Saxon and Norman invasions. I wish phylogenetic had something to do with filo dough because the world won't be a good place until baklava poisoning is the number one cause of death worldwide.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:55
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Arglebargle III posted:Are you talking about English's weird do-dependency? Do the Germanic languages not share that feature? Yeah, like having to use do in negation ("he doesn't know that") and in questions ("who do you think you are?"). Other Germanic languages have nothing much like that, but apparently Celtic languages do, which gives ground for theories about its origin in English, and whether it's been borrowed and which way. It's a pretty unique feature, I hear Korean has something similar.
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Sep 26, 2014 12:04
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I think the inference I draw is that the germans and later the norse pretty much wiped out the celts from england. culturally if not physically.
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Sep 26, 2014 14:32
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euphronius posted:I think the inference I draw is that the germans and later the norse pretty much wiped out the celts from england. culturally if not physically. This is a good way to put it. Apparently recent genetic testing was attempted that found little change in genetics of people all around England where it had been expected that the parts of England first and longest settled by the Germanic and Norse invaders should have substantial differences. Ras Het posted:I think the proposed Celtic roots of English do-support are becoming like a historical urban legend. The timeframe is really bizarre, with do-support appearing in texts in like the 1300s, so it requires a fair bit of imagination to explain the gap of some 800 years. I hadn't heard about the do-support thing actually. Just that it was suspected various behaviors not done in other "known" predecessor languages might have originated from the vast Celtic common-population retaining things as they learned to speak the successor languages of their conquerors. And of course, all the Celtic placenames and such being influential over time.
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Sep 26, 2014 14:41
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Nintendo Kid posted:This is a good way to put it. Apparently recent genetic testing was attempted that found little change in genetics of people all around England where it had been expected that the parts of England first and longest settled by the Germanic and Norse invaders should have substantial differences. Ah could you explain this a different way. You mean compared to the Welsh and Bretons?
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Sep 26, 2014 14:43
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Kemper Boyd posted:A while back, I watched a documentary with Francis Pryor, and the dudes in it argued that there probably wasn't any sort of military invasion of Britain during the post-Roman period and there's archeological evidence that shows that most of the "Romans" didn't really even leave since they were mostly locals. For example, there's evidence that points towards forts at Hadrian's Wall being continually manned despite Rome writing Britain off. Sounds kinda like the Swedish crusades to Finland and Jews being slaves in Egypt.
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Sep 26, 2014 14:51
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euphronius posted:Ah could you explain this a different way. You mean compared to the Welsh and Bretons? Well it's comparing people all across Britain, so Scots too. And that the Irish aren't really different as well. If I remember right there were genetic differences across areas, but the differences did not seem to match up with historical patterns of invasion by others or with the time such invaders ended up spending in those area. Instead, appearing as if they were likely to be the range of genetic differences that existed "originally". And this of course plays havoc with a lot of UK-focused racism, which is always a bonus.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:25
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euphronius posted:Ah could you explain this a different way. You mean compared to the Welsh and Bretons? Yeah, if the Saxons wiped out the locals you'd expect England to have genetics closely related to Germans while Scots/Welsh/Irish/Bretons/Galicians should all be related but not to the English, but as it turns out English people are more or less the same as all those Celt groups. Obviously Saxons did come and German influence was big in England (as was Norse later) but the idea they took over and totally displaced the existing population is wrong. Unfortunately yet again, no records so figuring out what exactly happened is rough.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:26
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A cultural pogrom Is undeniable though.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:52
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euphronius posted:A cultural pogrom Is undeniable though. Possibly, but then again we're kinda fuzzy on what exactly the culture was and we have little recorded stuff from the common folk as opposed to writings about the various conquering groups and their selected "high class" millieu. We do know that whatever the ruling classes were prior got stomped and had to either adapt to the new rules or die or maybe go till the fields next to their former subjects. What we see when we get out the other side and start getting ongoing descriptions of life among the lower classes is that daily life already differs a decent bit from the daily lives of the lower classes in areas the various conquerors came from. Are the differences reflective of what people were doing prior to invasions? Simply due to different climates and landscapes? We really have no idea. The one solid change that eventually comes along is bringing back connections to continental Catholic authority for worship after the connections during Roman era went out.
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Sep 26, 2014 16:08
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Empire Never Ended. Roman Britain didn't really end to closer to 500AC then it's traditional dating and at least one Roman Calvary group visited Britain to see about reoccupation around 460 or so.
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Sep 26, 2014 16:38
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sbaldrick posted:Roman Britain didn't really end to closer to 500AC then it's traditional dating and at least one Roman Calvary group visited Britain to see about reoccupation around 460 or so. I can imagine this tiny group just casually landing on the beaches, maybe popping into town, and then deciding 'no, gently caress that, they're on their own'. Can someone put that into Latin for authenticity?
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Sep 26, 2014 22:24
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sbaldrick posted:Roman Britain didn't really end to closer to 500AC then it's traditional dating and at least one Roman Calvary group visited Britain to see about reoccupation around 460 or so. That wasn't a Roman cavalry unit, it was the future St. Germanus of Auxerre stopping by to argue with the Pelagians for a second time. Or possibly not, since he may had died in the 440s, but he did visit post-Roman Britain at least once, there is no gainsaying that. There was still enough Romanitas left in Britannia during the late 460s for a king named Riothamus to attempt a combined land offensive with Roman troops in northern France, but after that everything goes dark. Literally if there's one period in history worthy of being called the Dark Ages, it's post-Roman Britain. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 22:25
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:That wasn't a Roman cavalry unit, it was the future St. Germanus of Auxerre stopping by to argue with the Pelagians for a second time. Or possibly not, since he may had died in the 440s, but he did visit post-Roman Britain at least once, there is no gainsaying that. I saw some discussion years ago of the origins of the legend of Arthur being from that period, where Arthur was one of the last of the Romans trying to pull together a semblance of the old realm as things spun apart. I have no idea of the currency of those ideas now, but it seemed intriguing.
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Sep 26, 2014 22:39
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Deteriorata posted:I saw some discussion years ago of the origins of the legend of Arthur being from that period, where Arthur was one of the last of the Romans trying to pull together a semblance of the old realm as things spun apart. I have no idea of the currency of those ideas now, but it seemed intriguing. Well it's interesting, because Arthur isn't really a Welsh or Celtic name but it is a common Roman one (Artorius). And then there's Camelot - a pretty clear reference to the Roman capital of the province of Britannia: Camulodunum. He had his powerful knights, who were known for travelling widely and their cultural and martial prowess - potential characteristics of any Roman governor and his legionaries. The idea that Arthur was really a Roman ex-patriot of some kind that governed Britannia and defended against the Anglo-Saxons is certainly a plausible explanation. It would mirror the existence of Merlin, a composite character who was based upon Ambrosius Aurelianus, a 5th century Roman commander that had stayed behind after the imperial withdrawal. But it should be noted that Merlin was not initially connected to the Arthurian narrative. It's all an appealing concept, to be sure, but all the evidence is circumstantial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_basis_for_King_Arthur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camulodunum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosius_Aurelianus Fo3 posted:Romanised celts, or Romans? It's a false dichotomy, borne of our historical perspective as Britain as a modern nation. By the time the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain in the early 400s, they had governed the territory for close to 400 years. It's like thinking of the United States as being chiefly inhabited by Americanized-Brits. The people living in Britannia were Romans, and were just as Roman as any other citizen living anywhere other than Constantinople. Kaal fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 23:13
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Kaal posted:It's a false dichotomy, borne of our historical perspective as Britain as a modern nation. By the time the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain in the early 400s, they had governed the territory for close to 400 years. It's like thinking of the United States as being chiefly inhabited by Americanized-Brits. The people living in Britannia were Romans, and were just as Roman as any other citizen living anywhere other than Constantinople. I'm not sure that's true. In particular, I'd love to see evidence that Latin was the vernacular of the British people (as opposed to a second language acquired by its elites) prior to the Roman withdrawal. I'd suggest that places like Hispania and Gaul that weren't horrible isolated border provinces were assimilated to a much greater degree than Britain. (i.e. the reason Latin died in Britain as a popular language is that it never really took over to begin with, and of course as a language of the Church it didn't die until the early modern period).
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Sep 27, 2014 11:23
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, if the Saxons wiped out the locals For what it's worth, surely the expectation would be that the Saxons wiped out the local men and then shagged their women. So not quite literal ethnic cleansing, and not a total genetic replacement of the locals. (Though you'd still expect to see a difference I guess)
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Sep 27, 2014 11:27
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One would think that given Roman domination of Britain the Welsh and Cornish would have been more strongly influence by Latin than Irish/Scots Gaelic. Is there any evidence to indicate that this happened? Granted, it may be difficult to determine whether a Latin-derived term can be traced back to Roman times or was introduced later through the Church or the Norman rulers.
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Sep 27, 2014 12:32
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feedmegin posted:For what it's worth, surely the expectation would be that the Saxons wiped out the local men and then shagged their women. So not quite literal ethnic cleansing, and not a total genetic replacement of the locals. (Though you'd still expect to see a difference I guess) They wouldn't even need to kill off all the men, just the upper classes. If the bulk of the Romanised Celtic population are serfs under Saxon warlords, and there are no learned Celtic speakers to maintain the culture around then it is easy to see how the Saxon culture and language would come to be adopted by the commoners.
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Sep 27, 2014 12:35
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure that's true. In particular, I'd love to see evidence that Latin was the vernacular of the British people (as opposed to a second language acquired by its elites) prior to the Roman withdrawal. For all I know, after the Romans defeated Boudica the average celt maybe didn't like them or want to assimilate and just minded their own business, working the fields ie just doing the same old and speaking the same celtic language they always did, until the Angles and Saxons appeared, and then the norse/vikings. The Romans have gone, meet the new boss... For those struggling with the length of Roman occupation and it NOT turning everyone in a latin speaking "Roman", how Portuguese is Goa today, after 450 years of occupation, besides some architecture and culinary words? E: V Fo3 fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 18:40
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Hell of a lot more Portuguese than Mumbai is.
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Sep 27, 2014 18:44
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But they aren't Portuguese speaking as an official language is my point, even after 450 years of occupation. Even though it was the official language during the occupation, as soon as the Portuguese left, bam, the language is dead. Because it wasn't the language of the people, only the administration. Same for Britain, as soon as the Romans (administrators) left, the local language takes over, which in this case means only until the Angles and Saxons appear, who don't leave. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 18:47
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Fo3 posted:But they aren't Portuguese speaking as an official language is my point, even after 450 years of occupation. Even though it was the official language during the occupation, as soon as the Portuguese left, bam, the language is dead. Yeah, the Portuguese occupation of Goa shares a lot of parallels, such as length of occupation, and
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Sep 27, 2014 19:53
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Fo3 posted:But they aren't Portuguese speaking as an official language is my point, even after 450 years of occupation. Even though it was the official language during the occupation, as soon as the Portuguese left, bam, the language is dead. With respect to Goa at least part of this is because the early modern and modern European conception of cultural identity was becoming much more exclusive than ancient imperial identity had ever been -- aside from the concrete differences in administrative procedures and cultural investment, with modern colonialism in a place like Goa there's also the overbearing influence of race discourse, which is something largely irrelevant when considering classical history. Think of the Hellenistic period in the ancient Near East, for example, where already in about half that time there had been far-reaching cultural 'conversion' at most levels of society (post-Maccabean Judaea being pretty much an exception that proves the rule).
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Sep 27, 2014 21:13
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure that's true. In particular, I'd love to see evidence that Latin was the vernacular of the British people (as opposed to a second language acquired by its elites) prior to the Roman withdrawal. I'd suggest that places like Hispania and Gaul that weren't horrible isolated border provinces were assimilated to a much greater degree than Britain. There were plenty of areas that were very Roman but the common people didn't speak Latin. Egypt and Greece were thoroughly Roman, but the peasant farmers didn't speak Latin. Rome was a multicultural empire - they had people of all cultures and religions and languages as part of it. Just because someone doesn't speak Latin as a first language doesn't make them not-Roman, anymore than someone who doesn't speak English as a first language isn't precluded from being American. There was no "British" identity and there never had been since it was a bunch of disparate tribes. After 400 years they were all Romans.
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Sep 27, 2014 22:51
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Yeah I mean the upper class Romans spoke Greek!
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Sep 27, 2014 23:43
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I wonder how much modern day India is a reasonable analogy to the Roman Empire. Most people speak Hindi, though many (most?) not as their primary language. Most identify themselves as Indian, but that is rarely their sole ethnic identity.
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Sep 28, 2014 00:05
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You know, if we're going to talk about foreign occupation, linguistic penetration, and India it seems loving absurd that no one's pointed out that small matter of the English bumming around the sub-continent for a few hundred years. According to Wikipedia 18% of the people in India speak English today. It's heavily concentrated towards urban areas and skews heavily middle and upper-class, as one would expect from a colonial language. It also maps pretty well with what we see happen in England during the nastier bits of the medieval period. If some disaster caused a massive migration to rural areas and generally reduced the opportunities for education and long-range trade English would probably fade out to a similar extent that Latin did in medieval England.
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Sep 28, 2014 00:31
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euphronius posted:Yeah I mean the upper class Romans spoke Greek! Didn't Gaius Marius get a lot of poo poo because he spoke Greek but with the "wrong" accent? To the point that he allowed people to think he didn't speak Greek at all rather than look like a rural yokel?
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Sep 28, 2014 06:08
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I've done a little reading about the end of the Han dynasty and it's like reading a plot synopsis of Game of Thrones. So many disastrous decisions. And I messed up the chronology at the end in my last post. The eunuchs and Empress Dowager probably would have noticed something amiss before 192, considering the eunuchs were massacred in 189 and the capital was razed in 190. Things went downhill faster than I knew. 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 07:03
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