Part II

The Adventure of Languages in Europe

I n t r o d u c t i o n

How to Proceed: Three ways

• A first solution would consist in looking at only the official langages of each country. The linguistic map of Europe seems then quite evident, at least for France, Portugal, Greece or the Netherlands, which have one single official language. Belgium already poses a problem, having three official languages: Dutch (or Flemish), French, and minimally German.

Tiny Luxembourg’s situation is rather unique, for if French and Letzeburgische or Luxembourgeois (which made it its official tongue en 1984) are the two single official languages, German is spoken daily by the whole of the population without creating any linguistic conflicts. The most unusual situation, however, is that of Ireland: Irish (or Gaelic), a Celtic language, according to the Irish contitution, is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, when it is spoken by a tiny minority of the population, whereas English, the second official language, is the common language of Irish people. And, in British-ruled Northern Ireland, it raises the hackles of the fiercely pro-British Protestant majority.

• A second solution would be to trace all the languages and dialects spoken in each country, which would be difficult since minory languages stubbornly ignore modern borders. [Please, read the attached article from Boston Globe, (July 20, 1997), “Nations without countries”.] Euskara (Euskal Herria means the land of the Basques) is spoken by Basques in Southern France and northern Spain. Occitan (i.e. langue d’oc) or Old Provençal as well as Franco-Provençal straddle France and Italy. German hardly seems like a minority tongue, but it is those in Denmark, Italy and Holland who still insist on speaking it.

Britain has four languages officially listed as lesser used - Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Irish. Italy has twelve minority languages - Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulan, Greek, Latin, Occitan, Sardinian, Slovene and the Gypsy tongue called Rom. France has seven. In Switzerland, Romansch, although spoken by only one percent of the Swiss, is one of the country four official languages. We could add Lappish speakers from artic Sweden, Norway and Finland. . . Altogether we would be confronted with over two dozen minor European languages, which have their official headquarters in Dublin at the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages.

• A third way, which is going to way ours, is to proceed through the history and geography of European languages (as it is briefy presented in Essay # 1, Languages, in your textbbok, pp. 22 to 27). Let’s endeavor, then, to learn something about the peoples who have contributed to the making of the history of 1. Greek and Latin, 2. the major Romance and Germanic languages, 3. as well as the peoples - Celtic peoples in particular - who have made the history of minority languages in Western Europe, namely Breton, Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic.

• If you take a look at Map 1 : Great Linguistic Areas, and ignore political borders, you could trace two imaginary lines dividing Europe in three major linguistic areas: One of these lines cuts the central area from north to south, thus delimitating the area of Slavic (or Slavonic) languages to the east, and that of Germanic languages to the west and the north. Another imaginary line would begin between Great Britain and France, and continue from Belgium, through the continent, to join - in northern Italy - the line of separation between Slavic and Romance languages.

• This simplistic division omits the existence of many other languages, for example that of the Celtic languages to the extreme west, or Greek at the extreme southeast or the Basque language, sole pre-Indo-European, that has survived on a small territory located on each side of the Pyrenees between France and Spain. (Map 2: The different language groups in Europe)

• The outline of this part of the course, which I have divided into five parts, would be something like this:

1. a “pilgrimage” to the sources of Western Civilisation, followed by

2. a presentation of the Greek language; continued by

3. a development on the Celtic languages, just to remind ourselves that most of Western Europe was Celtic for several centuries, before being dominated by the Roman Empire,

4. a domination which occasioned the diffusion of Latin, the ancestor of Romance languages, namely for the major ones: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French,

5. After the fall of the Roman Empire, we’ll see Germanic populations taking more and more importance, and Germanic languages replacing or deeply influencing the languages of the populations that had preceded them. We’ll concentrate on Danish, German, Dutch and English.

• Another manner of outlining the above would be to present the main thread of these five headings as follows:

1. Distant Linguistic Origins

Historical Family Original Official Country

Indicator Branch Dialect State Language

2. Greek Attic Greek Demotic Modern Greek GREECE

civilization

3. Celtic Celtic Gaelic Irish Gaelic IRELAND

expansion

4. Roman Italic a. Toscan Italian ITALY

Empire (Latin) b. Castillan Spanish SPAIN

c. Gallaïco- Portuguese PORTUGAL Portuguese

d. Dialect of FRANCE

Ile-de-France French BELGIUM

(langue d’oïl) LUXEMBG

5. Germanic Gothic Scandinavian Danish DENMARK

Invasions Swedish SWEDEN

High-German German GERMANY

High-German Luxemb. LUXEMBG

Low-German Nethelands NETHERLDS

BELGIUM

Dialect of English GREAT-BRIT

Southeast of England

I. DISTANT LINGUISTIC ORIGINS

• A Common Stock Language : Indo-European (Map 3)

Linguists, with good reasons, propose a common origin or “zone de départ” i.e. area of departure to a great many of the languages of Europe and Asia: from English to Russian, Albanese to Greek, Hindi to Persian, or Armenian to Kurd. This common stock is not an attested language per se , for there are no written texts in Indo-European. This common language goes back to a period when writing had not yet been invented.

The Indo-European of the linguists is therefore a language they have reconstituted from the comparison with existing languages. They discovered that they were many similarities, which could not have happened by accident, between different languages. Thus “mother” was said mater in Latin (the ancestor of romance languages), mothar in Gothic (the most ancient existing Germanic language), mathir in old Gaelic (a Celtic language) and matar in Sanskrit, an ancient language of India.

• A Pratriarchal Society

What type of society did the “Indo-Europeans” live in? (We need to add “...” at Indo-Europeans as peoples, for we don’t know who they were). However, by studying ancient terms expressing family relationships for example, we have been able to discover that “theirs” was a society highly structured and hierarchized, dominated by the absolute power of the father, who does not appear as the genitor but as the supreme chief of the “greater family”. This is the sense of the word paterfamilias in Latin. All owed him absolute obedience, even the mother, who was considered only has the person bringing the children to the world. Furthermore, the Indo-European forms that are at the origin of the words for brother and sister in all these languages designated persons belonging to the same generation, but not necessarily born from a same father or a same mother. This is what we mean by “greater family” or “family at large”.

• The feminine world of “Old Europe”

This being said about the role of men, archeological digs have revealed that it was a “mother-goddess” whom the inhabitants of “Old Europe” venerated, i.e. a woman deity who identified herself also with water, the periodic return of seasons, or the new moon. Thus on some figurines found in the Danube plains of Eastern Europe, and dating as far back as three thousand years B. C. , one sees signs, the fonction of which was probably symbolic, that could be considered as the beginning of a form of writing; signs showing shapes of M, V, X, triangles and zigzags, which are like representations of water, double V-shape or other triangular forms representing a woman’s pubes and symbolizing the mother-goddess ; the sign X (i.e. two inverted triangles) was the dictinctive emblem of the goddess. These combination of recurring symbolic signs call to mind the syllabaries that have appeared in Crete more than a thousand years later.

• Megaliths

“Old Europe” had also known another civilization, vestiges of which are found all along the western coasts, from Spain to France, to Great Britain and Danemark: the megalithic civilization. It developed between the fourth and the third millenium B. C. , leaving (as you’ll see when watching the video on England) dolmens and menhirs, which have retained part of their mystery. It is thought that, similarly to the neolithic civilization of Central Europe, which was mostly an agrarian civilization, the megalithic civilization was sedentary as well, although nothing allows us to think that contacts ever took place between these two civilizations.

• The Last Great Migrations

If we consider now the linguistic situation of Europe such as it exists today, we can infer that it is the result of movements of populations that took place after the third millenium B. C. . These populations, who had come from the steppes of Central Europe, ended by imposing, with rare exceptions, their Indo-European tongues: the Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Romance languages issued from Latin), as well as Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages.

• Map 4: Linguistic Europe at Dawn of History allows us to imagine the situation before the last major migrations. Toward the end of the second millenium, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic Indo-European populations were in contact with populations of various origins, only a few of which are indicated on the map (Iberians in the Iberian peninsula or ancient Hispania, Aquitains in southwest of Gaul, Ligurians in what is today the Genoa region of northern Italy, Etruscan in what is now Tuscany, who spoke non-European languages, etc.). The Celts had not yet crossed the Rhine and the Germanic tribes were still in the northern part of western Europe. The Italic populations resided in Central Italy, whereas in Greece the Dorian people (- 1100) had replaced the Mycenaean civilization that had spread its influence to many parts of the Mediterranean region from -1400 to - 1150. Ar for the Slavic peoples, whose localisation is approximately in the region of what is today Ukraine, they did not begin their expansion before the first century of our christian era.

• Map 5: The Seven Branches of the Indo-European Family

In the Europe that spans, to borrow De Gaulle’s expression, from “the Atlantic to the Urals”, the European family is today represented by the following seven branches:

1. Celtic languages: Breton in France, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic,

Welsh, Manx, and Cornish.

2. Germanic languages: North Germanic branch: all the Scandinavian

languages (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), with

the exception of Finnish & Lapp and Icelandic;

West Germanic branch: Low German, High

German, Dutch, English, Frisian.

3. Baltic languages: Lithuanian, Latvian (Lettish)

4. Romance languages: West Romanic branch: Italian, Rhaeto- Romanic or Rhaeto-Romance (i.e. the dialects spoken in southern Switzerland, northen Italy and Tyrol), French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese;

East Romanic branch: Romanian.

5. Slavonic languages East Slavonic branch: Russian, Ukrainian,

Bulgarian;

West Slavonic branch: Polish, Sorb, Czech,

Slovak;

South Slavonic branch: Slovene, Croation,

Serbian, Macedonian.

6. Hellenic languages Greek and Hellenic dialects;

7. Albanian with its two dialects, Tosque and Guègue

N.B.: Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Basque are non Indo-European languages.

• Distribution of Today’s West European Languages

1. To the extreme west, the remnants of the Celtic branch already mentioned: (Celtic Europe 7th Century B. C. & Today); 2. To the north: the two Germanic branches (Scandinavian languages, English, Frisian (i.e. the language of the Frisian Islands which are divided into groups belonging to the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany), German, Dutch, and Letzeburgische; 3. To the south, the offshoots of the Italic branch grown out of Latin: Portuguese, Castilian, Galician, Catalan, French, (and dialects of oc and oïl), Franco-Provençal, Italian, Sardinian, etc.; 4. To the southeast, the Hellenic branch, with the language of Greece and theGreek islands.

• Official Languages of the European Union (15 countries, 11 official languages)

1. Greek

- official language of Greece (population 10 416 000)

- official language of Cyprus

2. Italian (Tuscan, i.e. any of the Italian dialects spoken in Tuscany, especially the dialect of Florence)

- official language of Italy (57 157 000)

3. French

- official language of France (57 747 000)

- official language of Belgium (with Dutch & German) (10 382 000)

- official language of Luxembourg (with Lëtzebuergsch) (401 000)

4. Spanish (Castilian)

- official language of Spain (39 568 000)

5. Portuguese

- official language of Portugal (9 830 000)

6. English

- official language of the U.K. of Great Britain (58 091 000)

- official language of the Republic of Ireland (w/ Irish Gaelic) (3 539 000)

7. German

- official language of Germany (81 278 000)

- official regional language in Belgium, Denmark, Italy (South Tyrol)

8. Danish

- official language of Denmark (5 173 000)

9. Dutch

- official language of the Netherlands (15 397 000)

- official language of Belgium (with French & German)

10. Finnish

- official language of Finland (5 083 000)

11. Swedish

- official language of Sweden (8 738 000)

I. THE ROLE OF ANCIENT GREEK

• Geographically speaking, Greece may appear marginal; yet, if one wants to talk about the languages of Europe, Greek ought to be placed at the very beginning, Greece being the place where Western civilization began. From philosophy to poetry and theater, from mythology to history and from architecture to sculpture, it remains the most obvious reference. We don’t need to remind ourselves that the Greek language has its place in the study of all the languages of Europe, so much more so that words such as biolology or democracy, allergy or hygiene, can be easily recognized under other European forms.

• Just in passing , but equally important, Greece, as the cradle of Western Civilization, has played an essential role in the refining and the diffusion of the alphabet, the name itself recalls its Greek origin: alpha-bêta. Our English alphabet is based on the the Latin alphabet, which Romans had inherited from the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant civilization had developed during the first millenium B. C. in the center of Italy, the region that is today Tuscany. The Etruscans themselves had borrowed this alphabet, while adopting it to their own language from a Greek colony that had settled in the bay the Naples. (It’ s no coincidence that the name of Naples, “nea polis” i.e. the new city, is of Greek origine).

The Greek alphabet had spread at the same time as was expanding the Greek civilization from eighth century B. C. . The Greeks themselves, however, had borrowed from the writing system used by the Phenicians, a semitic people, composed of merchants and sailors who had settled in a region corresponding to actual Lebanon, and had established trading posts all around the Mediterranean. (They’re the founders of the city of Marseille, the second and largest city of France and its principal seaport.

While taking as model the Greek alphabet, the Romans, for their part, added some modifications. In particular they had transcribed the letter gamma by a C and not by a G, - this because the Etruscans had used this sign already to note the equivalent of [k]. Therefore, the Romans needed to add the letter G, which was needed to express the sound [g]. They arbitrarily placed it in the first part of the alphabet, replacing Greek Z (dzêta), and they put at the end the consonants Y and Z, which are late additions, still borrowed from the Greek alphabet. We’ll notice the absence of J, U and W in the first Latin alphabet, which counted only 23 letters. In the French written form, for example, the distinctions between I and J on the one hand, and U and V on the other, date from the XVIth century, while the adjunction of W took place only in theXIXth.

• Prestige and Influence of the Greek Language

Greek enjoyed such a prestige in the Antiquity that any foreigner who spoke another language was treated as a “Barbarian”, because when you were listening, all you understood was an unintelligible “brbrbr” sound. Propagated by Latin writers and orators, it’s the whole Greek civilization that, at the time of the Roman Empire, had spread everywhere, with the Greek language used as the privileged model.

We may ask ourselves: Is it because the Romans and their successors did not want to be considered as Barbarians that they kept the habit of always drawing from the Greek language to enrich or renew their learned vocabulary? The hypothesis is perhaps simplistic, but it is true that it’s mostly in the most prestigious parts of the vocabulary that Greek or Greco-Latin forms have proliferated in contemporary European languages.

• Learning Language & Daily Tongue

In addition to many terms that have passed into our current vocabulary, such as allergy, electronic, philology, zoology, each one of us has heard, read or even used more rare or learned terms, such as ichthyology (i.e. zoology specializing in the study of fishes) or, to choose a Greco-Latin term, halitosis, a medical term joining Latin [halitus] and Greek [-osis], which means, stale or foul-smelling breath. If you study art history, you may know or want to know that the callipygian Venus is so named because she has (I’m quoting from the dictionary), “beautifully proportioned buttocks” [From Greek kallipugos: Calli + puge, buttocks].

You also speak Greek without knowing it when you buy carrots, dates or almonds, or when you ask for a tisane (true, a French word, from Greek ptisana, barley), of chamomile (from Greek khamaemelon, “earth apple”: khamaï, on the ground + melon, apple) if you happen to be in a clinic (French clinique, originally “bedridden person,” from Greek klinike, medical treatment at sickbed, from klinikos, “of a bed”, physician who visits bedridden persons, from kline, bed).

• Names of Places & Greek First Names

Another interesting example is that of Greek words that can be recognized in the names of cities around the Mediterranean basin. We’ve seen the example of Naples in southern Italy. We can add the name of Nice, located between Monaco and Antibes, Nice is a city named after the Goddess of Victory, (Thêa) Nikaia. Both Antibes and Monaco go back to their Greek roots: Antibes comes from Antipolis, i.e. the “opposite city”; Monaco is somewhat ambiguous in its etymology. True, there was at that location, in the VIIth century B. C., a temple dedicated to Heracles monoikos, i.e “Hercules the solitary”, but another etymology has Monaco go back to Ligurian monegu, i.e. “rock” and the adjective derived from Monaco is Monegasque, which, on the other hand may have its origin in Provençal Mounegasc, from Mounegue, Monaco.

• Here are the descriptions of six first Greek first names. Can you discover them?

1. It’s about a little girl who should be wisdom incarnated. Who is she?

2. This is a common male first name evoking the earth and based on the same root as geography or geology.

3. If philosophy is, according to its etymology, “s/he who loves wisdom”, what is the corresponding first name for “he who loves horses”?

4. This pretty first name for a woman evokes today a wild flower, but it was - and still is a pearl in Greek.

5. She is, according to its etymology, devoted to solitude and could be considered as the patron-saint of monks? What’s her name?

6. She is pure, as were the Cathars (from katharos, pure), and, according to French tradition, if at the age of 25 she’s not married, a diminutive is added to her name.

• Lexical richness of the Greek Language

In the course of its long history, Greek has accumulated masses of vocabulary, in which one is able to recognize successive chronological layers. There is, outside the important base of ancient Greek (pateras father, adelphos brother...), borrowings from Hebrew (sabbato Saturday), Persian (paradeisos paradise), Latin (karvouno carbon/coal, kastro fortress, skoupa broom...). It’s only later on that Greek borrowed from Balkanic languages, i.e. Slavic, Albanian, and especially Turkish: kafés coffee, mezés hors-d’oeuvre, minarés minaret, papoutsi shoe, tenekés tin, can, etc.

Borrowings from Italian pose some problems, for often a doubt remains on their veritable origin: for example, does kanali come from Italian canale or is it a Greek adaptation of French canal? The same quesion can be asked about words such as ntelikatos delicate, karafa carafe, propaganda, koultoura, serviro to serve, kopiaro to copy.

In addition, Italy is a country with numerous dialects ; for if some borrowings originate inTuscan (which became the language of Italy), such as kapélo hat, phréskos fresh, spággos string , others came from the Venitian or the Genoese dialect, for example vapori steam ship. One thing is certain: from the beginning of the XIXth century and during a large part of the XXth, French held the first place. Thus, in a book published in 1978, were found 1700 words of French origin. Since then, the borrowing situation has changed ; the majority of new words came from English, rekór record, tourismós tourism, trám tramway, vagoni wagon, kompiouter, etc...

Exhibiting some chauvinism and revealing my French sources, I want to say a bit more on French borrowings. In which domains are they found? In technical and scientific words, such as kalorifér central heating, phíltro filter, poúntra powder; in cooking, bien sûr, koniák, krokéta, menoú, omeléta, zampón, pourés ...; the world of fashion, magió [maillot], ntkolté, décolleté, low-cut, phoulár, soutién...; in the domain of cinema: ntokumantair documentary, operatér, zenerik générique = credits ; and also in some names for colors : gkrí, kaphé, mov, mpé blue, róz rose, etc..

In the vocabulary borrowed from French are found a large quantity of terms invented by French scientists, who drew from ancient Greek sources to create new terminology or “neologisms” (i.e. the “science of new words”), which have returned to Greece as new words. Here are some examples, in addition to the already mentioned neologism. Thus it is a French surgeon, Charles Emmanuel Sédillot (1804-1882), who first gave the French language and, later on, many other languages, a Greek word to designate a minute life form, especially one that causes disease, the word “microbe”, from bios life and mikros minute. We could add phovía phobia, thermómetro, ypertrophía, and even the word tiléphono.

• The “Garden” of Greek Roots

In most languages of Europe, are easily recognized Greek roots, that are basic elements to construct learned words. Here are a few:

ana- upward progression caco- bad micro- small

cata- downward pseud- false nano- extreme smallness

palino- backwards strepto- twisted brachy- short

makros- largeness dino- frightening

callo- beautiful terato- monstrous lepto- thin

logo- discourse -logy science -graphy writing

theo- god pan- all pan- all

thermo- hot hydro- water cryo- cold

helio- sun seleno- moon astero- star

cephalo- head sterno- chest -derm skin

chryso- gold oniro- dream -morph shape, form, structure

oro- mountain litho- stone xylo- wood

dendro- tree phyllo- leaf glotto- tongue

tachy- rapid dactylo- finger rhino- nose

thanato- dead hypno- sleep xeno- foreigner

• From Greek to English

To speak Greek, while making a speech in English, may not be such a challenge after all. Here is how Xenophon Zolotas spoke in 1959 in a closing speech at the International Monetary Congress for reconstruction and development. Here is an excerpt of his acrobatic exercise:

“It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists. Although they emphatically stigmatize numismatic plethora, they energize it through their tactics and practices.”

You ought to be able to understand every word; “idiosyncrasy”, i.e. temperamental peculiarity, comes from idio- peculiar to + syn- together +

krasis mixture. More difficult is the neologism “cryptoplethorist”. It can be

“decomposed” into crypto- hidden and plethora overabundance.

Can you create new words of your own? What would be a “bibiophagus”?

A “logophile”? A “logolater”? A “xenophone”?

• There is a major aspect of the history of the Greek language that hasn’t been dealt with: how do the Greeks reconcile a language with a prestigious past, named Katharevussa, the official form of Modern Greek, exhibiting many morphological and lexical characteristiccs restored from Classical Greek,

< katharos, pure) with the needs of a diversified and modern tongue, called Dhimotiki or Demotic i.e. the colloquial form of Modern Greek?

It’s a long story . . . in which people actually died for their native language. In 1901, for example, students demonstrated against a translation of the New Testament in Demotic and some were killed. The government attempted in 1911 to pacify quarrels by recognizing officially only the “purified” language, which, however, was really spoken by no one. To put an end to this contradiction, the govenment adopted in 1917 a decree introducing the teaching of Demotic in primary school, a decree that was annuled in 1920.

Then, there was a new reform in 1964-67. However, it’s only in 1976 that a new law has fixed a new norm. Here is just a quote from article 2, Law of April 30, 1976:

1. Commencing from school yeat 1976-1977 [...], the language, object of teaching, and the language of school books is the neo-hellenic.

2. By neo-hellenic is understood the Demotic language, the one developed as an instrument of panhellenic expression by the Greek people and the Nation’s recognized (dokimoi) writers, and constructed without regionalisms or particularities.

• Two words or just one?

Today the dichotomy between Demotic and Katharevussa seems anachronic. Although a difficulty remains. . . I know Classial Greek fairly well, and yet I would not know how to ask for a glass of water. The learned word is hydor but in popular usage it’s nero. Hence the choice of two words. Conversely, there is only one word for skin, derma.

Thus the Greeks have the choice between two words in a certain number of cases. Here are a few examples:

Learned Popular

odous “tooth” donti

lithos “stone” petra

agathos “good” kalos

leukos “white” aspros

khrimata “money” lephta

Whereas they have only one word for other parts of the vocabulary where

both terms (learned and popular) coincide:

polloi “many”

duo “two”

mikros “small”

anthropos “human being”

glossa “tongue”

When both terms are been retained, they are nor always used indifferently: for example, the same person, who goes to the bakery to buy psomi - popular word for bread -, will say artos - a word belonging to the learned vocabulary - to talk about “blessed bread” in a religious context. There are two words for

house, one’s own house is always spiti, and aspro spiti designates any “white house”, whereas the Washington White House is o Leukos Oikos.

• Ntior & Mak Ntonalnt

Did you recognize the words Dior and Mac Donald? Would you recognize mpira (beer) ? WYS-[is not]-WYG when you attempt to pronounce, for example, bêta, delta, gamma, which are not pronounced [b], [d], [g] in Greek ; bêta is a [v], delta, a [d] (like English th), and gamma, a [g] (i.e. a very very consonant articulated with the back of the tongue). Therefore, for foreign words, the Greeks have the recourse of using double written forms , which already existing in other Greek words effectively pronouced [b], [d], [g].

• Where is Greek spoken Today?

- In Greece: population 10 416 000

- Official language: Demotic (Dhimotiki), since 1976.

- Cyprus (population: 734 000), Southern Italy, Corsica (Cargèse), former USSR (Crimea and Ukrainian coast of the Azov sea), Albania (Southern), Egypt, Turkey (Istambul and Anatolia).

- Countries of recent emigration: U. S. , Australia, Brazil, Germany.

• This is the story of a Cypriot woman visiting Athens, who wants to buy a bed (which is said krevati in Greek and carcola in Cypriot). But she doesn’t want her originto be discovered, because Greeks often make fun of Cypriots, of their accent, their dialect. So, she tries to hellenize her dialectal word, carcola

- a practice known in Cyprus as hellinikourizo - , by asking the salesperson for

a cariola, a sking in fact for a prostitute. . .

III. THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

• Definition:

What do we mean by Celt or Kelt? 1. One of the ancient people of western and central Europe, including the Britons and the Gauls. 2. A speaker or a descendant of speakers of a Celtic language. [French Celte, singular of Celtes, from Latin Celtae, from Greek Keltoi].

A definition: A sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages, subdivided into the Brythonic branch, consisting of Cornish, Welsh, and Breton, and the Goidelic branch, consisting of Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.

• The Shrinking Map of the Celtic Languages

If one compares the Celtic languages Languages (Breton, Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic) to their Latin or Germanic cousins, they appear as

real poor parents, pushed back to the extrene corners of the coasts of Western Europe, cf. map 5 : Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany,

(a region and former province of France on a peninsula extending into the Atlantic between the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay) and finally Galicia (ancient Gallaecia, a region and ancient kingdom of northwestern Spain).

Therefore, it’s hard to imagine that, until the middle of the third century B. C. , the Celts occupied the two thirds of the continent and that for two centuries they were the largest people of Europe. Map 6 where we read the names Galates, i.e. Galatia, an ancient country forming part of north-central Asia Minor. Chief city, Ankara, capitol of Turkey; Hallstatt in Austria; La Tène in Switzerland; Bretons (which, in English is read Briton(s), i.e. one of the Celtic people who inhabited ancient Britain before the Roman invasion; Gaulois, i.e. the Gauls, whose Celtic language was named Gaulish, being the

language of ancient Gaul, i.e. the name given in antiquity to the region in Europe south and west of the Rhine, west of the Alps, and north of the Pyrenees, comprising approximately the territory of modern France and Belgium); and finally the Celtibères, i.e. the Celts who had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, i.e. the region of south-western Europe separated from France by the Pyrenees and consisting of Spain and Portugal.

The cradle of Celt civilization was located in Central Europe, in a region corresponding to actual Bohemia [a region in today’s Czech Republic], (from Latin Boihaemum, i.e. “home of the Boii”: Celtic Boii (fighters), name of the Celtic people who inhabited this region] and Bavaria, [the largest state of Germany, in the southern part of the country ; capital, Munich]. We know little on how far and how wide they had expanded until the middle of the first millenium B. C. , i.e. at the period of the “iron age” (Hallstatt), but we do know that toward the end of the fifth century B. C. , at the time of the second “iron age” period, also called La Tène period, which goes from the fifth century B. C. until the Roman conquest, the Celts have moved toward the West and the North Sea.

In the beginning of the fourth century, they entered Italy and, after progressing in Central Europe along the Danube, it is then, around 300 B. C.

that they reached their greatest expansion. They pushed as far as Asia Minor, hence the name Galatia in central Turkey or Galata, the chief commercial district of Istanbul. Let us think also of Saint Paul’s epistle to the Galatians.

(Thinking of Galatians and people of same Celtic origin: just a personal comment. I remember being in a remote village of central Turkey, visiting the famous rock churches with their magnificent “rupestrian frescoes ” and being struck by my physical resemblance to some of the men: same black hair, straight nose, slight built. . . Distant cousins of mine, probably! The nearest town where I was born, named Bressuire, comes from Bricciodurum, from Celtic -durum, meaning fortress, village, and the capital of the département of Deux-Sèvres in Western France, Niort on the river Sèvre, means Niovoritum, from Latin Novus + Celtic ritum, ford.)

• The Celtic World

The above personal note is a way of introducing you to the “Celtic world”.

The Celts, besides the many archeological sites (Austria, Switzerland, France), have left thousands of names of places, a sign of their long presence in Europe. The original Celtic names are difficult to recognize under their modern forms, but indications on the meaning of those that we find with the most frequency allow us to dicipher the main lines of their universe. It’s a world where dominated names of defensive or sacred places and where nature had an important place.

For example, if one looks at the distribution of geographical names with a Celtic origin on a map of Europe, one notices that the largest number of the names of rivers with a Celtic names is found today in the South of Germany and Switzerland. Since names of rivers are generally the oldest ones to be attested, thus the hypothesis can be confirmed that these parts of Europe were the habitat of the Celts prior to their migration to Gaul where, on the contrary, the names of rivers are pre-Celtic in their majority. It’s also mostly in Gaul that are found names in -magos, which no longer designate defensive

places, but have the sense of markets, or places of exchange; such is the case of Argentomagus, an important Gallo-Roman site where recent digs (1986) have shown that, until the end of the third century, when it was destroyed by fire, it must have been an important center of exchanges with the Rhône basin : the number of Gallo-Roman coins coming from this region is the proof of it.

• Belfast, Lyon, Vienna, Milan, Cambridge, York: All Celtic Names

Thanks to Latin authors, we know, for example, that the ancient form for the city of Lyon was Lugdunum, “the fortress of the god Lug”; and that there are 26 other Lugdunum in Europe. The same dunum (“fortress”) is found in

Down (Ireland), Leyde (Netherlands), or Liegnitz (Poland).

We also know that Milan is the most ancient Mediolanum that is known. The name means in the middle of a “lanum” i.e. “plain”, then “sacred clearing”. We know also that there are 54 other toponyms going back to the same Mediolanum; a frequent name in France: Meulan, Meillant; but also found in England, Germany and as far as Serbia.

The tree that we name in English yew was named in Celt “eburo”, a sacred tree for the Celts. The word has taken different forms according to the diverse local pronunciations and the suffixes added to it: thus Eburacum became York in England, Evreux and Embrun in France, Evora in Portugal, and Yverdon in Switzerland.

Here are some Celtic prefixes or suffixes and names of Celtic places on a European map (before being imported on this side of the Atlantic. . . Celtic or not. . . Such as Paris, Maine. Incidentally, the word Paris comes from Gallo-Roman (Lutetia) Parisiorum, ( “swamps) of the Parisii”, the Gaulish tribe whose capital was on the Ile de la Cité, then marshy. Did you know also that Chester, in the heart of New Hampshire comes from Latin “castra”, meaning “fortified place”?

- beal “mouth of a river” Belfast

-bona “foundation, village” Bonn (Germany), Bologna (Italy)

briga “hight, fortress” Coimbra (Portugal), Bregenz (Austria)

briva “bridge” Brive (France)

cambo “curve of a river” Cambridge

cumba “valley” Come (Italy)

-late “flat land, marsh” Arles (France)

-lindo “water, pond” Dublin

- vindo “white” Vienna (Austria)

• Recreation:

I. Among these six names of places, only one is not of Celtic origin. Which one?

1. Belfast 4. Coimbra

2. Brive 5. Verona

3. Chester 6. Yverdon

II. Among these six names of places, only one is of Celtic origin. Which one?

1. Tarascon 4. Naples

2. Gibraltar 5. Paris

3. Munich 6. Rugby

• Very Little Writing

If linguists and historians don’t know much about the Celts, it’s because they did not trust written texts and wrote only what was unimportant! This is the reason why their religion and all the knowledge of their priests, the druids, the long epic poems of the bards, and the stories narrating the achievements of their ancestors were transmitted orally. Julius Caesar tells us that some future druids spent as much as twenty years in school to learn by heart thousands of sacred formula, because a religious taboo forbade them to put these formula on “paper” or one “stone”...

There are nevertheless written traces of the ancient Celts: votive inscriptions, mottos on coins, etc. But, whether they were found in the British Isles or in Gaul, all these texts are very brief. They are written most often with the Latin, sometimes Greek, or Etruscan alphabet, depending on the region where they were written. More unusual, however, are a couple of hundred inscriptions engraved in a completely original writing with a mysterious name: the ogham or ogam alphabet, which the dictionary defines as an alphabet used for writing Irish from the fourth or fifth century A. D. to the early seventh century. Irish ogham, From Old Irish ogom, said to be after its mythical inventor Ogma.

All ogham inscriptions have been found in the British Isles; the most interesting ones being those that have been discovered in Wales, because

of the Latin translation that permitted to decipher what the texts meant. They’re all funeral inscriptions on wood or stone, of magical character, the interpretation of which was reserved to the priests, the druids.

Despite their brevity - usually a proper noun followed by inigena “daughter of”, or more often maqqi or maqi “son of” - , the deciphering of these incriptions is instructive, as it enables us to link this information to family names beginning so often in Irlande by “Mc” and Scotland by “Mac”, which, as states the dictionary, “indicates son of”. Used in surnames [Irish and Gaelic Mac-, from common Celtic makkos (unattested).

This alphabet was abandonned in the VIIth century, and it’s only with the Latin alphabet that the first Celtic texts were written.

• Precision of Vocabulary: Gaelic, Gallic/Gaulish, Welsh

First, let us not confuse Gallic and Gaulish. Gallic is said of or pertaining to ancient Gaul or to modern France. (Your professor speaks with a definite Gallic accent!). Gallia is the Latin name for Gaul. The Greeks, an ancient people, Call France Gallika. A characteristic French trait is named gallicism. Gaulish, on the other hand, is the Celtic language of ancient Gaul.

A Gael is a Gaelic-speaking Celt of Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man. Gaelic then is one of the languages of the Gaels, this is why we say Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic. The etymology of the little word gael is not simple. The word comes from Scottish Gaelic Gaidheal, probably from Old Irish goidel, a Celt, from Old Welsh Gwyddel, Irishman, probably gwydd, wild.

Welsh is said “of or pertaining to Wales, its people, its language, or its culture. Wales is from welisc, the Saxon word for foreigner; the same way the Greeks call people beyond their borders Barbaroi, because they didn’t understand their language; the same way the Russians call the Germans niemets, meaning someone whose speech is unintelligible.

Another important division: we use different terms when speaking about

ancient and modern Celtic languages. Ancient Celtic is subdivided into

- Goid(h)elic, also Gadhelic, Gaedhelic, which corresponds to the dialects of Ireland and Scotland,

- Celtiberian (which has not survived),

- Brythonic (to which belong Gaulish).

When we talk about contemporary Celtic languages, we divide then into

- continental Celtic or Breton (France) (you’ll hear some sounds of it when watching the video on “La Belle France”)

- Welsh,

- Cornish (i.e. Cornwall),

- Scottish Gaelic

- Irish Gaelic, often referred simply as Irish or Gaelic

• Ireland and its languages (Map 7)

Population: 3 790 000 inhabitants

Official languages: Irish and English

Article 8 of the Constitution: “The Irish language as the national language is the first official language.” Officially, the seven counties to the northwest, west and southwest of Ireland where the language is spoken daily are called

Gaeltacht.

Among the Celt languages still “alive”, Irish Gaelic is the only one to enjoy today a privileged status. This “advantage” seems quite derisory when you see English, official second language, spoken everywhere. In fact, Gaelic Irish appears more a second language, studied in school, than an official

first language.

England annexed Ireland at the end of the XIIth century; then Henry II Plantagenêt organized the invasion of the island a century after the Norman conquest of England, thus placing Ireland under Anglo-Norman administration. But, during the following three centuries, and despite the obligation that was required of the Irish people to adopt English under the threat of losing their property, it’s the Gaelic language that prospered, pushing away the language of the conqueror toward the eastern extremity of the coast. English was still so little kown in the XVIth century that, when Henry VIII was proclaimed King of Ireland in 1541, his speech had to be translated into Irish so he could be understood.

The tendency however was soon reversed, this time in favor of English, slowly at first. Thus, in 1600, English was still spoken by a small minority of Irish. It took two centuries for English to become the daily language of half the population.

With the arrival, during the first half of the XIXth centuy, of English landlords taking over the lands of the old Irish aristocracy, the Irish language

was progressively evicted from all legal or administrative writings. First in the east and the northeast, all those who succeed in social life progressively abandoned the use of their language, which remained the daily tongue of the peasants, the poor and the illiterates. This situation remained that of Ireland until the middle of the XIXth century.

Another event had also dramatic consequences for the Irish language: the great famine of 1845, during which it is estimated that a million and a half of people perished. Another million, among the poorest of the survivors - and those who had continued to speak Irish - found hope only through emigration to the United States.

Once in the States, they had abandoned their language at the end of one generation. However, they had added a new word to the English language:

phoney, a word that is the adaptation of Irish fáinne (rings), i.e. the only

(fake) jewelry the poor Irish could afford.

As I said earlier, the only people for whom Irish Gaelic is of daily use are scattered, according to official documents, in the small villages of the west and southwest of the country, located in seven districts officially designated as comprising the Gaeltacht, i.e. the “country of the Gaels”, where, out of a population of 20 000 inhabitants, 17 0000 are Irish speaking but all bilingual.

The question we may ask ourselves is whether, thanks to the means

put in place by the Irish goverment, the first official language of the Republic of Ireland will someday cease to be anything more than a symbolic institution? Or is the government, in fact, quite satisfied with English as the second but all powerful business language of Ireland? As you probably know, the Republic of Ireland has been very successful in attracting many multinational compagnies, notably in electronics, computers, software, financial services and pharmaceuticals. The reasons? The strong competitive position of its economy over the past five years, the high level of qualifications and skills of the local work force - not to mention Europe’s youngest population. “We have had, for example, more than a decade of stable national wage agreements. We also offer low-cost tele-service rates for international business and, despite our peripherical location in Europe, excellent logistics. The UK can be supplied overnight, and 80 per cent of the European Union’s population is accessible inside 48 hours.”

(Source: The European, 13-20 July, 1997)

IV. LATIN

• Rome’s expansion : a few dates

- 753 Fundation of Rome

- 616 -509 Etruscan kings; Tarquin, last king of Rome (534 - 510 B.C.)

- 509 Expulsion of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. Birth of the Republic

- 390 The Gauls invade and burn Rome, but are pushed back

- 312 Construction of the first via romana (roman “highway”), the

via Appia, linking Rome and Capua

- 241 - 238 Conquests of Sicily, than of Sardinia and Corsica, which became

Roman provinces

- 197 Conquest of Spain

- 191 Conquest of Cisalpine Gaul, i.e. the part of ancient Gaul south of

the Alps of northern Italy

- 167 Conquest of Illyria, on the Adriatic sea

- 148 - 146 Conquest of Macedonia and Greece

-146 African expeditions (Tunisia)

- 120 Conquest of Transalpine Gaul, i.e. the section of Gaul that lay

northwest of the Alps (Provincia Narbonensis)

- 58 - 50 Conquest of northern Gaul

- 15 Conquest of Rhetia (Tyrol, Lombardia: Pô valley)

+ 43 + 49 First expedition in England

+ 106 + 124 Conquest of Dacia (Romania)

• The Languages of the Conquered Peoples

At its apex (see Map 8, the Roman World at is Apex) i.e. second century B.C., the Roman Empire spreads from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea

(Mare Caspium). Latin then is the language that rules this romanized world.

Yet, in the course of its expansion, Rome never imposed its language nor took actions against the tongues of conquered peoples. In the Iberian peninsula, Iberian was probably spoken until the end of the first century; Gaulish, in the Pô valley, until the third; Punic, in North Africa, until Saint Augustin (IVth - Vth century A. D.). Furthermore, several elements of the latin vocabulary betray their regional origins. Words, such as bos, bovis (ox),

asinus (ass), multa (fine), caseus (cheese) were borrowed from other Italic languages. The same is true of inferior (inferior), casa (hut), anser (goose), lupus (wolf), fenum (hay), etc. ; all words that denote their rural origins.

• What Latin owes the Etruscan Language

Not only he brilliant Etruscan civilization gave the Romans the Greek alphabet, but the Etruscan language has also left its traces in the Latin language. The suffix -na, for example, is of Etruscan origin in such words as

catena (chain), lanterna (lantern), persona (theater mask then person). Linguists also think that words such as histrio (comedian, actor), servus (slave), or calceus (shoe) were borrowed from Etruscan. Its influence is also felt on proper names. The city of Ravenna bears an Etruscan name, and so is Maecenas (a patron, especially one generous to artists). The name comes from Gaius Maecenas, Roman statesman of the first century B. C. , patron of Horace and Virgil, descending from an Etruscan noble family.

• Latin & Gaulish

The survival of Gaulish terms, for instance, is singularly noticeable in the domain of transportation. It must be kept in mind that the Romans were essentially at their origins a sedentary people, who had “not invented the wheel”; this as a light way of saying that the Gauls were the ones who invented large carriages with four wheels to carry their belongings and block their camps at night. Thus, the word carrus (four-wheel carriage) is the ancestor of the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese carro and French char). This in opposition with the ancient Latin term currus, which designated the ancient two-wheel war chariot.

Some borrowings from Gaulish concern country or peasant life: alauda

(lark), cumba (valley), cambiare (to exchange), saga (coat made of coarse wool). In Portuguese today, saia means skirt.

Other Gaulish borrowings, still found in Romance languages, have not left traces in written Latin, as if the vocabulary had directly passed from Gaulish to other languages of the Romania without any transit stage in Latin.

This is one of the many signs indicating that the the Latin we have in Latin literature is not exactly the type of Latin that gave birth to Romance languages, for . . .

• . . . There was Latin and Latin

. . . the reality is that next to Classical Latin i.e. the Latin written by Virgil, Horace or Cicero, existed another form of Latin, a common language, that of everyday communication, which never enjoyed the honors of literature, for the simple reason that it had no prestige. It is precisely this other type of Latin, the so-called vulgar Latin (from vulgaris, from vulgus, the common people), that will be at the basis for the development of Romance languages.

• Classical Latin, Unified Latin

One of the pecularities of Classical Latin is that, for several centuries, it stayed perfectly stable and unified: the language of first writings (third century

B. C.) differs little from the Latin of the classical period (first century B. C.) and even from the end of the Roman Empire (476 A.D.).

Stated briefly, from a peasant tongue at its beginnings, Latin had acquired at the time of its expansion the rigor of a “lawyers’ language”, which had to express without ambiguity law, politics and public organization on a written form identical in all provinces of the Romania. Incidentaly, it is significant that the first written Latin texts are legal or juridical in nature.

• Rusticitas vs. Urbanitas

In the times of Caesar and Cicero, there is no doubt that, in opposition to

rusticitas or “country usage”, existed a sort of purism caracterized by urbanitas, i.e. “city usage”, that is to say the city of Rome. Strict rules had fixed this “urbane” tongue, for example: no lazy drop of /h/ in homo, hora; or always pronounce the final /s/, or do not use diminutives, etc.

According to this urbanitas, one had to avoid as well the use of Greek words. Cicero used them only in his letters, avoiding them in his speeches, while creating abstract neologisms, such as providentia, qualitas or

medietas (mid-stage, which gave medieval).

• Latin and the Vulgate

Thanks to Roman administration, law, literature and schools, Latin became the common language of peoples of diverse origins. As early as the first centuries of our era, it enjoyed a new expansion occasioned by the diffusion of christianism. As the official language of the Roman Church, it served as a focus point and the privileged venue for the transmission of the “Good news” of the Gospel. (from Late Latin evangelium, from Greek eu - angelion, good news, from euangelos, bringing good news : eu- , good + angelos, messenger). Important also in this respect was the Latin translation of the Bible at the end of the 4th century by Saint Jerome, kown as the Vulgate.

• Written Language & Lexicon

Whereas the written langage spread in a unified Classical Latin, spoken Latin continued its own development, differenciating itself in a multiplicity of languages, which have retained only part of Classical Latin. Here are some

examples:

Classical Latin often had two forms to express the same notion. In the Romances languages, one of them has disappeared and has been replaced by

a more colloquial form, as for example the verb loqui (to talk), which did not have any derivation (except words such as loquace, loquacious) in Romance languages, but was replaced by the verb parabolare; hence parler in French and parlare in Italian, or fabulare, hence falar in Portuguese and hablar in Spanish.

Of the two forms for mouth, os and bucca, both attested in Classical Latin, it’s the second that must have been the most frequent in spoken usages; the same is true of caballus, preferred to equus for horse.

To designate a house, the Romans had at least four words:

- domus (house), with all that what attached to it, objects as well as people;

- aedes, referring only to the building;

- villa (“farm”, country place);

- casa (hut, cabin).

It’s the most humble term, casa, that has best survived in Romance languages: casa in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, chez (at the house of).

• Spoken Language and Grammar

The specificity of languages descending from Vulgar Latin is the numerous expressive forms, the abundance of diminutives, compounded forms full of imagery, analytical forms that are more readily understood, and reinforced foms.

The diminutive forms especially developed in a spectacular fashion: Thus, it’s the word auricula (“little ear”) and not auris that we find in Italian

orecchia or French oreille; genuculus and not genus (knee), in Italian ginocchio and French genou; testiculus (“little witness”) for male testes .

The verb edere or esse (to eat) from Classical Latin was replaced by a compound form, comedere (to eat together, -- it’s so true that the essence of a meal is to be partaken!), a form that we find in Spanish and Portuguese comer. Italian (mangiare) and French (manger) find their origins in the familiar manducare (to chew).

The synthetic forms of Latin comparatives in -ior, doctus (learned) and doctior (more learned), fortis (courageous) and fortior (more courageous) progressively disappeared to leave the place to analytical forms, composed of

magis, more, or plus (plus), which respectively became más or mais in the Iberian Peninsula, plus in Gaul and più in Italian.

Finally, in the case of adverbs, reinforced forms with combination of prepositions became multiplied: in sumul > together , ab ante > French avant

(before), de ex > French dès, as soon as, etc.

These few examples demonstrate the distance that separated Classical latin from Vulgar or common Latin. It helps also to understand to what extent the knowledge of a Romance language avers itself to be insufficient to translate

a text from Classical Latin.

(Note. Mutatis mutandis, comparing Classical Arabic and its modern spoken forms, this helps to understand why a Tunisian cannot communicate with a Moroccan in their respective native tongues.)

• The Caprices of Doublets (Vulgar Latin & Classical Latin)

Although Vulgar Latin is at the root of all Romances languages, this does not mean the disappearance of Classical Latin. In fact, very early, this Classical Latin was the source from which Romance languages drew their learned forms. Thus, a quantity of Latin words have taken two directions to become French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish: the popular route, which led to the spoken language, and the learned route through direct borrowing from Classical Latin. (We’ll see concrete examples of this when we look at French).

There are therefore much Latin in French (and consequently in English) as well as in other Romance language. This curious survival of a “dead” language is explained by the fact that from the time of the fall of the Roman empire until the VIIIth century, Classical Latin was like dormant in the many monasteries of the ancient Romania (Latin-speaking world of the Roman empire). The Carolingian renaissance - Let’s mention in passim the role of Alcuin (735 - 804), the English scholar and theologian, who was adviser to Charlemagne - gave a new impetus and an accrued importance to Classical Latin. Thus Latin took in Europe the role of a model language along with Greek, the classical language par excellence. (To give a personal example, I probably wouldn’t have pursued a Ph.D. in Romance philology, if I hadn’t spent six years of secundary school studying Classical Greek and Latin).

Latin became with Greek the symbole of “culture” and survived as the privileged written language until the end of the XIXth century.

• When Latin was the Written Language of Choice

The above was true not only in the countries that Rome had occupied, but also in Germanic and Slavic countries. As an example, here are some authors who have written at least a part of their works in Latin:

- Saint Augustin (354-430), from North Africa ; the most known Father of the Church;

- Roger Bacon (1214-1294), English scholar and philosopher; one of the precursor of the experimental method;

- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Tuscan writer and poet. He chose to write in Latin his De vulgari Eloquentia, in which he was the first to recognize historical affinities between the romance languages ;

- Erasmus (1467-1536), the great Dutch humanist who published his works in Latin under the name of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus;

- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-15430, the Polish astronomer who enunciated the principle of heliocentric planetary motion and was at the origin of the scientific revolution of the XVIIth century;

- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), Spanish soldier and ecclesiastic ; founder of the Society of Jesus (1534).

- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, often considered, thanks to his Novum Organum, as the real precursor of modern science ;

- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German astronomer, one of the inventors of modern astronomy ;

- René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician. He wrote his first works in Latin. His Discours de la méthode was first published in French in Leyde in 1637, but as early as 1644, the French version was followed by a Latin translation.

- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch philosopher, whose Latin first name was

Benedictus;

- Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish scientist and theologian ; followers founded religion in his name (Swedenborgianism, a.k.a Church of the New Jerusalem);

- Carl Von Linné (1707-1778), Swedish botanist and originator of system of taxonomic classification. (Taxonomy is defined as the science, laws, or principles of classification, from French taxonomie: taxo- [<taxis , arrangement, order] + - nomy: [<nomos, law], which indicates the systematization of knowledge about, or laws governing, a specific field).

To these authors could be added all the Catholic popes who wrote their Encyclicals in Latin, i.e. the papal letters on a specific subject addressed to the ordinaries of the Church or to the hierarchy of a particular country.

• Romance Languages Today in Europe (Map 9)

On the map is represented the present extension of Romance languages within the ancient Roman Empire. When you compare this map with

The Roman World at its Apex, you’ll notice the passage to modern appellations: from Oceanus to Atlantic Ocean, Mare Internum to Mediterranean Sea, from Pontus Euxinus to Black Sea, and Mare Caspium to Caspian Sea (the largest inland body of water in the world).

• Romanian / Rumanian / Roumanian : a Romance language in exile

Just a word on this ex-communist country, which is aiming at becoming part of the new NATO alliance and, some day (2004?) at being among the new countries composing an enlarged European Union.

Occupied by the Emperor Trajan in 106 A. D. , the former Dacia province was Roman for only 115 years. But, despite the Slavic invasions of the VIth and VIIth century, the structure of the Romanian language has remained Latin, while acquiring Slavic traits. Thus Romanian was first written in Cyrillic, but the Roman alphabet was adopted in 1868. However, the Turkish, Hungarian and Greek elements of the language, and especially its French imports, make Romanian a language with a composite and colored vocabulary.

V. AROUND ITALIAN

ITALY

Population: 57 157 000

Official Language: Italian (literary Tuscan)

Official Regional Languages: Sardinian, German (South Tyrol), 57 French (Val d’Aoste)

• Before Italian

If the history of the populations in contact with the language of Rome allows us to understand how Vulgar Latin was able to give birth to many

other languages, among which Italian, it’s almost impossible to precise when it took place. What is probable, is that after the fall of the Roman Empire, at the end of the Vth century, spoken Latin was no longer real Latin. However, it took some three hundred years to find a formal ackowledgmentof the situation in the various former provinces of the Romania. Not surprinsingly, the first example was offered by the Church. Thus, in France, in 813, the Concile of Tours recommends that priests preach their homilies in rusticam romanam linguam, i.e. in the folks’ vernacular, a sign that the faithful didn’t understand Latin any more and already spoke a much altered vernacular tongue.

• Little Pieces of Italy

Closely entangled in the struggles between Empire and Papacy, the country reached is political unity only in 1861, and its population, during the Middle Ages, found itself divided up between the Kingdom of Sicily in the south, the States of the Church in the center, and the more and more powerful cities of the north (Florence, Genoa, Milan, Venice.) Thus distributed in small rival States, the population was speaking a diversity of dialects while, at the same time, suffering from successive invasions: Germanic, Byzantine, Arabic, Frank . . .

• Germanic Influences

The Latin spoken in Italy, as early as the first centuries of the Christian era, was under various Germanic influences: first the influence of the Goths, especially the Ostrogoths at the end of the Vth century, then that of Longobards - the most important one - at the end of the VIth, and, at the end of the VIIth, the influence of the Franks, a population already much romanized because of their settlement in Gaul for three centuries.

Among German borrowings, we find names of colors in particular: bianco

(white), biondo (blond), falbo (fauve, dark yellow), bruno (brown), grigio (grey). We find most of them in French and the other Romance languages.

The same constatation can be made for verbs such as: guardare (to watch, to guard - garder), guarire (to heal, to defend - guérir), guarnire (to garnish - garnir).

The Germanic word guerra (fighting) replaced Latin bellum, probably because hostilities had taken a new form: from the battle in ranks of the Romans to the unruly fighting of the Germans. In addition a homonymic conflict between the adjective bellus (beautiful) and bellum (war) may have contributed in favor of guerra.

Among the Germanic peoples, the Longobards, (i.e. the “long bearded”),

later named Lombards, are those who have left the strongest imprint in the Italian vocabulary. The Lombards moved in and settled from 568 in northern Italy and extend as far as south of Rome, thus establishing a vast kingdom that lasted two centuries and comprising today’s regions of Ombrie,

Tuscany, Pouilles and Campanie.

Thus it’s not surprising to find today many traces of their language in everyday Italian; words such as baruffa (quarel), ricco (rich < a Germanic adjective meaning “powerful”), scherzo (joke), stracco (tired), zazzera (schock of hair < a Germanic word designating “a lock hair”).

In 774 the Franks put an end to the kingdom of the Lombards, and so it was the language of the newly arrived conquerors that entered in contact with the Romance languages of Italy. As the Franks were already much romanized, arriving in Italy at the time of the Carolingians, it’s often difficult to indicate with precision if a word has a Frank or a French origin, i.e. much more recent one. For example, the word truppa (troop) and the adverb troppo (too much / too many) have the same etymology: back-formation from troupeau, herd, from Medieval Latin troppus < a Germaic word meaning “pile”. Both truppa and troppo were introduced in Italian via French, but, similarly in Old French, troppo meant originally “many” and not, as in modern trop “too many”.

• Byzantine Influence

From the middle of the VIth century, the Ostrogoths, who occupied the south of Italy, had been defeated by the troops of the Eastern Roman Empire,

and the Byzantine influence (i.e. for the language, the Greek influence) was

going to be felt for several centuries. As a witness of this Greek influence are a quantity of words still in use today or words that have evolved in form and

sense. Here are a few:

duca “chief”, a Greek form of dux

gondola probably derived from Greek kondy, “vase”

metro “measure”, from Greek metron “measure” > meter

scala “port of call / stop over”. The word scala “ladder” has a Latin

origin, but the new sense of “place of landing” came from

Constantinople

• Arabic Influence

If Arabic much enriched the languages of Italy, it’s not only because of the Arab domination in Sicily that lasted for two and a half centuries (827-1091), but mostly because of their superiority at the time in some scientific domains such as astronomy, mathematics and medicine.

Here are some easily recognized in English

azimut alcali nucca nape of neck

nadir alcool talco talcum

zenit sciroppo sirup

algoritmo elisir elixir

Of a more common use, many terms related to commerce and food were also very early borrowed from Arabic:

carciofo artichoke zucchero sugar

spinaci spinash magazzino storage place

melanzana eggplant tariffa tariff

These borrowings often took roundabout ways before settling in Italian.

For example, the term designating arsenal (naval dockyard) took different foms according to the various dialects, but it’s the Venitian form arzanà that took over (and became arsenale in literary Italian), before spreading to other European languages. The port of Genoa was the center of irradiation for the word cotone, which also became European. Another source tells me that the word for cotton originates in Middle English cotoun, from Old French, from Arabic (Spanish dialectal) qoton, variant of Arabic qutn. Whether through Genoa or Spain, the Arabic origin remains. No doubt, for example, that words such as algebra, alambico and albicocca (apricot) first passed through Spanish

before becoming generalized in other languages: the article al is a remnant of the Spanish influence. (We’ll see more of this in the chapter “Around Spanish”).

On the other hand, the Italian word zero is a creation of an Italian scholar named Leonardo Fibonacci (1175-1240), who introduced Arabic numeration in Europe. From the Arabic word sifr, which was an adjective meaning “empty” (and gave also the word cifra “cipher”), he latinized it into zefirum,

which became zefiro, then zefro, and finally zero. It’s from the Italian that the French borrowed their zéro, borrowed in turn by English . . .

Here is a last and interesting example: the word “assassin”. By becoming Italian, assassino, has changed meaning, from “hashish addict” to “voluntary criminal”. Originally an Assassin (with “A”) was a member of a secret order of Moslem fanatics who terrorized and killed Christian crusaders. The word, in English, comes from French, which borrowed it from Italian, where it has retained its modern sense since the XIIIth century. The word comes from hasshashin, plural of hashshash, from hashish.

• Neighborly Sisters

From the XIth century onward started a reciprocal processus of exchanges with neigbors across the Alps, literary exchanges that were to last all along the centuries. First, ought to be mentioned the many troubadours from southern France, who wrote and sang in langue d’oc, and who, expelled by the crusade against the heretics Albigenses, found refuge in the courts of the Italian States. In the south of the country, which, in the XIth and XIIth century, had been conquered by the Normans, who had implanted a Christian kingdom and expelled the Arabs, the knowledge of French had become indispensable at the court. Brunetto Latini (1220-1295), Dante’s master, chose French to compile his Livres dou Tresor, which is a kind of encyclopedia on the knowledge of the times, and it’s in French as well that in 1298 Marco Polo, from the bottom of his jail, dictated the story of his voyages to the Far East.

• A Brilliant Sicilian Poetry & Under the Sign of Literature

At about the same time, the prestigious court of Frederick II (1194-1250) [Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily] saw the beginning of a genuine and indigenous poetry. Ahead of the rest of the country, Sicily opened the way to Italian literature and influenced other poets and writers in other parts of Italy, for instance in Bologna and the large cities of Tuscany. It gave rise to a novel art of writing all in softness, named the dolce stil nuovo, a new style created by a group of cultivated men, among them was Dante.

It is important to emphasize that, contrary to the history of the French language linked to the political history of the country or that of the Spanish language, which developed under the impetus of the religious life of its population, it is through literature that we can cast a light on the history of the Italian language.

A few well-known names from Italian literature will serve as guides in helping us understand the history of the language. First, let’s list the names of the three great Florentines of the Trecento, i.e. the XIVth century: Dante (1265-1321) for his Divine Comedy, Petrarch (1304-1374) for his sonnets, and Boccacio (1313-1375) for his tales. Other great writers later on have illustrated the Italian language based on the Tuscany dialect in great works, but it’s perhaps the novelist Manzoni (1785-1873) who, in the XIXth century, gave a new impetus to a written language less stereotyped because the language of his novels was based on its actual usage. For the the XXth century, we could choose Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). He was the first one, some forty years ago, thanks to his keen sense of the linguistic situation of Italy, to declare that the future of Italian was to be found in the usages of the industrial triangle of northern Italy. And when one hears talks of separatism from the prosperous

north blaming the economic ills of Italy on the “farniente” of the south, it seems that Pasolini is on target. . .

N. B. : A note on the division North/South. Researching for this course and focusing on the countries of the European Union, I’ve been struck by the number of remarks I’ve read or heard concerning the dichotomy between

northen (Scandinavian and Anglo-saxon) and Mediterranean countries. People, let’s say in Luxembourg, do not conduct business the way it would be done in southern Italy or Greece. Grosso modo, we find in the E. U. the same stereotype that we maintain between North and South America.

• A Few Dates and Indicators in the History of Italian

Literature Academy Political Life Languages

XIVth c. XIVth > XIXth c. XIVth > XXth c.

Dante Italy divided Each region

Petrarch into multiple maintains its

Boccacio rival States dialect but Tuscan

becomes the written Italian

XVIth c. XVIth c. > XIXth c.

Accademia Discussions on the

della Crusca “questione della

lingua”

XIXth c. XIXth c.

Manzoni rewrites his novel Italian unity

(1861)

XXth c.

Spoken Italian

begins to be

generalized

XXth c. (2nd half) XXth c. (2nd half) XXth c. (2nd half)

Pasolini was right Growing Will linguistic

importance of usages from the

industrial triangle North oust the

Milan-Turin-Genoa official Tuscan?

• The “questione della lingua”

While the Tuscan dialect of Florence was consolidating its position as the written form of the Italian language, Italians themselves never tired for centuries of posing the “questione della lingua”. The question was: Do we retain as a model the Tuscan of the Trecento with its great models? Or is it better to take the living language of Tuscany as a model? Why cannot we choose another dialect stemming from Latin? Or wouldn’t it be better to mix several dialects?

Hence we understand that they there would be the partisans of the archaïc tendency, represented by the Accademia della Crusca and the others. This first European Academy (1583) “sifts” the Italian vocabulary in order to extract the fine flour, at the example of the miller who separates the flour from the bran (crusca). We understand also that words such as purista and neologismo, both of French origin, appeared at the time in Italy.

• Italian & Europe

In the XVIth century, Italian culture became truly European. In Lyon

(a center of Italian Renaissance) or London were printed books in Italian. Everywhere Petrarch is imitated. Sonnets are composed on the Italian model.

Milton (1608-1674), a century later, went as far as writing his sonnets in Italian. To know Italian is a sign of distinction. The Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), who expanded the Holy Roman Empire through Europe and America, speaks it and writes it. Francis I (1494-1547) has conversations in Italian wih the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Queen of England and Ireland, can write letters in Italian...

There is a famous phrase from Charles V, the versions of which are many and probably vary from country to country. Here the version I heard long ago from one of my professors:

“I prefer to speak

German to my horse,

French to men,

Italian to ladies,

and Spanish to God.”

(Let’s not give him that much credit: he was born in Ghent (Belgium) of a German-speaking father and Spanish-born mother. . .

• He rewrote his Novel to “Tuscanize” it . . .

All these linguistic quarrels won’t be resolved until mid XIXth century, after the literary event, renewed twice, of Manzoni’s novel, I promessis sposi “The fiancés” (lit. The promissed spouses), an experiment probably unique in its kind. The author, raised and educated in Milan, who had just published his great love story, took a trip to Florence in 1827 that was a real literary conversion. There, in the language of the educated Florentines, he was discovering the rich and supple, alive and real, literary language that he had read only in books. Therefore, to borrow his expression, which has become an Italian proverb, after “rinsing out his clothes in the Arno river”, he decided to write another version, completely new, of his novel. He decided to discard all the expressions that sounded too Milanese and the archaïc or stereotyped formula belonging to the literary tradition that he had accepted on faith until he was able to confront them with the actual usage of Florence. For example, he decided to replace “adesso”, the common form for “now” in the north, by “ora”, more typically ; or to replace “ambedue”, “ambo”, that has kept a remnant of Latin, with tutt’e due (“both of them”), that was more familiar, etc. It is therefore a much revised novel that is published anew in 1842, a publication that marked an important date in the history of the Italian language. In fact, what Manzoni had accomplished was to bring together written and spoken language.

There is, as we know, such a difference between the written and the spoken word . . . Sartre had this phrase, although half true, to say the same thing: “On parle dans sa langue maternelle, on écrit dans une langue étrangère.” (You speak your native tongue, but you write in a foreign language.)

Torn betwen the Tuscan, with its long literary tradition, and Rome whose prestige is linked both to the Holy See and the concentration of the press and television in the Roman capital, common Italian seems today under a new attraction pole. For half a century, with the development of the so-called “industrial triangle” (Milan-Turin-Genoa), bringing in many workers from other regions, it really seems today that the usages from the north are leading the evolution of the “new Italian”. Milan perhaps is in the process of playing

for Italian, at the the end of the XXth century, the role of linguistic meling-pot that Paris had played in French since the Middle Ages.

• Italian Dialects World Around

Italian has given a large number of words to other languages - design, caricature, mask, rotonda, ballet, violon, etc. , but the adjoined map, (map 8) provided for your recreation, indicates words that, although coming from a regional dialect, were first included in everyday Italian, then passed into the international language with minimal changes.

• There is Pasta and More Pasta (Map 10)

The Eskimo (or Eskimos), supposedly boast of nine words to say snow. People from the desert have as many words to name a camel. De Gaulle famously remarked of France: “How can you expect to govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?”. But this is probably a trifle in comparison with the “mille e tre” (as Mozart’s Don Giovanni would have said), the countless sorts of Italian pasta, each of which bears a different name according to its shape, its region of origin, its mode of preparation, or sometimes according to the sauce or the ingredients that accompany them. Only connaisseurs in Italian gastronomy can distinguish between spaghetti, tagliatelle and other fettucine, even before entering the subtleties of shapes that separate penne, fusilli, conchiglie, farfalle ... , which are only a prelude to the pasta always stuffed, ravioli,cappelletti, tortellini, cannelloni . . .

• From Ciáo to Mafia or from Venice to Sicily

- Ciao! This “salutation” word is the Venitian pronunciation of schiavo

([I am your] slave) and an ancient respectuous form of greetings.

- grissini Thin crusty baguettes. The term, of Piemontese origin, is found,

for example, in the writings of J.-J Rousseau, who called them

grisses.

- risotto This is a rice dish, the origin of which is from Lombardy

- minestrone is a soup also of Lombardic origin containing assorted vegetables, vermicelli, and herbs in a meat or vegetable broth

pizza “Pizza Napolitana”. As its original name indicates, the pizza was

popular only in the region of Naples. It began to be known first

in northern Italy, then abroad, only after the second world war.

paparazzo (from Rome). A paparazzo (a word that probably comes from

French paperassier, scribbler, from paperasse, scrap paper) is a

reporter or photographer, especially a free-lance one, who

doggedly searches for sensational stories about, or takes pictures

of, celebrities for magazines or neewspapers. Fellini’s La Dolce

Vita (1960) contributed to its popularity. In his film, he had

chosen the last name of Paparazzo for the photographer.

mafia (also maffia). From Sicilian dialect mafia, lawlessness, “boldness”. From Arabic mahyah, “boasting” states one source.

Another says “from unkown origin”. Originally the word meant

“valor, superiority, excellence”. Its current meaning is attested

only since the middle of the XIXth century.

• Italian and Foreign Languages

Borrowings from the French are ancient and have been integrated into the structure of the language. Until the middle of the XXth century, it’s by far

from French that Italian had borrowed the most and, similarly, Italian was

the language that contributed the most during the same period to enrich the French vocabulary.

It is, for example, in the XIIth century that Italian borrowed from French mangiare, which progressively replaced manducare and manicare, still found in Dante. The influence of the French was particularly invading in the XVIIIth century. At the beginning of the XIXth, the influx of words that came from France was at its peak in every domain for, in addition to France’s cultural influence, was added the fact that France had annexed a good third of Italy. It’s from around the middle of last century that entered words such as

ristórante, menù, coperto (“couvert” in a restaurant), garage, automobile, ascensore, élite . . .

The resemblances, however, are at times misleading. If in French chiffon is just a dust rag, in Italian, as in English, it means a fabric of sheer silk or rayon, what the French call “mousseline”. But it’s when talking about food that similar words mean different things. A menu, as in English, is what the French call la carte, where are listed all the dishes that can be served. An Italian bigné has nothing in common with a French beignet (doughnut), which is fried, but is the equivalent of a chou à la crème (a cream puff). Finally, if you ask for some croissants (it’s also an Italian word) in a bakery, you’d be surprised to discover that they taste like brioche (sweet bread); for what we call a croissant in French is named chifel in Italian.

Among the most recent borrowings from the French, can be cited bricolage

(tinkering), eau de Cologne and eau de toilette, or osé (when we say risqué in English!)

English, or more exactly American-English borrowings, have also invaded the place: flash, freak, sniffare, stressare are part of young people’s vocabulary.

In addition, words such as computer, chek up or killer, self-service, drink, sexy or sponsorizzare are commonly heard or found in the media. Whereas the French have transposed NATO into OTAN and AIDS in SIDA, the Italian

have retain the English acronyms. This wave of anglicisms, which is common in all the other languages of Europe, is relatively recent and, after a period of excesses, it seems nowadays that, outside the world of sports, computers (internet especially) and technical terminology, “American imports” are less omnipresent in the Italian press.

• Italian in Switzerland

The Italian minority of Switzerland is mainly concentrated in the Tessin, which, on the economical level, depends from German-speaking Switzerland. The Italian spoken there is close to the Italian spoken in northern Italy with some dialects belonging to the Lombard group. However, if, for everyone, “Italian is the language of the heart”, German is schwytzertütsch, “the language of the bread”.

• Italian in the World

Outside of the independent Republic of San Marino (25 000) and the canton of the Grisons in Switzerland, where Italian has the statute of official language, important Italian groups have settled in the US, mostly New York (from southern Italy) and California (northern and central Italy), in Canada, South America (especially Argentina), and Australia.

• There is “burro” and “burro”!

This is the story of a Spaniard who is vacationing in Italy and thinks he knows Italian, and who, in a restautant ask the waiter for butter:

- Cameriere, per piacere, mantequilla.

Of course, the Italian waiter doesn’t understand what the guy is asking for.

Surely, the first words: cameriere (waiter), per piacere (please), are Italian, but

mantequilla is not Italian but Spanish.

So, the Spanish insists:

- Per piacere, mantequilla.

Still no result. Then he gets angry and finally insults the waiter:

- ¡Burro!

And immediately the waiter brought him what he was demanding. . .

“Burro” may be the equivalent of “stupid ass” = donkey in Spanish, but

also stands for “butter” in Italian.

Satisfied the Spanish tourist says to his wife: “You see, in this country, you need to insult people to get what you want.”

VI. AROUND SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

A. SPANISH

- 300 millions of Spanish-Speaking People

Among the languages descending from Latin, Spanish is today the one enjoying the largest diffusion in the world, but the greatest majority of Spanish-speaking people are outside of Europe, mostly in Latin America. Out of an estimated 300 million people for whom Spanish is the official language, less than 14 percent live in Spain.

• Spanish Around the World

Outside of peninsular Spain, Balearic and Canary Islands and the two Moroccan cities of Melila and Ceuta, totaling around some 40 million people,

Spanish is spoken by more than 260 millions of people, 75 percent of whom live on the American continent.

Outside of Spain, Spanish is the official language of 21 countries:

Argentina Belize Bolivia Chili

Colombia Costa-Rica Cuba Equador

Guatemala Equatorial Guinea Honduras Mexico

Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru

Puerto-Rico Dominican Rep. Salvador Uruguay

Venezuela

• Spain and its Languages

Population: 39 568 000 inhabitants

Official language:

- Castillan, official language

Regional Official languages:

- Catalan, a Romance language; approximately 4.5 million speakers,

48 percent of whom have Catalan has their native tongue;

- Galician, a Romance language; approximately 2.5 million speakers ;

- Basque, a non-Indo-European language; approximatey 0.7 million

speakers, two-third of whom speak Basque fluently;

- Aranese, a romance language .

• Distant origins

Although this rugged country of western Europe that occupies 194,400 square miles on the Iberian peninsula has retained many traces of its

previous occupants, we don’t know much about the populations that preceded the arrival of the Celts around the VIIth century B. C., namely the Aquitains and the Iberians; the Aquitains being the sole people that have survived, thanks to their probable descendants, the Basques.

Historical dates, inscriptions, names of places, and the evolution of the dialects in the region concur in favor of the hypothesis permitting to see in the Aquitains as the ancestors of today’s Basques.

From the Iberians and their language, we know little except that, as early as the neolithic period, around the VIth millenium, they had settled here and there in western Europe. Their language, which didn’t belong to the Indo-European family, is attested in inscriptions using either a special or the

Greek alphabet. Iberian inscriptions (more than a thousand words) have been discovered in both southern France and Spain, which haven’t yet been deciphered.

On the Mediterranean or Atlantic coast, the Phoenicians had established the ports of Malaga and Cadix, the Carthaginians gave their name to Carthago Nova > Cartagena, while the Greeks had created small colonies in

Ampurias and Alicante.

Then, coming from Germany, and even before perhaps settling in Gaul, the Celts had pursued their migrations as far as Hispania, the ancient name of the Iberian peninsula. Established in the valley of the Ebro (Iberus), to the west of the zone occcupied by the Aquitains, they were in contact with the Iberian people. The result: the Celts of Spain took the name of Celtiberians. They spoke an archaic type of Celtic, quite different from Gaulish, and they have left many names of common places such as Conimbriga (Coimbra) in Portugal or La Coruña, Braga, Segovia in Spain.

• The Roman Conquest

The Romans began their conquest in 218 B. C., but it was a slow and difficult conquest: it took two centuries. Romanization was relatively easy in the Baetica province - modern Andalousia - and the capital of Cordoba was declared a patrician colony as early as the year 169 B. C. with its inhabitants progressively abandoning their language to learn Latin.

The northern populations, on the other hand, resisted vigorously. The least docile were the inhabitants of the Basque region, who continued to speak their language without yielding to the pressure of Roman occupation.

The Basques always have considered that someone who doesn’t speak their

language was a erdaldun, i.e. “someone who speaks a half-language” (the word is based on erdi “half”), whereas someone who speaks Basque is eskualdun.

• Roman Spain (Map 11)

In 27 A. D., the Romans had divided Spain in three provines: Tarraconensis in the north, Baetica in the south, and Lusitania in the west.

It’s only in the third century that the Emperor Caracalla created the separated

northern province of Gallaecia Asturica.

Just as a recreational exercice, here are a few Roman names with their Spanish equivalent:

Caesar Augusta > Zaragoza Legio (Septima Gemina) > León

Carthaago Nova > Cartagena Malaca > Malaga

Emerita Augusta > Mérida Tarraco > Tarragon

Gades > Cádiz Tagus > Taho ; Iberus > Ebro

Toletum > Toledo Hispalis > Sevilla

Baetis > Guadalquivir Durius > Douro, Duero

• Hispania : Land of Archaïsms

Situated as the extremity of the Roman Empire, Spain had limited contacts with the other Roman colonies, which explains that it has not benefited from some ot the ulterior innovations that came from Rome, and explains also that Latin has kept ancient forms.

For example, while magnus disappeared everywhere to be replaced by grandis, the expression tam magnus “big like that” (with accompanying gesture) has remained in the Iberian peninsula in tamaño in Spanish and

tamanho in Portuguese to indicate “size”.

Here are some other examples of ancient Latin forms, kept in Spanish and Portuguese and abandonned in the other Romance languages.

Classical Latin Spanish Portuguese

comedere (to eat) comer comer

mensa (table) mesa mesa

formosus (beautiful) hermoso formoso

caput (head) cabeza cabeça

humerus (shoulder) hombro ombro

fervere (to boil) hervir ferver

French and Italian, for example, abandoned classical Latin in favor of

more familiar or more descriptive terms, such as the word testa (“a piece of

broken pottery”) > head, or manducare (to devour), a term at first only used

in comedies figuring the character of Manduco (“the guzzler”), a sort of ogre

both grotesque and terrifying.

Classical Latin Late Latin > French Italian

(comedere) manducare manger mangiare

(mensa) tabula (board) table tavola

(formosus) bellus (pretty) beau bello

(caput) testa tête testa

(humerus) spatula épaule spalda

(fervere) bullire (make bubbles) bollire

A precision: If it’s true that bello exists in Spanish, this adjective has remained literary, at least in European usages, and similarly, if formoso

exists in Italian, bello is the most common form.

• Hispania : Land of Innovations

The Iberian peninsula was also land of innovations, creating words of its own. For example, the verb extinguere (to extinguish), which is very close to its original Latin in English, and we find in éteindre in French, was abandoned in Spanish and Portuguese in favor of a more “poetic” term: apagar, formed on appacare, which means to apease, to pacify. The Latin adverb tarde (late), which has remained only as an adverb in French (tard) or

in Italian (tardi), has been expanded to nouns in Spanish and Portuguese, where tarde can be used as a noun in the sense of afternoon (la tarde). Finally,

to say yellow, both French (jaune) and Italian (giallo) go back to galbinus,

whereas Spanish amarillo and Portuguese amarelo are formed on a diminutive of amarus (bitter, amer in French), which both suggest the bitterness of the bile and its yellowish color.

These few examples allow us to undertand why Spanish Latin appeared so deconcerting to Cicero when he heard speeches delivered by orators coming from Spain. This did not prevent Spain from producing major figures in Latin letters: Seneca, the Roman philosopher, political leader, and author of tragedies, and his son, Nero’s preceptor, were born in Cordoba, so was the poet Lucan. The Roman Emperor Trajan was a native of Itálica, near Seville

• Germanic Invasions

When, as early a the end of the third century A. D. , and mostly around the fifth century, the Germanic invasions - Vandals in Andalousia, Suebi in

the West, and Visigoths in the rest of the country -, the local populations are for the most part latinized.

The Vandals, a member of a Germanic people that overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries [from Latin Vandalus

“wanderer”], more known perhaps for their sack or, better said “vandalism”, of Rome in 455 A.D. , seem to have left few traces of their passage in Spain, except, probably, the name of Andalusia < Portu Wandalusiu.

More important were the Visigoths, whose kingdom spanned all of

present day Spain, to the exception of the Basque region and that of Galicia occupied by the Suebi. Their domination, which extended outside of the

Pyrenees in southern Gaul, lasted three hundred years (409-711). It has left important traces in institutions and in the law ; it also contributed to the inspiration of epic poetry so prevalent in Spain.

In the language itself, influences are more difficult to discern, for most of the Germanic elements that we find in Spanish could have penetrated under the form they had already taken, either in Vulgar Latin or, some time later, in the vocabulary that came from France. Such are, for example, forms like

robar (to steal), sala (salle), rico (rich), guisa (manner). From this last word, Spanish has derived the verb guisar, with the sense of “preparing in a certain manner”, then “to prepare the means, to cook”.

With the Visigoths’ conversion to Christianism in 589, then began a period of peace and merger between occupied populations and invaders.

This prosperous period lasted more than a century, during which the kingdom of Toledo favored arts and letters. In the schools of Seville, Saragosse and Toledo, teaching was done by masters such as Isidore of

Seville (560-636), who was considered one of the greatest scholars of his time.

Just as a note. There is a visible trace of Visigothic influence in many

Spanish names. Many of the Spanish first names are Visigothic : their first sense is often linked to qualities of moral or physical strengh. Thus:

Adolfo < adal (noble) + wulf (wolf)

Alfonso < all (all) + funs (ready)

Alvaro < all + varo (informed)

Fernando < frithu (peace) + nanth (bold)

Rodrigo <hroth (glory) + ric (powerful).

• The Long Arabic Period

If “Germanic imports” were restricted to some specific domains, the profound and lasting marks left by Arabic in the Spanish lexicon have given the language its most original aspect.

Landing near Gibraltar , <Djabal al-Târiq i.e. “Târiq’s mountain”, name of the Berber Chief who landed first in 711 on the famous “rock”, the Arabs conquered in less than seven years the quasi totality of the peninsula, to the exception of a small region in the north, where had formed a pocket of resistance in the Asturias, which would become the starting point of the

Reconquista, (a “re-conquest” that began around 800 and ended only in 1492 with the fall of Grenada) . . . More later on the famous date of 1492.

After centuries of a Romance/Arabic bilinguism, and sometimes trilinguism Romance/ Classical Arabic/ Spanish Arabic, Spain understandably has kept numerous traces of the invadors’ tongue. For, even if it’s true that, from the XIIIth century onward, Moslem Spain was reduced to the sole kingdom of Grenada, since the XIth century however Arabic had become the language of culture of the largest part of the peninsula. We call Mozarabs the Christians, speaking a Romance language, who lived in areas of Spain under Arab domination.

• Thousands of Arabic Words

It is estimated that lexical arabisms in Spanish amount to more than 4000 forms, out of which 1500 are toponyms, i.e. names of places. If are only retained simple forms, which exclude all derivatives, there still remain 850 words. This arabisms are easy to recognize: one out of four begin with an a.

Here are just a few common examples, some of them not requiring any translation:

aceite (oil), alcaide (governor), aldea (village) algebra, adobe, algodon, almacén (store), alquimia, azar, azúcar, etc...

When one compares Spanish with other Romance languages, one notices that Spanish has most of the times incorporated the article al- in the words

borrowed from Arabic. Here are a few examples permitting to compare

Spanish, French and Italian:

Spanish Italian French

aduana (customs) dogana douane

alcuzcuz cuscus couscous

algodón (cotton) cotone coton

arroz (rice) riso riz

atún (tuna) tonno thon

azúcar (sugar) zucchero sucre.

• Languages in Spain Today (Map 12)

Despite the expansion of the Castilian, which is at the basis of the official common language of Spain, other languages have continued to exist in the

peninsula. As mentioned previously, they include, as is shown on your map,

Basque, Galician, Portuguese, Leonese, Aragonese and Catalan. Andalusian Spanish is just a variety of Castilian, born from the repopulation of Andalusia from the XIIIth to the XVIth century by northern Spaniard.

• The Basques in Spain

The basque language - euskara- is only spoken in a small region of about

170 km (from west to east) to 60 km (from north to south) [2739 square miles in area] by an estimated 400 000 inhabitants, out of a total Basque population of 2 600 000. Since 1975, the language has acquired the statute of (regional) official language.

Implanted very early in Europe, Basque preceded the Indo-European languages leaving traces in the typonomy (words ending in -berri, meaning new) as well as in the common Spanish vocabulary : pizarra (slate), izquierdo

(left). This Basque term replaced siniestro “coming from the left”, which had

for a long time coexisted with it.

• Castilian = Spanish

Among all the Romance dialects of the peninsula, Castilian was the most innovative. For example, while all the other dialects retained the initial

f- of Latin, Castilians, probably under the influence of the surrounding Basque

population, pronounced it as a real /h/, the articulation of which became

progressively attenuated to the point of total disappearance. Thus farina, became harina, in which the h was aspirated like in the word hero, an h

which is not pronunced at all today. This expansion of this pronounciation began very early (as soon as the XIth century)

In addition, at the time when Castilian began to spread southward, between the XIth and the XIIIth century, French influence began to be felt

from across the Pyrenees. The new road of pilgrimage leading to Santiago

de Compostela, in northern Spain, on the site of the tomb of Saint James,

named el camino francès, contributed to this influence: The pilgrims stay in mesones (maisons) ; their food consisted of manjares (dishes) and viandas (food) which they seasoned with vinagre (vinegar). The monks (monjes) receive their pitanza (meager portion), and the one who presides over the chapter is named deán.

Marriages between Spanish kings and French princesses increase contacts with the French language, which has left other traces in Spanish, such as

homenaje (hommage) or mensage (message). This French influence continued all through the Middle Ages, (the end of which, traditionally, is put at the year 1453, date of the fall of Constantinople).

• 1492 and Spanish Expansion

This by means of introduction to another important date in Spanish history: 1492, a date three times memorable for Spain:

- as mentioned previousl, 1492 is the date of the fall of Granada (and also

that of the expulsion of the Jews by Isabella “the Catholic” (1451-1501), queen of Castile and Aragon as wife of Ferdinand V (1452-1516), king of Aragon Castile, Sicily, and Naples ; who aided Columbus (and organized Inquisition).

- 1492 is the date of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

The date from which the Spanish language commences its conquest of the new word.

- 1492 is also the date of publication of the first Spanish grammar, Castilian

to be precise, by Antonio of Nebrija, who is himself from Andalusia. This marks the recognized consecration of Castilian as the language of Spain.

The great period of Spanish letters, called sigle de oro, spans from the XVIth to the later part of the XVIIth. This is the time when plays of Lope de Vega (1562-1635) are performed in France and Italy, when French, for instance, saw the addition of words such a brave, grandiose, compliment, sieste, armada, embargo, camarade, as well the important cédille, where both name and written forms were borrowed from Spanish.

Spanish, for its part, enriched its vocabulary by being in contact with hundreds of indigenous languages in “Las Americas”. For example, the

words canoa, sabana (savane), tabaco, maíz, caníbal, tiburón (shark) have been borrowed from the Arawak or Caraïb language. Among the words that have passed from Nahuatl (the language of Aztecs) to Spanish, let’s mention: aguacate (avocado), tomato, chocolate, cacao, etc. Nahuatl is the language that is skpoken today by more than one million people in Mexico.

• Borrowings from European Languages

The Germanic languages have left a few traces in everyday Spanish. The word bigote, for mustache, for example, is a deformation of the Bî gott! that mustachioed Swiss mercenaries uttered during the time of the Catholic Kings.

Borrowings from Romance languages were important from the middle of the XVIth century, when many Italian words were introduced: escopeta,

diseño, modelo, balcón, manejar (to handle), etc.

French also brought in a large contingent of terms: servieta (today servilleta), sumiller (somelier, wine waiter), batallón, xefe (later on spelled jefe), from chef, etc. In the borrowings from the French, pronunciation and

spelling may take capricious ways; thus bijouterie became bisutería. In words such as cliché, garaje and chófer, the pronunciation is hispanized (with tch and jota). We could still add from French: toilette, trousseau, soirée, buffet, bibelot, remarcable (in addition to notable), as well as the calque of “coup d’oeil” (glimpse of an eye): golpe de ojo, in addition to mirada (look).

Portuguese, which was fashionable in the XVIIth century, left mermelada

or the expression echar de menos (to miss).

• Last but not least: English

English, completely ignored during the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, began to penetrate Spanish in the XVIIIth, first in literature, and often by the intermediary of French: vagón, tranvía, túnel, lider, mitin (meeting), turista, etc. This penetration increased from then on until today, with words such as

jersey, esnobismo, party, marqueting, gangster, esmoquin (tuxedo), supermercado. . .

Since the middle of the XXth century, American English has entered en masse in Spanish, as well as in the other languages of Europe. Here are a few examples, among hundreds of others: aire acondicionado, flash (as in French:

sensation of intense pleasure, or effect of surprise), grupi (fan), jipi (hippy), jol

(hall), mousse or ratón (computer mouse) ; software.

Just a last example to show how the same English word can take a different sense in Spain and in France. For example, by borrowing the English form flip in a very special sense, Spanish first used the word flipado or flipante to describe the exciting effects of drugs, then to describe any sensational event. Slang French, on the contrary, uses flippé and flippant, but only in the sense of anguished and frightening, but never to mean exciting.

B. AROUND PORTUGUESE

• Portuguese & its Languages

Population: 9 830 000 inhabitants

Official Language: Portuguese, a Romance language ; official language of the State of Portugal, the Azores and Madeira islands.

• Portuguese in the World:

Portuguese is also the official language of Brazil (150 000 0000 inhabitants)

as well as five African Republics:

- Cape-Verde

- Guinea-Bissau (Former Portuguese Guinea)

- São Tomé and Principe islands

- Angola (Formely Portuguese West Africa)

- Mozambique (Formely Portuguese East Africa)

• A Brief History of the Portuguese Language (and its Pronunciation)

Occupied by the Romans at the same time as the rest of the Iberian peninsula, the territory that would become Portugal has known essentially two groups of Germanic invadors. The Suebi settled as early as 411 A.D. in Galicia, where they organized a pacific State, with Bracara (Braga today) as their capital and Portocale (Porto) as a first strong hold.

It’s only from the Vth century A.D. that is attested the form Portucale

(Portu, today Porto, and Cale, today Vila Nova de Gaia) that is the ancestor of the word Portugal.

The Visigoths succeded the Suebi 585 and exerted their domination until the arrival of the Arabs in 711. And although the contacts with the Germanic languages lasted three centuries, the traces are limited in the vocabulary: are present, however, common words such as gana (envy), ganso (goose), roubar

(to steal), a Germanic verb meaning to sack.

The Arab occupation lasted five centuries, which explains the abundance of Arabic terms found in the Portuguese vocabulary. As in Spanish, they’re easily recognized with their beginnings in al- or a-, as in aldeia (village), almofada (cushion), arroz (rice), azeite (olive oil), azuelo (colored tile), oxalá! (“inch’Allah”), etc.

- A Prestigious Literary Language

In the meanwhile, in the northwest of the peninsula (Galicia), Latin had acquired an aspect that distinguished it from its Leonese or Castilian neighbors in the north and Mozarabic in the south, giving birth to a literary language, Galician-Portuguese, named Gallego, which is the ancestor of the

Portuguese language.

• The many Provençal, French and Latin contributions

The pilgrimages to the tomb of Saint James of Compostela brought with them the installation of monastic orders from France: Cluny, Cîteaux, Clairvaux, where the Portuguese abbeys had become cultural centers. At

Alcobaça were organized, from 1269 on, public lectures in grammar, logic and

theology.

At the same period were also borrowed many terms from Old Provençal, the language of the troubadours, such as alegre (joyful), or trovar (to compose verses), as well as, also from France, the chivalric vocabulary: dama, vianda

(food, dishes) and the many suffixes in -age (linhagem, message, selvage, ending today in -agem).

Among the many learned or semi-learned terms borrowed from Latin are, for example, escola (school), pensar (to think), the popular variant is pesar,

ciência (science), físico (medical doctor).

• From Latin to Portuguese : fall of -l- and -n-

At the pronunciation level, it’s as early as the IXth and the Xth century that phonetic evolutions had taken place, giving Portuguese its peculiar

form: the fall of the -l- and -n- consonants from Latin, when placed between

two vowels. Whereas, for example, le l and n of Latin, in the word color or

corona (crown), are found in the other Romance languages, we have cor for color and coroa for corona in Portuguese.

Here are just a few examples:

Latin Modern Port. Castilian English

diabolum diabo diablo devil

dolor(em) dor dolor (pain, grief)

luna lua luna (moon)

tenere ter tener (to hold)

• Other -l- and -n- coming from Latin and other borrowings

There are, however, many -l- and -n- in Portuguese, v. g.: pele (skin),

pena (feather), which are easily explained if we know that in Latin there were words such as the common greathing Vale! (Stay well! or Take care!) or pala

(shovel) with only one l and other words with two l or two n, such as valle(m) (valley) or palla (coat). In short, only the single -l- and -n- have been eliminated. Here are a few examples:

Latin Portuguese English

bulla bola ball

molle mole soft

pelle(m) pele skin

sigillu(m) selo stamp

stella estrela star

To this ancient source of -l- and -n- must be added another one: the borrowings, those from learned Latin, for example, as in the other Romance languages. Such is the case for calor (heat), the learned form from Latin calore(m), which has retained the -l-, next to quente, the popular form.

The same thing can be said of the adjective pleno (full, entire), which we find in the expression plenos podere (full powers, compared to the popular cheio

(full), where -l- has disappeared. There exists also the learned form palácio

(palace) next to the popular form paço.

Finally, all the more recent borrowings from otherlanguages have retained their original -l- and -n-. Examples: azuelo (colored tile), borrowed very early from Arabic, pelota (ball), borrowed from Castilian in the XIIIth century (today bola), sala (room) borrowed from the French salle in the XVIth century, or salame from Italian salami, televisão from English in the Xxth.

- Another trait of pronunciation that permits us to recognize Portuguese from the other Romance languages is the treatment of the consonants p, t, k followed by -l- in Latin, such as in pluvia (rain) or clave(m) (key). Whereas these consonants have been retained in French or have become -ll- in Spanish, they have ended in ch in Portuguese:

Latin French Spanish Portuguese English

pluvia pluie lluvia chuva rain

clavem clef (clé) llave chave key

plorare pleurer llorar chorar to cry

plenus plein lleno cheio full

flamma flamme llama chama flame

• Words from Far Away

The XVth and the XVIth centuries were those of the European navigators and explorers, many of them Portuguese:

- Bartholemeu Dias (1450-1500), Cape of Good Hope,

- Pedro Alvarez Cabral (1460-1526), Brazil,

- Vasco da Gama (1469-1524), first to reach India by sea (1498),

- Fernão de Magalhães (1480-1521), Magellan, commander of the Spanish

expedition that was first to circumnavigate the world.

Not only Portuguese has left its imprint in all these regions of the world, most often by becoming the common language of their inhabitants, but has added a large quantity of exotic terms to its vocabulary. Here are just a few samples from the Far-East, Africa and Brazil.

a) From the Far-East:

bengala cane, stick pagode pagoda

chá tea paria pariah

chávena cup tufão typhoon

(chávena is formed from chá, a word borrowed from Chinese. Originally

it designated only a tea cup, but today designates any kind of cup)

b) From Africa:

banana macaco macaque

cachimbo pipe mandioca manioc, cassava

candonga smuggling, contraband sanzala village

c) From Brazil

ananás pineapple

jacaré cayman, crocodile

jibóia boa

• Classical Portuguese

It’s with the publication of the poet Camoens’s Lusiadas in 1572 that commenced Classical Portuguese. Portugal, at that time, was under Spanish domination, which only increased the tendency of learned Portuguese to adopt Spanish as a second language. It was the case, for example, of Gil Vicente (1470-1537), the creator of Portuguese theater and Camoens (1524-1580) himself.

In classical Portuguese, can also be recognized the influence the Italian Renaissance (arpejo, soneto, bússola) and especially an exceptional proliferation of forms borrowed directly from Latin. This tendency intensified around the middle of the XVIth century and has continued to our times, where forms modeled on Latin, such as adornar (to adorn, decorate), ameno

(pleasant), austero (austere), are found in quantity.

• Richness of Portuguese Lexicon

The Portuguese literary lexicon is characterized by the abundance of latinisms, borrowings from exotic languages, and the many words taken from French, especially in the XVIIIth and XIXth century. Some of those words have sometimes kept their French form: élite, fantoche (puppet), nuance. Others have been adapted to Portuguese structures, such as:

atelier or atelié (shop) garagem (garage)

blusa (blouse) guiché (booth)

camião (truck) matinê (matinée)

chofer (chauffeur) sutiã or soutien (brassiere)

pequeno-almoço (breakfast)

Today English reigns, not only in sports, scientific and technical domains, but also in expressions of everyday life:

Bar livre-serviço (self-service)

bife (beefsteak) meeting

computador sanduíche or sande

lanche (lunch) stress

And more recently, briefing, mailing, performance, software or jogging.

• Conclusion:

a) Spanish & Portuguese

In comparison with Spanish, Portuguese appears as a language much “eroded” where some syllables have been swallowed or simplified. Thus to Spanish voluntad (will) corresponds vontade in Portuguese, mañana and

manha (morning); general and geral and the plural generales and gerais...

Among phonetic and spelling differences, we note that:

- the Portuguese j is pronounced as in French (janeiro), there is no jota;

- the Spanish ñ is transcribed as nh

- the o and u are pronouced [ou], except when the o is stressed and is pronounced [o], whereas ou is pronounced [o], such pouco (little, few) is procounced [pocou].

b) Portuguese and “Brazilian”

At the beginning of the colonial period, cultural ties between Brazil and

Portugal were close. In addition, contrarily to the situation in Spanish America, Brazil didn’t have universities and rich Brazilian students went to

Coimbra to study.

The 1822 independence of Brazil tended to value the Indian roots of the country as well as the ethnic origins of the new immigrants. Therefore we find a difference of vocabulary, such as aero-moça vs. hospedeira for air-hostess or bizarre changes in gender; sanduiche is masculine in Brazil and feminine in Portugal, but it’s essentially the fauna, (wildlife) and flora vocabulary that characterize the differences betwen the two countries.

Finally, in terms of phonetics, Brazilian Spanish is much softer and with less hushing sounds than Portuguese.

It’s going to be interesting in the years to come to observe how Portuguese

in the other countries of the world that speak Portuguese. Portuguese is the

eighth most spoken language in the world with more than 150 000 000 people in Brazil alone.

VII. AROUND FRENCH

A. FRANCE & ITS LANGUAGES

Population: 57 747 0000 millions.

Official Language: French, Romance language; official language of France “métropolitaine”, D.O.M. (Départements d’Outre Mer): Gadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion, St.-Pierre-et- Miquelon and T.O.M. (Territoires d’Outre Mer): Mayotte, Tahiti, Nouvelle-Calédonie, Wallis et Futuna.

Minority Languages: Occitan, Breton, Catalan, Alsatian, Flemish

• French before France

If you wanted to caracterize the French language in one sentence, you could say that it is the most Germanic of the Romance languages (whereas English is the most Latin of the Germanic languages). The name itself of France is inherited from Frank (i.e. Germanic) invadors. Yet, if you ask the average Frenchman reciting from his French History book, he’ll say: “Formely France was known as La Gaule and its inhabitants the Gauls”; thus he’ll be inclined to say thatFrench goes back to Gaulish, which would be quite wrong. In fact, the history of the French language is both that of the evolution of Latin spoken in Gaule and that of a constant enrichment through the contact with its neighbors’ tongues. This “polyphonic” adventure took place on Celtic soil, previoulsy occupied by various populations,

• Before the Arrival of the Gauls

The Gauls, of course, were not the first inhabitants of La Gaule, although we know little about the populations that had preceded them, outside of a few names of peoples such as those who gave the name of the Aquitaine region (and, most likely, of whom the Basques are the distant descendants), or such as the Iberians or the Ligurians. Their traces are found, for example, mostly in the names of rivers and places. Thus, the names of the four main rivers: Seine, Loire, Garonne and Rhône precede the arrival of the Gauls.

• The Basques in France

If the Iberians or Ligurians remain mysterious peoples, there is one population that is known somewhat better: the Basques. Basque is spoken in France in the western part of the department kown as Pyrénées-Atlantique, which represents approximately the third of Spain’s Basque territory.

Among all the peoples of Europe, the Basques are perhaps the most amazing for their resisting capacity to invadors ; their very unique and ancient tongue has survived all invasions. It first resisted Celtic, then Roman and Germanic invadors; the Arab conquest didn’t reach them either; and their language resisted on both sides of the Pyrenees to Spanish as well as to French. We’ve seen that the Basque language recently has acquired the statute of regional official language in Spain, which is not the case in France where it doesn’t have any official statute, but is still the daily tongue spoken in rural families.

• The Gauls Abandon their Language

At the difference of the Basques, the Gauls abandoned their native tongue to adopt the languages spoken by their successive invadors, first the Romans, thus adopting Latin. Although there existed a period of bilinguism that lasted at least half a millenium, during which exchanges of vocabulary took place in both directions. But we know well only the borrowings from Latin, for we know little about the Gaulish language of that period except for traces in geographical names. As said before, the Gauls were talented orators who didn’t trust the written word . . .

• Other Celts from the British Isles

Six centuries after the first contacts between Gauls and Romans, Gaulish most likely still subsisted only in some remote or isolated places. It is then

that, expelled from Britannia, new Celtic populations came to settle in the northwest part of the country named today Britanny. By chance, in that remote corner of Gaule, they spoke a language close to the one that had been dominant there before the arrival of the Romans. This is the language that is known today as Breton, a Celtic vestige that has survived until now the spread of Latin in early days and later on the development of French. This is the reason why the French vocabulary of Celtic origin belongs to two strata separared by several centuries: Gaulish before the Christian era, and Breton, since the fifth century.

One Gaulish word, bouge (leather bag), in Old French, has reached our American shores under the name of budget. From bouge came the French

diminutive bougette (little bag), borrowed by English to become budget and, since the time of the French Revolution (1789), to be used in French as well.

• When Latin Supplants Gaulish

The Roman conquest of Gaul had begun around 120 B. C. by the creation of the Provincia Narbonensis, which is at the origin of the province of Provence in southern France, a region where the impregnation of Gaulish had been uneven and superficial. Half a century later, in 58-50 B. C., the entire country entered the Roman orbit, and the Gallo-Romans - as they call themselves - progressively abandon their Celtic language to give precedence to Latin. But it was a special form of Latin, which was still going to change in the coming centuries when it found itself in contact with the Germanic languages spoken by the incoming Gothic invadors.

From the third century A.D., various Germanic peoples had entered Gaule. First hired as mercenaries in the Latin armies, the Franks had settled in the northern part of the country, and their influence would be felt more and more in the course of the following centuries. In the fifth century, other Germanic peoples, this time the Alamans (who gave their name to Allemagne) occupied the eastern part of Gaul, where their language has been maintained to this day under the form of the Alsatian dialect, while the Burgunds (who gave their name to Burgundy), abandoned theirs in exchange for Latin.

The determining event for the language that was to become the French language, at the end of the fifth century (496), was the conversion of their leader, Clovis, to Catholicism and, following him, of all the Franks. By then, the conquerors had already learned the language of the conquered. Hence, with Latin as the medium for religious life, a new bilinguism - Germanic / Latin this time - became generalized and weighed heavily on the

slowly evolving future French language.

• The Colored World of the Franks

There is a semantic field that was particularly marked by Germanic influence: that of colors. Latin, for its part, made the distinction between

albus (flat white) and candidus (brilliant white), but not really when it came to chromatics, i.e. the range of colors. For example, it was difficult in Latin to

distinguish the color blue, for words such as caeruleus designated the color of a blue sky, cyaneus, dark blue (let’s think of the word cyanosis (a bluish decoloration of the skin, resulting from inadequate oxygenation of the blood), caesius (grey blue, but also greenish blue, or grey green), as well as glaucus (between green and light grey) were used mostly to distinguish the color of the eyes.

Thanks to the forms borrowed from Germanic, the solution to this color

confusion was solved by means of a simplification: blue and grey, not without hesitations, for, in the Middle Ages for instance, the term blue could designate light blue as well as grey or blond. The first attestation of blavus, the “German import” that gave bleu in French (as in Sacré Bleu!”), goes back to the VIIth century.

The term grey also went through peculiar semantic developments. This form at first designated an old man: this is the same sense that we find in modern German Greis (old man) and, in a roundabout manner, in Danish gris, meaning . . . a pig. The explanation is simple: the color of a pig’s bristles

evokes also that of the grey hair of an old man . . .

Finally, the ancient Latin word flavus, which designated golden yellow when talking about a person’s hair, seems to have been replaced very early by the word blond, of Germanic origin. Blond was a very appreciated color of hair by the Romans who, during the Imperial period, bought large quantities of it in Germany.

• German Words in Quantity

Many of the Germanic words used in French to designate colors are found in the other Romance language, but not as much as in French where we find the greatest number of substantives (several hundred), but also dozens of verbs, a few adjectives and even two adverbs.

Among the countless nouns, in areas as varied as:

1. war and construction: butin (booty), espion (spy), guerre (war), hache (hatchet, axe), hangar, maçon (mason), salle (room), trêve (truce) ;

2. the ocean: bouée (buoy), mât (mast), hareng (herring) ;

3. domestic life & clothing : bonnet, botte, écharpe (scarf), poche, robe, toque;

4. cooking: escalope, flan, gâteau, gigot, soupe ;

5. country life and animals: parc, jardin, guêpe (wasp), bison, fox, etc.

The list is quite long in terms of concrete vocabulary, but very discreet when it comes to abstract nouns: besoin (need), besogne (chore), harangue,

hâte (haste), honte (shame).

Many French very common verbs go back to their Germanic origin: attacher, brandir, garder (to keep), rôtir, déraper (to skid), flatter, garnir,

souhaiter (to wish), blesser (to wound), dérober (to steal), gâter (to spoil), guérir (to heal), marcher, choisir, épargner (to spare), glisser (to slide), haïr

(to hate), danser, équiper, gagner (to win), gratter (to scratch), trotter, etc.

In addition to the adjective of colors already mentioned, other adjective have taken place in the French vocabulary, frank, of course!, but also fourbe

(false-hearted), frais (fresh), gai, hardi (daring), laid (ugly), rich, sale (dirty).

As for the two adverbs, among the forty or so of foreign origin in French, they are: guère (hardly), used only in a negative sentence to mean not much and trop, meaning too much/too many. At the origin, it was a substantive, which became in Medieval Latin troppus (herd, flock), which gave also troupe and troupeau.

• The Ultimate effects of a Disappeared Consonant

The Latin spoken by Roman legionaries ignore the consonant /h/, which was no longer pronounced in Latin in the days of Cicero (in homo, honor, hora, where the h was just as part of the written form. But the language that was about to become French acquired this consonant, through Germanic influence, in words such as haie (hedge), hache (hatchet), halle (hall), hameau

(hamlet), hutte (hut), where the h (retained in English) was for a long time

pronounced with an “aspirated h”. Today, all these words are pronounced as if they began with a vowel, that is to say it’s no longer aspirated but it prevents the linking, “liaison” or the elision with the preceding article. Compare la haine (hatred) and l’aine (groin). French also borrowed other words beginning with a true h, such as harem, from Arabic, hussard (hussar) from Hungarian, harakiri, from Japanese or hamac from Arawack, but, out of 121 common words beginning with h, 105 were provided by Germanic.

• The Vikings in Normandy

New contacts with Germanic languages took place between the IXth and the Xth century, from the incursions and the subsequent and definitive settlement of Scandinavian populations in what is known today as Normandy. The influence of Scandinavian, however, is reduced to a dozen of words, among which duvet (down), guichet (booth), joli (pretty), homard (lobtster), vague (wave).

• When Did French Begin?

From the fall of the Roman Empire (476), the lack of documents does not permit us to follow the evolution that ended with the birth of the French language. If one takes the written form as a criterium, one could consider as French’s “birth certificate” the Serments of Strasbourg, pronounced in 842 by two of the grandsons of Charlemagne, Louis-le-Germanique and Charles-le-Chauve, in a document written in Latin but where a few lines of the oaths are both in Romance and Germanic - teudisca lingua - language. Already in 813, as we’ve seen, the Council of Tours had recommended that homilies be preached in “rustica lingua romana”, an indication that the faithful no longer understood Latin; something that didn’t take place overnight. . .

At the end of the VIIIth century, Charlemagne (who was crowned as Emperor in 800 and whose native tongue was Germanic - his real name was Karl der Grosse - but very much attuned to Latin, had realized that the language spoken in France was no longer its “printed” form, had requested the aid of English scholar and theologian, Alcuin, who, once at the Saint-Martin of Tours’ abbaye, taught seriously Latin to French monks, who no longer could understand the translation of the Vulgate, the Bible translated inn Latin by Saint Jerome.

Thus began what was called the “Carolingian renaissance”, which is also

a “rebirth” of Latin .

In Charlemagne’s times, eight “French” people out of ten had Germanic names . . .

• French Doublets

Thanks to this renewed interest in the Latin language, hundreds of new, words were going to appear in French, words adapted directly from Latin, as if it were a foreign language. The whole history of French (and consequently English) is thereby altered, and one cannot understand the variety of French forms if one doesn’t take this return to Latin into account. For example, while a word like aqua had, through normal evolution, changed from aqua > agua> ev(e) to eau, new learned forms were then directly created from the same aqua root, words such as aqueux (aqueous), aquatique (aquatic), etc.

The same thing with frère (brother) and fraternel, oeil (eye) and oculiste.

These doublets are not synonymous however, and it’s sometimes difficult to recognize for example, that stemming from Latin liberare, the verb livrer (to deliver, to hand over) - by popular formation - has in fact the same root as libérer (to liberate) - by learned formation.

Cadencia (fall, and more specifically fall of the dice) gave both chance - popular - and cadence - learned; calculum (pebble and the pebble employed to do calculations, we have caillou and calculus; from clavicula(m) (little key), we have clavicule and cheville (ankle).

Word evolution always means the shortening or dropping of letters through normal and human laziness. This explains how hospitale(m) is reduced to hôtel, musculum (muscle) to moule (mussel). In the verb mutare, which gave mutation in both French and English, by change of a “t” to a “d” that progressively disappeared, we have mutare > mudare> mu(d)are> muer.

The verb computare, (to reckon together, to compute) gave in French

compter (to count) and conter (to count stories).

• The French Language: an Affair of State

This re-Latinization of French didn’t happen by chance. From Charlemagne to Mitterand, this control over the national language is

a constant all through France’s history. Thus after Charlemagne, it was Francis I, who in 1539 decided to replace Latin by French in all official documents. A century later, in 1635, Richelieu created the French Academy, whose mission was - and still remains - to codify the lexicon and determine the grammar. A century later, in 1794, a politician, who was a constitutional priest, Abbé Grégoire, pushed in favor of the abolition of all French patois and dialects, so that the laws of the Republic be understood by all and as a response to the citizens’ request who wanted that their children be taught French. In 1964, De Gaulle created the Haut Conseil de la langue française, and became the Haut Commissariat - note the adjective “haut” - of high importance - and what is today the Délégation à la langue française. In sum, from the High (which in this instance means “early”) Middle Ages, the State has weighed heavily on the evolution of the French language.

• What’s left of a Multi-Lingual France? (Map 13)

Despite the over-growing grip of the French language, which had become the king’s language as early as the end of the eleventh century, regional languages are still part of the linguistic scenery. The attached map only indicates places where some dialects still can be heard: mostly in peripheric regions where non-Romance languages are still spoken: Breton, Basque, Germanic (Flemish and Alsatian). The limits of the Romance languages are more difficult to establish. They can be distributed in langue d’oïl (northern France), langue d’oc (southern France), Franco-Provençal, Catalan and Corsican.

What characterized the tripartite division of Romance languages in the Middle Ages was:

1. in the oc region -- “oc” and “oïl”> “oui” are two different ways of saying “yes”, dialects closer to Latin (the same is true of Catalan);

2. in the oïl region, a more advanced evolution of the language, owed in part to Germanic influence;

3. in the Franco-Provençal region, dialects of the occitan (oc) type, but quite influenced by oïl dialects. (Occitan is the modern form of Old Provençal)

• The XVIth Century and the Italian Fascination

With two queens coming from Italy - Catherine de Médicis, Queen of France (1547-1559) and Regent from 1560 to 1580, then Marie de Médicis, who

marries Henri IV in 1600 and becomes Regent from 1610 to 1630, the French Court resonated with Italian accents, and the French language received an influx of vocabulary concerning the domains of war, arts, and daily life. Table manners became more refined: no more eating with your fingers, but with a fourchette. . . Repasts became a celebration.

Here is just a sample of some of the words that entered the French vocabulary in the XVIth century and became assimilated to French forms: alerte, soldat, dessin, figurine, gouache, caleçon, costume, pantoufle, perruque, gélatine, semoule, vermicelle, etc. But there are also all the other

genuine Italian imports: adagio and allegro, forte and fortissimo, pizza and spaghetti and gorgonzola . . . In a word, for four centuries Italian has supplied

plenty to French, and Italomania in France is on a par with Francomania in Italy.

• The XVIIth Century: Exotic French and “Nouvelle France”

The marriage of Louis XIII (1610-1643) with Ann of Austria, daughter of Felippe III, than the subsequent union of “the Sun King”, Louis XIV, (1643-1715) with Maria-Teresa, daughter of Filippe IV, contributed to the addition of Spanish terms to French vocabulary. In particular, it’s thanks to Spanish that penetrated in French the exotic vocabulary that had accompagnied Spain and Portugal’s great maritime expeditions. For example: cacao, chocolat, cacahuète, tomate from Mexico, caoutchouc, pampa from Peru, maïs, ouragan, savane, from the Lesser Antilles. And from Portuguese: acajou (mahogany), ananas (pine apple), tapioca from Tupi, the Indian language of Brazil.

For its part, France had attempted to implant itself in North America. As early as 1534, Jacques Cartier had taken possession of Canada in the name of

French King, Francis I.

French colonization, however, did not begin before the XVIIth century, an attempt that ended in 1763 (Seven Years’ War) with France losing most of its overseas possessions and England becoming a world power.

With the English victory, French was maintained only in the eastern part of Canada. As you all know, French-Speaking Canadians are mostly concentrated in Quebec (86%) with only a minority in former Acadian territories: 36% in New-Brunswick and only 3% in Nova Scotia.

• From the XVIIIth Century to the Present

The end of the XVIIIth century was not only a period of political upheavals, it was also one of lexicon renewal and one that made great strides in inventing new terminology, in particular in chemistry. Surely, when

nitrate de cuivre (copper nitrate) replaces cristaux de Vénus (Venus’s cristals)

or sucre de Saturne (Saturn’s sugar) is replaced by acétate de plomb (lead acetate), some “poetry” in left out.

The short reign of the Revolutionary calendar was also a time when names of the months sounded much more poetic. The poet Fabre d’Eglantine

had thus distribued, with corresponding rimes, the months for each season:

Fall: vendémiaire brumaire frimaire

Winter: nivôse pluviôse ventôse

Spring: germinal floréal prairial

Summer: messidor thermidor fructidor.

As for the borrowings from English, already quite abundant (humoriste, inchangé, parlementaire, sentimental, sélection...), they’re harddly recognizable, for most of the time they come from Latin formations and very often they go from one language to the other and vice-versa: from English to French and then French to English.

French has been importing words from English for two centuries, but the last twenty years have seen borrowings multiplied in particular in the domain of science and technology, in popular music and in all that is related to the world of drugs. Among recent borrowings that can be heard daily are the verbs flipper (to be anguished), speeder (to be in a hurry and nervous), flasher (to have a sudden and irresistible attraction) ; faire un break (to pause);

c’est un peu short (it’s somewhat insufficient); and what can be called a “false anglicism”, the verb zapper (to change channels on television with a remote-control).

B. BELGIUM & ITS LANGUAGES

Population: 10 080 000 inhabitants

Official languages:

- Dutch (Flemish), a Germanic language, official language since 1898 ; approximately 6 millions (60%);

- French, official language since 1830; approximately 4 millions (40%)

Brussels (close to 10%) is officially bilingual according to the 1971 Constitution, but 80% French-speaking;

- German; approximately 70 0000 (0.7%).

• French in Belgium

An important note: “Belgian French” must not be confused with Walloon, which is an oïl dialect that is also found in France, on the other side of the border, but is much more present in Belgium, where it is spoken in some southern provinces. Walloon is the oïl dialect that, by being the least influenced by the Parisian language (the language of the Royal Court setting the tone), has retained many ancient traits, such as the Latin u pronounced ou.

Very close to the form of French spoken in France, the Belgian “accent” is nevertheless recognizable by some traits in pronounciation:

- u sounding as ou (when preceding i) as explained above; thus huit (eight) is pronounced “houit”, puis (then) is pronounced “pouis”;

- the permanence of four nasal vowels with, in particular, a clear distinction between the vowels of brin (a bit) and brun (brown);

- the syllabic pronounciation of the i of lion (pronounced li-on), avion or marié, or the u of tuer, the ou of Louis.

These differences of pronounciation are minor. On the other hand, the same words may have a different sense in both countries. Here are some examples:

In Belgium In France In Belgium In France

chicons endives vidanges verres consignés

endive scarole farde dossier, chemise

déjeuner petit déjeuner septante soixante-dix

dîner déjeuner nonante quatre-vingt-dix

souper dîner cru (adj) froid et humide

• French in Switzerland

It’s toward the end of the XIIIth century that French replaced Latin in administration and commerce in Switzerland. The propagation of French

then progressed with the Reformation, first in Geneva (Calvin’s homeland),

Lausanne and Neuchâtel, relegating the Franco-Provençal dialects to the cantons of Valais, Fribourg and Swiss Jura.

Among the particularities of pronounciation, the Swiss share some traits with the Belgians: for example, the vowel is open in pot or sabot (as in porte or botte). As for the lexicon, the Swiss, for example, have retained with the Belgians the more logical septante (seventy) and nonante (ninety), to which

the Swiss add octante (eighty).

• French in the World

French is the official or *an official language on all continents, but with various degrees. It may be official language in 17 African countries, but spoken only by a bit more than 10 per cent of Africans.

Europe:

Belgium*, France, Val d’Aoste* (Italy), Luxembourg*, Monaco, Switzerland*.

Africa:

Benin, Ivory Coast, Burundi, Cameroon*, Centrafrique, Chad*,Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Ivory Coast, Djibouti*, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania*, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo.

North and Central America:

Canada (provinces of Quebec and New-Brunswick*, Haïti*, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guyana, Saint Pierre-et-Miquelon.

Indian Ocean:

Reunion, Comores Islands*, Madagascar*, Maurice*, Seychelles*, Mayotte.

Pacific Ocean:

Vanuatu*, New Caledonia, Wallis & Futuna Islands, and French Polynesia (Tahiti).

VIII. THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

I. Before the Differentiation

• The Latino-Germanic Overlap (Map 12)

At the heart of the languages of Europe is found the long and sinuous

division between the languages of Latin origin (to the west and south) and

the languages of Germanic origin (to the east and north). Materialized on the map by a thick line, it shows how, disregarding state borders, Germanic and Romance languages overlap their respective territories.

Thus, in northern Italy, the High Adige (the second-longest river in Italy),

represents a small Germanic enclave in a Romance zone, the same as are in France the Flemish (near Belgium) and Alsatian-Lorraine zones (near Germany). Swiss and Belgium are traversed by linguistic borders determined by law, but the Great Duchy of Luxembourg is linguistically both Germanic and Romance in its entirey.

• Peoples in Motion

At the time when the Celts dominated the major part of Europe, the populations who were the carriers of Germanic languages had not left yet the

northern part of Europe. Their most ancient kown location is the south of the scandinavian peninsula (Scania), in actual Denmark (Jutland and the islands), and north of Germany (Mecklemburg).

We don’t know exactly since when these populations had been living there, but their presence in these regions is certain around the year 1000 B. C.

At the beginning of the iron age (toward the Vth c. B. C.), they probably had been in contact already with the Celts: the Germanic word for iron (eisarn in Gothic, Eisen in German) is probably a borrowing from Celtic (iron = iarann in Gaelic Irish).

At the example of the Celts, but after them, the Germanic peoples extended outside their primitive location, and their migrations took them both to the west as well as the south. Around 500 B. C., some Germanic tribes occupied already what is today the Netherlands, while others had reached the Vistula (Polish Wisla) and others still as far as what is today central Germany. Their expansion continued all through Western Europe at the beginning of the Christian era, but was temporarily stopped in the Rhine and Danube regions by the might of the Roman Empire where fortified borders were nevertheless places of contacts and exchanges.

• The Borders of the Roman Empire: a Myth?

There are today (cf. video on Britain) visible traces of fortified Roman constructions, such as the Hadrian Wall between England and Scotland, doubled more to the north by the Antonin Wall, or the limes germanicus

(German border) between Rhine and Danube. For a long time, it was believed that these stone constructions were insuperable barriers. In fact, the most recent research has shown that these fortifications (built by precaution against prospective hostile incursions, were nevertheless zones of commercial exchanges. The numerous Latin borrowings by the Germanic languages are a proof of it.

• The Latin Heritage

The proof that contacts existed between Germans and Romans, other than armed confrontrations, appears clearly in the many early borrowings from spoken Latin. The first ones go back to the first century B. C. Here are a few examples, cited in the form that they have today in German:

Strasse (street) < strata “paved road”

Wall <vallum “fence around a field”

Ziegel (tile) <tegula

Kalk (chalk) <calx, calcis “pebble, chalk”

Mauer (wall) <murus

Fenster (window) < fenestra “opening”, cf. Spanish ventana

Pfeil (arrow) < pilum “javelin”

The above examples show that, with the exception of Pfeil (arrow, the Germans borrowed little from the military domain, but have widely benefited

from the Romans and their superior construction techniques.

They have also assimilated in part the Romans’ way of life. For example, the German word Tisch (table) was borrowed from Latin discus (tray), which reminds us of the Roman custom of having tables that were brought in already served and brought back at the end of the meals. There are also:

Schüssel (dish) < scutella “little cup”

Keller (cellar) < cellarum “place where food is stored, pantry”

Wein (wine) < vinum

Frucht (fruit) < fructum

Birne (pear) < pirum

Pfirsich (peach) < persicum (malum) “Persian apple”

Latin was also the vehicule for Greek in Germanic languages. Thus the Latin monachus < Greek monachos (“by oneself”, then “monk”), is at the root of München (Munich).

For its part, but without reaching the same proportions, Latin also borrowed from Germanic, for example sapo (soap), ganta (goose), glaesum

(amber).

• Germanic Peoples and their Languages (Map 14)

In the first century A. D., Tacitus gave one of his works the title Germania, as if the Germans had constituted a single nation, unified at the political level. In reality, until their conversion to Christianism, they were divided into independent tribes that occupied different territories close to one another, but the frequent contacts between them had for a long time prevented all linguistic differentiation. Later on, their dispersion favored the development of different idioms, which, according to their zones of departure, can be linked to three main groups:

1. the peoples from the North: their descendants speak today the various Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic), which linguists designate as the North Germanic languages ;

2. the peoples of the North Sea: Frisians, Angles and a part of the Saxons.

There are today represented by the populations who speak Frisian and English, and must be distinguished from the ones who, starting from North Germany, from the Elbe (Labe in Czech) to the Rhine, migrated, either toward the west, like the Franks, or toward the south. Among the latter, were

in particular the Longobards > Lombards, who settled in Northern Italy (Lombardy), the Alamans, who finally settled in what are today Alsace and Switzerland, and the Suebi, whose peregrinations in Europe ended in the west of the Iberic peninsula. It’s much later that were established the distinctions between Low German, which is at the source of the Dutch language and Plattdeutsch (North German), and High German, from which is derived modern German. Linguists designate all these languages under the name of West Germanic languages.

3. The peoples from the Oder and Vistula: Goths, Vandals, Burgunds. Their languages, from the East Germanic group, no longer have a descendance.

• The Three Major Linguistic Groups (A summary)

It is in the course the first millenium of the Christian era that took place the differentiation of Germanic languages in several varieties, which are

distributed in three major groups following the approximate point of departure of their migrations:

1. East Germanic group (no descendance);

2. North Germanic group, which comprises the Scandinavian languages;

3. West Germanic group, the most important, subdivided in two sub-groups:

a) German, under the two forms of Low German and High German;

b) Anglo-Frisian, which gave birth to English (in the British Isles) and

Frisian (essentially today in the Netherlands).

• Some Germanic Linguistic Traits

Among the traits that permit to distinguish the ancient Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages, the most important is perhaps the accentuation of all words on the first syllable.

This strong initial accent is still in existence today, as we know in English.

Let’s compare, in English and Danish, the Germanic pronunciation with that

of borrowed words:

English Danish

barley advice ankel abrikos

lady affair gade fromage*

stubborn brunette kage karbonade**

wonderful superb leve natur***

- fromage, although a borrowing from French, doesn’t “say cheese” but a

sweet dessert that we call “mousse” in English

- karbonade, a typical Flemish dish, is roughly the equivalent of our

Salisbury steack

- natur, with its stress on -tur, is a borrowing from Latin natura.

Another ancient trait characterizes Germanic languages: a whole series of consonants changed their mode of articulation. For example, to the Indo-European /d/, which remained /d/ in Latin, corresponds a /t/ in Germanic:

Latin: /d/ decem English: /t/ ten Danish: /t/ ti

/d/ dens-dentis /t/ tooth /t/ tan

The above examples were chosen in English and Danish, because in German, consonants went through another evolutiont, kown as “second

consonantic mutation”. Thus, instead of retaining the /d/ Latin or the /t/

(as in English or Danish), the Indo-European /d/ evolved at a second stage in

/ts/ (written z) in German. Thus, dix or ten in German has become zhen and

dent or tooth has become Zahn.

• Let’s Digress for a Little Story

During the Second Wold War, the German Secrete Services had parachuted two German spies who had studied English at Oxford, who spoke perfect English and well acquainted with British culture. The first evening, both spies go to a pub, and one of them orders something to drink:

- Waiter, two martinis, please.

Then the waiter inquires:

- Yes, dry?

And the German, interpreting the dry as drei, number three in German, corrects him:

Nein, zwei!

The two spies were, of course, unmasked and arrested . . . End of the story.

A third trait deserves special mention: a large part of their lexicon does not belong to the common Indo-European fund, but are specifically Germanic, such as boat, from Old English bat and Old Norse batr; helmet, from Frankish helm (unattested); wife, from Germanic wif (unattested).

Here is a sample of some of these terms in varied domains:

- the sea: boat, ebb, keel, mast, sail, sea, ship, strand

- cardinal points: east, north, south, west

- arms: bow, helmet, shield, sword

- animals: bear, calf, eel, lamb, stork

- domestic life: bone, bread, drink, wife

- institutions: king, knight, thing*

* thing originally meant “judicial assembly”.

• To find Your Way Among Germanic Languages

We’ll proceed as follows:

1. At first a rapid incursion in the Scandinavian languages (represented by Danish);

2. Then the Germanic languages of the West, which comprise on the one hand the varieties of the so-called “Teutonia”, i.e. High German (German per se) and Low German (Dutch as well as the variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium [Flemish]), and on the other, English and Frisian;

3. Finally we’ll take note of the fact that Frisian and English, two Germanic languages closely related at the origin, have known a very different destiny.

• “A furore Normannorum, Libera nos, Domine”

When we think of Scandinavian countries, it’s the name of Vikings that comes to mind. These Vikings, (Map 15) who became famous in English thanks to Beowulf, gained their savage reputation in 793 when they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Scotland. During the two following centuries, the whole of Europe feared their raids and pillaging, so much so that in all churches a single prayer counted: “From the furor of the Norsemen, deliver us, ô Lord.”

These Norsemen were not only cruel plunderers, their expeditions (see map 14) had taken them into the Russian plains, where they had founded the first Russian state (the word Russian comes from Finnish ruotsi and designates the Swedes), and they had finally landed in Sicily after skirting around Turkey and Greece.

They were great traders and ship builders [langskip/kaupskip] (Cf. video on Sweden) with uncommon vitality. As early as the end of the IXth century, they had colonize Iceland (“the island of ice and fire”) and had “discovered” America several centuries before Christopher Columbus.

Finally they became kings and rulers in foreign lands: Dukes of Normandy (at the beginning of the Xth century), kings of Dublin (from 869 to 1000), and Danish kings of England (fom the end of the IXth century to the middle of the XIth).

• Scandinavian Languages: One or Several?

A foreigner is always fascinated when s/he sees the ease with which a Dane, a Norwegian or a Swede can converse together, each one in his own language without the help of an interpreter. A common origin with a non-differentiated language until the IXth century is the reason. After that date, Scandinavian languages evolved in two groups:

- to the east, the branch that led to Old Danish and Old Swedish

- to the west, the more conservative branch of Old Faroese and Old

Norwegian, the latter becoming later on in closer contact with Danish.

The norm for the Danish language was established at the end of the XVIIIth century, but it was a language in its own right at the time of Reformation, which had seen the publication of a Bible in three different languages: Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic. For its part, Norwegian freed itself from the grip of Danish only in the XIXth century. The reason? Danish had been the official language of Norway for almost four centuries. This explains the paradoxical situation of Norwegian which, while adopting the Danish learned vocabulary in its written form, has continued to pronounce it

the Norwegian way. Let’s add that Norwegian pronunciation is much closer to that of Swedish, although the Swedish vocabulary, on the other hand, is quite different. The Scandinavians have found a perfect formula to simplify the question: “Norwegian, it’s Danish pronounced the Swedish way.”

VIII. AROUND DANISH

• Denmark and its Languages:

Population: 5 173 000 inhabitants

Official language: Danish, a North Germanic language

Official Regional Languages: German, Faroese, Groenlandic (inuktitut),

a language of the Eskimo family, official language of Groenland

• Definite article & Glottal Stop

- One of the particularities of the Scandinavian languages is the place of the definite article (-en or -et) placed at the end of the word. Thus the water or das Wasser is said vanded in Danish; barnet = the child; manden = the man.

- Another particularity of Danish is what is called the stød, or glottal stop. This glottal stop is perceived as a sudden stop of the air flow in the throat during the articulation of a vowel, as when you cough. Here is an example: the words gul (yellow) and guld (gold) are pronounced almost identically (the /d/ in guld is silent), except that the prononciation of “yellow” is interrupted by a sort of hiccough between the vowel and the final l. Jokingly, the Danes say: “You don’t speak Danish, you cough it”.

- “Coughed” with infinite softness . . . The added impression of softness comes from the very loose pronounciation of certain consonants, specifically

d, g, and r. If in bade (to bathe) and fløde (fresh cream), one still hears a

hint of a very light d, the words kage (cake) or bage (to cook in the oven) are pronounced as if there was no g between a and e. As for the r consonant, it is articulated at the bottom of the throat, in a very loose manner, which makes it sound like a vowel, especially in certain contexts, for example in: bager (baker), lœre (to learn), or fare (danger).

• Scandinavian Languages and Latin

- Several times in the course of their history, Scandinavian languages have been in contact with Latin. Very early, the Latin of Roman merchants has left common words of everyday life: købe (to buy) from Latin caupo (tavern keeper) and vin (wine), and old borrowing from vinum. This means that the tavern or the bar was already a favorite location to do business . . .

Nil novi sub sole!

- Copenhagen is in fact a half Latin name. The capital of Denmark, København, is the “haven of merchants”; købe (to buy) can be associated with the German verb kaufen and English cheap.

Following Roman traders, Christian missionaries brought in, either Latin words of Greek origin, such as kirke (church or prœst (priest), or purely Latin terms, such messe (mass), from Latin missa, or provst (provost, dean), from Latin propositus.

These Latin contributions continued later on, often by the intermediary of French. As in the rest of Europe, Latin became the sole language of Scandinavian universities. The first university had been created at Uppsala (Sweden) in 1477 and at Copenhagen in 1479.

• Mostly German

The infuence of Low German on Danish from 1250 to 1500 has been compared to that of Norman and French on English in the Middle Ages.

This is not surprising, for Low German was most of all the language of the

Hanseatic League, the commercial association of free towns in northern Germany and neighboring areas, formely organized in 1358 and dissolve in the 17th century. The league opened trading posts in Sweden and Denmark, thus creating close contacts between the peoples of the Baltic and those from Northen Germany. German was also the language of the court of Danemark, where reigned at the time a dynasty of German origin.

In addition to a considerable German lexicon, Low German left Danish with prefixes in be-, er-, for-, such as befale (to order), erklœre (to declare),

forbyde (to forbid) as well as suffixes in -hed or -isk, such as skønhed (beauty),

dramatisk (dramatic), etc.

The Low German influence ceased in the XVIth century, with the Reformation and the apparition of Luther’s Bible, which was written in High German. Danish then enriched its lexicon with new borrowings from this

other language.

• And Frenchmania

In the XVIIIth century, another foreign language attracted the Danes: the French language, the language then par excellence of fashion and diplomacy.

Here is a sample of French words that have made their way in Danish with, sometimes, a particular Danish twist:

Danish from the French

alle (avenue) allée (lane, path)

avis (newspaper) avis (opinion, announcement)

bøf (beefsteak) / steg = roast boeuf (ox & beef)

entré (entrance fee) entrée (entry in general)

lune (caprice) lune (moon)

citronfromage (lemon mousse) citron (lemon) + cheese

flute (bread baguette) flûte (flute & also baguette)

• And now “Englishappy”

From the XIXth century, English “invades” Danish, but according to different modalities as time progresses. Thus kiks (from cakes), strejke (from strike), cykel (from (bi)cycle), were borrowed in the XIXth century, but their spelling was modified in the XXth, so as to make then conformed to Danish.

The most recent borrowings have retained the English spelling, such as computer, design, layout, nylon, sweater, teenager or weekend, with only slight modifications on the Danish model: checke from (to check), droppe (from to drop), etc.

Beware however of some deceptive similarities between words that are very close, such as sky, anger or small. Examples:

Danish English English Danish

sky = cloud sky = himmel

anger = remorse anger = vrede

smal = narrow small = lille

blanket = form (to fill out) blanket = tœppe

English, however, is not the sole source of these “false friends”. The most

troubling example, perhaps in biograph, which has nothing to do with “the writing of one’s life”, but is for the Danes, “the picture of life”, that is to say the cinema. . .

• Family Names in Danish

In the Middle Ages, the name characterized a person, either as being the son of someone, or as practicing a certain trade, or as residing in a specific place. But only the nobles then had the right to transmit their names. The

high bourgeoisie began to adopt family names in the XVIIIth century. The custom of latinizing names was then replaced, in all Scandinavian countries,

by the “frenchification” of family names, thus famed Swedish botanist and originator of system of taxonomic classification, listed in your dictionary as

Carolus Linnæus (1707-1778), bears as his original name: Carl von Linné. . .

When obligation was made to all Danish people, in 1823, to adopt a family name, the result was an incredible proliferation of nouns ended in -sen (son of). (The same thing could be said of Ireland with Mc and Scotland with Mac). Since first names were also in short supply, we have an over-abundance of Christensen, Rasmussen, Jensen or Andersen. And, if you want to talk about the author of the well-known fairy tales, that is Hans Christian Andersen: you’ll spell out his two initials: H. C. Andersen. Because, there are

thousands of Andersens in Denmark!

• To Write in Danish

In addition to the 26 letters of the alphabet, Danish utilizes three supplementary vowels, which are classified after z in their alphabet:

- æ, close to the vowell sound of net. Example: tælle (to tally), æble

(apple), træ (tree);

- ø, close to the sound of French feu (fire or defunct), in møde (to meet), or

the eu sound of peur (fear), as in dør (door);

- å, close to English a of water, for example in hår (hair).

Among recent reforms, that of 1947 abolished in Danish the use of capitals for common names, a habit that, on the German model, had been taken at the beginning of the XVIIIth century. Furthermore, the old written form of aa

(as in the name of Kierkegaard, which has retained its original form) has been replaced by the Swedish letter å, for example in the common name kirkegård (cemetery).

Most x have been replaced by ks, for example in “for eksempel” or in

seks (six). Sex has not changed, though. In Danish as in English it’s spelled the same!

• Danish and the Rest of the World

Danish is not much spoken outside of its borders, but this didn’t prevent other European languages from relying on Danish to name some important stages in the history of humanity. Thus it’s from the Danish terms stenalder, bronzealder, and jernalder that archeologists have translated

- in German: Steinzeit, Bronzezeit, Eisenzeit,

- in English: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age,

- in French: âge de la pierre, âge du bronze, âge du fer.

IX. AROUND GERMAN

A. GERMANY

• Germany and its Languages:

- Population: 81 278 000 inhabitants

- Official language: German, a West Germanic language,

- Official regional language: Danish (South of Jutland and north of Schelswig-Holstein) since 1920

- Other Idioms:

- Germanic: Alemanic, Austro-Bavarian, Frankish, High-Saxon, Low-Saxon, Frisian;

- Slavic: Sorbe

• A Standard Language Without a Birthplace

As in the other countries of Europe, a common language has progressively emerged, in what is today Germany, above the diversity of dialects spoken in the Middle Ages. But, while we can identify Tuscan as the ancestor of Italian or Castilian as the ancestor of Spanish, it’s impossible to localize the ancestor of what is today standard German, which was a written language before being a spoken one. In addition, owing to the political situation of Germany, where existed in the Middle Ages no learning center comparable to what Paris had been for French or London for English, the emergence of a common language was much delayed there, each region retaining an exclusive attachment to its own dialect. The situation was different, however, with regard to a common written form: two attempts at uniformity had already been made, one of which - already mentioned (Hanseatic League) - had taken place in the north.

• The North and the South

In the north, a mixte supra-regional language had taken form as early as the XIIth or XIIIth century. A sort of Low unified German was then born out of the practical needs of the Hanseatic League, which linked economically and commercially the major towns in north Germany to their counterparts in

northern Europe: London or Bruges, but also Visby in Sweden ot Bergen in Norway. This language lost its supra-regional character in Germany toward the end of the XVth century, when began the economic decline of the League.

In the south, it’s only toward the end of the XIVth century that began to be

formed a common language in the central and eastern regions, where the populations spoke various High German dialects. It started there out of the necessity at having a common administrative language that would allow easier communications between the various chancelleries of the Holy German Empire. It seems that the chancellery of Charles IV (1347-1378), whose seat was in Prague (today capital of the Czech Republic), played an important role in the elaboration of a uniformed written language for High German.

• A Note on Low German and High German

Low German, of course, doesn’t mean inferior. It only designates the varieties of Germanic that have developed in the low lands and German plains of Europe, also known as Plattdeusch. High German, on the other hand, developed in the mountainous regions of Central Europe.

• Latin & German

As in all the European countries, Latin had been for centuries the sole written language. Charlemagne’s “Carolingian Renaissance” had taken place in Latin. In the XVth and XVIth century, many German writers wrote only in Latin and, in 1570, seventy percent of printed books were still in Latin. Much later, Leibniz, who died in 1716, still wrote most of his works in Latin (and also in French).

From this fondness for Latin, language of the Holy German Empire and language of the Church, there are many traces today in German, not only in the religious domain, but also in music, for instance, Oktave, fuge, Kontrapunkt or Dizzonanz, or even Takt, which we call in English or in French tempo. Finally, social and university life has retained many Latin terms.

Abitur baccalaureate Aula conference hall

Dekan dean Fakultät faculty

Pensum homeword Datum date

Gymnasium high school Kompendium compendium

interpretieren to explain memorieren to learn by heart

• German, a Written Language (Map 16)

Toward the end of the XIVth century, together with Latin which was still the favorite, a form of written German was elaborated, which was a compromise between the various usages of Middle Germany around the citites of Leipzig, Erfurt and Dresde. Later on, the Augsburg-Ulm region (Bavaria and Bade-Wurtemberg), which had become superior economically, propagated the High German usages that also reach Frankfurt and Cologne in Western Germany.

From 1450, the German language profited also from Gutenberg’s printing discovery, more exactly the inventor of the movable type. From 1454, the production of printed books grew from his printing shop in Mayence.

In the middle of the next century, it’s the language of this same region that Luther, who had studied at Erfurt, chose for the translation of the Bible (1521-1522). But his choice had also another justification: this mixed language, which was already that of the Saxon chancellery, was for Luther the German language that could be understood in Low-Germany as well in High-Germany. In other words, it was a language that stood above the German dialects and, with the diffusion of protestantism, would reach other German-speaking countries.

In the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, this “medium” German slowly entered Austria and Switzerland, where other German varieties for centuries had developed independently. In Prussia (see map 16) however, it won’t be until the XIXth century that the form of High German that had become standard German would be adopted. In this northern region, where Low-German was the common language, High German was for a long time a language people had to learn.

• Spoken German & the Norm

It’s in 1687, at the university of Leipzig, that was given the first course in German. From 1830, with German now compulsory in school, and the creation of the German empire in 1871, its uniformisation became organized.

Spelling is fixed according to a norm made public in 1901 with an Official Dictionary for German Spelling.

• Just a word on the pronunciation of the consonants b, d, g.

It’s somewhat hard to conceive for foreigners that two distinct German words Rat (advice) and Rad (bicycle) are both pronounced with a [t] , or that the last consonant of halb (half) is pronounced as the last consonant of Alp

(elfe). Similarly, Werk (work) and Werg (tow) are both pronounced with a

final [k].

• Wait Patiently for the Verb

German grammar is somewhat more difficult. One needs to wait for the end of the completive sentence to discover the verb, and therefore understand the meaning of the phrase. The suspense can even be cruel, as in the following sentence, which takes up the famous legend of the Hammel flute player who, playing with his instrument, rid the city of their invading mice:

Ich habe gelesen, daß die Mäuse den bösen Bischof,

der sich in einen Turm geflüchtet hatte, auffraßsen.

And yet, the word for word is not that difficult to understand:

“I have read, that the mice the mean bishop,

which one (who) in a tower fled had, devoured.”

But, before hearing or reading the last word, one cannot guess what the mice did to the bishop. . .

The same construction is also found in nominal phrases, as in das von dem Großvater gekaufte Buch, i.e. “the book bought by the grandfather”.

Once again, one has to wait for the main word, one has to be patient.

Does this mean that German-speaking people are especially patient and

always polite? Well, if you watch in Europe the televised debates produced by the French-German cultural channel Arte, where the Germans never interrupt each other, contrary to the opposite habit of the French, you may be right.

Marvellous German syntax able to create politeness and conviviality!

• An Abundant Lexicon

German has also the ability to create compound words without the recourse of prepositions or circumlocutions. Thus Wollpreis is “the price of wool”, die Platzanweiserin, the “usher” in English, is “the one that shows the place”.

This flexibility of the language allows one to make up very long words, the composition of which is surprisingly transparent and the comprehension easy. Thus Rechtschreibereinfachung simply means “simplification of spelling” and Sprachgruppenzugehörisgkeitserklärung stands for “declaration of membership to a linguistic group”.

To this propensity to create long words, especially in the written language, from German or even Latin roots, is added the facility of direct borrowings from other languages. Thus, next to Unvoreingenommenheit “impartiality”,

considered heavy because of its length, one finds Objektivität, easier to handle. Your train ticket may read Fahrkarte (fare card), but the (French) word

Billet will do as well. This double choice of terms makes the German language one that can boast of its lexicon abundance.

• German and French

If German has borrowed heavily from Latin, it’s however with French and English that it has enriched the most its vocabulary.

French words are found in some specific domains:

- military life: Leutnant, Kapitän, General, Regiment, Kaserne, Etappe

- architecture: Fassade, Balkon, Nische, Etage, Mansarde, Garage, Marquise,

Allee (avenue), Chaussee (major road)

- Clothing; Kostüm, Decolleté, Plissee, beige, Garderobe

- Cooking: Bouillon, Omelett, Frikassee, Ragout, Krokette, Dessert, Kasserole, Mus (mousse), Kompott, Baiser (meringue).

If you know some French, you may have noticed that the allée had become an avenue, the chaussée (roadway) a major road, and that the baiser (kiss) has acquired a sweet taste!

Here are some more “faux amis” or false friends:

- Rendez-vous (appointment) > a social engagement with a member of the opposite sex = a date

- mit Manieren (with manners) > “with elegance”

- poussieren > to flirt, to sweet-talk

- fidel (faithful) > gay, happy

• German and English

The attraction of English has become more and more irresistible in the course of the XXth century. After the adoption of clothing items such as Frack, Smoking, or Shorts, there were words taken from music (jazz, swing), from sports (joggen) or the working world (jobben). Sometimes, as explained

previously, hobby is preferred to Leibhaberei or Party to Abendgesellschaft and, often, just exists the English term:

- comic comic strip

- high-tech

- software

- chip

- brain-drain

The Germans also used the expression Fast-Food Gastronomie, which is (at least from a French point of view) a contradiction of terms!

If one examines the contemporary borrowings made from English, one notices that this abundance leads in reality to an increase number of Greek and Latin forms. Such is in fact the characteristics of the major part of the vocabulary that, through American-English, has become international. Thus, to take a word hardly used anymore since the advent of fax machines, the German word Telegramm, an original English word that French transmitted to German, is made of two Greek roots: tele < telos (distance) + gram < gramma, letter and grammë, line. On the other hand, the German word Computer has for linguistic base a Latin verb, computare, but its German written form shows that it was borrowed from English, because if it has been directly created from Latin, it’s the from *Komputator that would have been chosen.

A last example will serve to illustrate the prestige of some English words

in contemporary German. Let’s take the word shop. In German, a shop is not

any shopping place but exactly what is call in English a boutique. Just to prove that the borrowed word always seems the most prestigious.

• German in Switzerland (74,2%) [French 20,6% and Italian 4%]

The schwytzertütsch, the traditional language of the German-speaking region of Switzerland, is a variety of the Alemanic dialect, but the written language remains everywhere standard German. Thus the restaurant menus mix both schwytzertütsch and German quite naturally. For example, Rösti, the typical Swiss dish of grated and rosted potatoes, the same as Güggeli (chicken) or Buuresuppe (country soup) retain their traditional names, whereas roast pork or veal scalopini (escalope de veau) are always designated with their German names: Schweinsbraten and Kalbsscnitzel.

Standard German such as it is heard in Switzerland shows some characteristics of pronounciation, such as rolled r at the tip of the tongue, or the suffix -ig pronounced -ik, but mostly some lexical particularities. For example baccalaureate, Abitur in standard German is said Matur in Switzerland (as well in Austria). Another amusing word is that of Kellöretli for a gusset watch, where you may recognize French: “Quelle heure est-il?”

• German in Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein, small principality [61 sq. mi.], - capital and largest city: Vaduz - not quite as large as Washington D.C. ] is located between Switzerland and Austria, is linked by a customs agreement with the Helvetic Confederation (HC) and is the seat of many international companies [electronics, metal products, textiles, ceramics, pharmaceutical, food products, precision instruments]. German spoken in Liechtenstein is a dialect close to the schwytzertütsch, and, as in Switzerland, standard German is used in administration and all official occasions.

History: Founded in 1719, Liechtenstein was a member of the German Confederation from 1815 to 1866, when it became an independent principality. It abolished its army in 1868 and has managed to stay neutral and undamaged in all European wars since then. In a referendum on July 1, 1984, male voters granted women to right to vote, a victory for Ruler, Prince Hans Adam.

Capital and largest city: Vaduz

B. AUSTRIA

• Facts & Figures:

- Population: 8 013 614 (1996)

- Area: 32, 375 sq miles [slightly smaller than Maine]

- Capital and largest city: Vienna. Other large cities: Graz, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck

- Languages in Austria: German, Slovene, Croatian, Hungarian

• History

Settled in prehistorical times, the Central European land that is now Austria was overrun in pre-Roman times by various tribes, including the Celts. Charlemagne conquered the area in 788 and encouraged colonization and christianity. In 1252, Ottokar, King of Bohemia, gained possession, only to lose the territories to Rudolf of Hapsburg in 1278. Thereafter, until World War I, Austria’s history was largely that of its ruling house, the Hapsburgs.

During World War I, Austria-Hungry was one of the Central Powers with Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and the conflict left the country in political chaos and economic ruin. Austria, shorn of Hungary, was proclaimed a republic in 1918, and the monarchy was dissolved in 1919.

Voters in June 1994 emphatically endorsed membership in the European Union, which took effect on January 1, 1995.

• German in Austria

German spoken in Austria, in both public life or taught in school, is standard German, the sole official language of the country, but the Austrian population in everyday life speaks one of the several Austro-Bavarian dialects, which are High German varieties close to the ones found in Bavaria.

For example, the north and the south of Germany still differ in designating

Saturday, Samstag in the south and Sonnabend in the north, or a man’s tie:

Krawatte in the south and Schlips in the north.

Here are some other lexical elements that differenciate German and :

Austrian vocabulary

Austria Germany

(dinner) Nachtmal Abendessen

(cauliflower) Karfiol Blumenkohl

(candy) Zuckerl Bonbon

(cup) Schale Tasse

(stairs) Stiege Treppe

(ceiling) Plafond Decke

(chair) Sessel Stuhl

• German in Belgium

German is spoken in a very small area in eastern Belgium (in the cantons of St-Vith, Malmédy) on the German border, in territories that successively belonged to 1. France, 2. Spain, 3. the Netherlands, 4. Austria & Prussia, and were occupied by Germany during World War II.

• German in Luxembourg (Map 17)

- Population: 406 901 (1996)

- National Name: Grand-Duché de Luxembourg [999 sq miles]

- “Official” languages: According to the 1948 Constitution, there is no official language per se, but French, German and Luxembourgish play the roles of national languages used complementarily:

- French, taught from the age of seven and used by the administration and the

writing of laws

- Luxembourghish, spoken by all Luxembourgeois

- German, school language before the age of seven and much present in the press.

Note: It’s in school that the passage from unilinguism [Luxembourgish] to trilinguism (Luxembourgish-German-French). A good example of this natural trilinguism is offered in the tribunals: testimonies are presented in Luxembourgish, speeches for the defense (plaidoiries) in French, and the verdict is rendered in German!

The language of well-known RTL (Radio-Television-Luxembourg) is French, but other radio stations welcome the three languages.

X. AROUND DUTCH

• The Netherlands: Facts & Figures

- Kingdom of the Netherlands

- Sovereign: Queen Beatrix (1980) - Premier: Win Kok (1994)

- Area: 16, 033 sq. mi. [About twice the size of New Jersey]

- Population: 15 531 940 (1966)

- Capital: Amsterdam

- Other large cities: Rotterdam, The Hague (seat of Goverment), Utrecht, Eindhoven

- National Name: Koninkrijk der Nederlanden

(The Dutch airline company, KLM stands for Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, i.e “Royal Air Company”)

• History

Julius Caesar found the low-lying Netherlands inhabited by German tribes - the Nervii, Frisii, and Batavi. The Batavi on the Roman frontier did not submit to Rome’s rule until 13 B.C., and then only as allies.

A part of Charlemagne’s empire into the 8th and 9th centuries A.D., the area later passed into the hands of Burgundy and the Austrian Hapsburgs, and finally in the 16h century came under Spanish rule.

When Philip II of Spain suppressed political liberalities and the growing Protestant movement in the Netherlands, a revolt led by William of Orange (known also as William the Bastard) broke out in 1568. Under the union of Utrecht (1579), the seven northern provinces became the Republic of the United Netherlands.

The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, and by the end of the 17th century Holland was one of the great sea and colonial power of Europe.

The nation’s independence was not completely established until after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), after which the country’s rise as a commercial and maritime power began. In 1814, all the provinces of Holland and Belgium were merged into one kingdom, but in 1830 the southern provinces broke away to form the Kingdom of Belgium. A liberal constitution was adopted by the Netherlands in 1848.

In spite of its neutrality in World War II, the Netherlands was invaded by the Nazis in May 1940, and the East Indies were later taken by the Japanese.

The nation was liberated in May 1945. In 1948, after a reign of 50 years, Queen

Wilhelmina resigned and was succeeded by her daughter Juliana.

In 1949, after a four-year war, the Netherlands granded independence to the East Indies, which became the Republic of Indonesia. In 1963 it turned over the western half of New Guinea to the new nation, ending 300 years of presence in Asia. Attainment of independence by Surinam on Nov. 25, 1975,

left the Dutch Antilles as the Netherlands’ only overseas territory.

• Dutch & Deutsch

How did these two words, of same Germanic origin, have arrived at designating the Dutch language and the German language?

To understand this curiosity, one must go back to the times of the Roman , Empire, when Germanic populations had been progressively romanized (or

latinized). To designate without ambiguïty the Germanic language in the regions where Latin had become the language of administration and culture, where the local population continued to speak their Germanic dialects,

was used the term theudisk i.e. “belonging to the people”. Thus in 842,

it is in teudisca lingua (popular language) that the Oaths of Strasbourg were

presented to the soldiers of Louis-the-Germanic, and it’s the Medieval Latin teudiscus that gave tedesco in Italian (and the literary tudesque in French). Thus we find theudisk at the origin of deutsch in German and Dutch in English. All these terms, theudisk, tedesco, deutsch refer only to German. The word Dutch also meant German until the end of the XVIth century. It’s only when the Netherlands became an independent country that the word Dutch in the XVIIth century came to mean the language of the seven United-Provinces of the times. For the English, across the channel, the people of the Netherlands were the Germanic or Dutch populations with whom they were

in closest contact and whom they name the Dutch.

• Holland, Netherlands, Flemish?

Because Holland was in the XVIIth century the most prosperous province of the Netherlands, people from the Holland province were those who were the most in contact with the other countries. From this period dates the habit for foreigners (and Dutch people as well) to identify Holland with the Netherlands, and to make no difference between “hollandais” and “Dutch” when it comes to the language.

If one wanted to be exact, one would have to distinguish between:

- standard Dutch, also called A.B.N., Algemeen Beschaafdt Nederlands

{General Educated Dutch), which is the same official language in the Netherlands and in Belgium

- the Holland dialect, that is the regional variety of the Holland provinces,

in the same way as “Brabançon” is the dialectal variety of the Brabant province in Belgium. (The national hymn of Belgium has for name in French “La Brabançonne”)

- Flemish, a term that covers loosely the spoken varieties in the provinces of Flanders in Belgium and in France.

• As seen on the map, (Belgium & the Netherlands, Map 18), the line of separation between Dutch and German (to the north) and French (to the south) Belgium that can be traced just about the middle of Belgium.

(Although in Flemish (Dutch) territory, Brussels is a bi-lingual capital).

• Three points of departure for the Dutch language

As was the case for most languages of Europe, three groups of populations

have contributed to the creation of the Dutch language. Chronologically they are the Celts, the Romans, and Germanic tribes finally submitted by the Franks.

1. The Celts, with traces of their presence in toponyms, such as the name of the city of Nimegue < Noviomagus “new market”, or in very ancient terms, such as ambt (function), which we find in the word ambassade (embassy) or ambassador in English)

2. The Romans whose occupation of the territory put the Germanic tribes that settled there in contact with Latin and introduced many everyday terms in the future Dutch vocabulary. If such a simplification makes sense, we can say that the Romans taught the Nervii, Frisii, and Batavi, who subsequently were submitted by the Franks, to use the flail (Dutch vlegel < Latin flagellus), the fork (Dutch vork < Latin furca), to make butter (Dutch boter < Latin butyrum) and cheese (Dutch kaas < Latin caesus). Abandoning their huts, they taught them how to build houses surrounded by walls (Dutch muur < Latin murus), covered with tiles (Dutch tegel <Latin tegula) and with a granary (Dutch zolder <solarium). It’s also to Latin that Dutch owes many terms of everyday life:

- straat < via strata (paved road)

- molen < molina (mill)

- kool (cabbage) < caulis (stem of a plant)

- wijn (wine) < vinum

- kelder (cellar) < cellarium (pantry)

- keuken (kitchen) < coquina

In addition, with the evangelization of the country, which began in the

VIIth century, a new influx of Greco-Latin terms enriched the lexical stock:

- engel < angelos (angel) - dom (cathedral) < domus

- bisschop < episcopus - brief (letter) < brevis

- leek (lay person) < laicus - inkt (ink) < encaustum

- schrijven (*to write) < scribere - peterselie (**parsley) < petroselinon

* the English verb to write comes from Germanic writan (unattested), to tear, to scratch, whereas scribere gave, via Medieval Latin scribillare, to scribble

** parsley in English is derived from Old French perresil

(petroselinon, rock parsley is made of petra, rock + selinon, celery).

3. The differenciation between the Germanic dialects of the region began only after the division of Charlemagne’s kingdom between his three grandsons. The Low Countries were first part of Lotharingia, then part of

the Holy GermanEmpire.

In the Middle Ages, people from the low lands had already separated themselves from the other Germanic peoples by a characteristic in their

pronounciation: whereas we say “old” in English and “alt” in German - with an -l- maintained in both languages, the future Dutch language already said

“oud” (pronounced [awd]).

Thus if you know words in English or in German ending by an -l- and

followed by a consonant, you can guess their equivalent form in Dutch:

English German Dutch

gold Gold goud (like Gouda)

old alt oud

cold kalt koud

salt Salz zout

to hold halten houden

bolt Bolzen bout

shoulder Schultzer schouder.

• The Predominance of Flanders & Brabant (XIIth - end of the XVth century)

The XIIIth century saw the prosperity of the Flemish and textile cities of Bruges (Flemish Brugge), the capital of West Flanders (norwestern Belgium), Ypres, or Gant (Ghent). Bruges, in particular, had become in the XIVth century one of the financial centers of Europe where money exchanges took place in the palace of the Van der Bursen family, the front of which was

adorned with three “bourses” i.e. purses (from Latin bursa). What is called in English the Stock Exchange or the Stock Market is named in Romance languages la Bourse in France or la Bolsa in Spanish and Italian, as a direct borrowing from the der Burse family.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the Low Countries speak a standard language based on the dialect of the city of Brussels which, at the time, is a

Germanic-speaking city. (Today Brusssels is a bilingual city (French-Dutch) located in Flemish territory).

• The Golden Century : XVIth century

Although the printing invention is generally credited to Johannes Gutenberg, between 1436 and 1440, in Strasbourg. (The first printed Bible

- so called the Mazarin Bible - because it had belonged to Mazarin, is dated

1450), a Holland precursor, Laurens Janszoon, named Coster and born in

Haarlem, as early as 1423, had sculpted on woods the first movable types.

The printing industry aided considerably the diffusion of the future Dutch language. The city of Anvers (Antwerpen) very early took the lead in the new technique, and in the south as well in the north the dialectal forms of the

Barabant region became a kind of model reference for the written language.

After the domination of the linguistic usages from Flanders and Brabant, from the XIIth to the end of the XVth century, the prosperity of the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam contributed to the diffusion of the dialects spoken in the two provinces of Holland. Although the Church and the University had remained faithful to Latin - Erasmus (1439-1536) wrote in Latin, famous printers created centers at Delft, Utrecht, Leyde and Haarlem in the north. These printers helped the diffusion of a new tongue that is called

Nederduytsch (Neder - duytsch). The latter part of the word is the evolved form of theudish, “belonging to the people”, preceded by Neder “low”, that we find in Nederland.

This is the language, which took shape in Holland in the second part of the XVIth century, that constituted the base of the ABN (Algemeen Beschaafdt Nederlands) or standard Dutch, and affirmed itself as a full-fledge language in the XVIIth century.

• French, German, and English Borrowings

-1685 : Revocation of the Edict de Nantes by Louis XIV. French Huguenots are no longer permitted to practice their religion freely. Thus began the

exodus (not only to the Netherlands or to Germany but also to New York and New England) of many French nobles fleeing the religious intolerance of their homeland. Amsterdam, Haarlem and La Haye became centers of cultural life from where are propagated novel linguistic forms grafted onto French words. Thus we have the suffixes in

-tie or -sie (modeled on French -tion or sion): generatie, infectie, inflatie, etc.

- antie or entie (modeled on French -ance, -ence): antiquiteit, capaciteit,

formaliteit, specialiteit, etc.

- eren (modeled on French -er): accepteren, factureren, garenderen (to guarantee), introduceren, manicuren, etc.

- eus (modeled on French -eux): mysterieus, nerveus, serieus, and also

modieus (which doesn’t exist in French and means “à la mode” = in fashion).

- With the XIXth century began a real interest for vernacular Dutch (in the sense of the standard native language of a country), interest that was marked by the creation of the first chair for the Dutch language at the university of Leyde in 1797. This is also the time when the influence of German took over that of French. Here are some borrowings from German (dating from after the Reformation):

in-zwang fashionable kitsch pretentious bad taste,

especially in the arts

schmink make-up tijdschrift magazine

- Here are now some borrowings from English (especially since the end of

Word War II)

- chechen dancing dance hall

- plannen smoking dinner jacket, tuxedo

- relaxen starten to leave

English is undoubtedly the language from whichDutch has been borrowing the most for the last thirsty years. On television, American series and English programs are shown is their original version with subtitles, which greatly

contribute to interferences from one language to the other.

Just as an aside and to demonstrate once more that languages are like sponges, French also borrowed from Dutch. Thus we have, for example:

- bouquin (familiar term for book), from boekelkijn “little book”

- boulevard, from bolwerk “fortification”

- kermesse, from kermisse, formed on kerk “church” + misse “mass”

- matelot (sailor), from mattenoot, originally “companion” (genoot”) The Dutch, in turn, borrowed the word from the French in the XVIIIth century

under the form matroos.

We also find vocabulary of Dutch origin in German, Russian, Japanese, as well as in English.

Besides the borrowings from the nautical vocabulary (skipper, yatcht), or more general, like landscape, English has retained some strange expressions,

pejorative expressions to be exact, going back to the times when the commercial rivality between the two maritime countries must have created

some tensions:

- Dutch wife = perhaps ? shrewish wife

- double Dutch = gibberish, gobbledygook

- to talk like a Dutch uncle = to talk harshly

and we use commonly the expression: to go Dutch

As you know, the name of the city of New York has remained Nieuw Amsterdam until 1667, and old plans of the city attest that Wall Street, Broadway or Long Island are just the translation of Walstraat, Breede Weg

or ’t Long Eiland. ( ’t stands for the abbreviation of the definite article het,

whereas ’n is the abbreviation of indefinite article een).

Finally, it should be added that a simplified form of Dutch is the second

language of 4 000 000 Afrikaanders. Africaans has been, since 1925, with English one of the two official langues of South Africa, where it is the native tongue of 60% of whites and 90% of people of color.

The Dutch language is also one of the official languages of Belgium, where it is spoken by 6 000 000 people, as well as a minority language in the extreme north of the département du Nord, where it is known under the name of flamand, or westvlaamsch (west Flemish).

XI. AROUND ENGLISH

A. UNITED KINGDOM of Great Britain & Ireland (map 19)

• Facts & Figures:

- Population: 58 49 975 (1966)

- Area: 94 247 sq mi [twice the size of New York State]

- Capital & other large cities: London (6 679 699), Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bradford, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol.

- Languages: English, Wesh, Scots =Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish

• Early History

Roman invasions of the first century B.C. brought Britain into contact with the Continent. When the Roman legions withdrew in the fifth century

A.D., Britain fell pray to invading hordes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from Sandinavia and the Low Countries. Seven large kingdoms were established and the original Britons (of Celt origin) were forced into Wales and Scotland. It was not until the tenth century that the country finally became united under the kings of Wessex. Following the death of Edward the Confessor (1066), a dispute about the succession arose, and William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England, defeating the Saxon King, Harold II, at the Battle of Hastings (1066). The Norman conquest introduced Norman law and feudalism ... as well as Anglo-Norman language to the court of England

(whose motto remains the French “Dieu et mon Droit”, which means:

“Dieu est [la source de mon] droit” (My God-given right)

• How Few are Celtic Terms in Britain

There seems to be a kind of reluctance to integrate Celtic elements in the language. For example, even when searching well, one finds less than twenty ancient Celtic words in English, and linguists always quote the same examples: crag, tor, coomb (valley), or the name of Puck that we find in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This reluctance has continued through the centuries and, besides the words plaid and slogan, borrowed from Scottish Gaelic in the XVIth century, or whisky in the XVIIIth, the most recent borrowings seem to retain an element of regional quaintness; for example the pretty word colleen from Irish Gaelic, or sporran i.e. the leather or fur pouch worn at the front of the kilt by Scottish Highlanders. (The word comes from Late Latin bursa, bag, from Greek, leather, hide). As for the words dolmen and menhir, they come either from Breton (probably via French) or from Cornish.

If one wants to find “Celtic souvenirs” in the regions where the Celtic languages have disappeared, one needs to look into toponyms i.e. names of rivers or of places.

For example, when the words are composed of one element, often they evoke water, as it’s the case for Dover, from Celtic dubris (water), Avon

(river), Exe (water), Trent (river prone to flooding), etc. More common are hybrid words such as Gloucester, Worcester or Dorchester, in which the first element is Celtic and the second, Latin. Under the form -cester or -chester, one guesses the Latin castra (camp, fortified place). It’s under this disguised form that in Exeter can be recognized Exe- meaning water. Similarly, in Lincoln, the prefix lin- (pond) is of Celtic origin whereas -coln is the evolution of Latin colonia (colony).

In some toponyms, Celtic names are combined with Germanic forms. Such is the case of Canterbury or Salisbury, in which -bury represents the evolution of a Germanic form designating at first a fortress. In Lichfield,

-field is Germanic and -lich Celtic. Etymologically, a lichfield was “a field on the edge of a grey forest”.

One suspects that Celts and Saxons didn’t intermingle very much

and didn’t understand each other’s languages. What leads to this observation is the fact that some toponyms, such as Cheetwood (Lancashire) or Brill (Lincolnshire) are in fact tautology: both cheet and wood mean forest, the first in Celtic and the second in Germanic. As for brill, it’s the contraction of Celtic bre (hill) and Germanic hill. It seems that the second term was necessary to understand the first. (More on these doublets later).

Finally, as already mentioned, the term Wales is from welisc, the Saxon for foreigner, which gave Welsh. For their part, the Celts lumped all their enemies under the names of Saxons. This latter appellation was later on replaced by that of Angles, and their language named Englisc. But it’s only from the year 1000 that the country took the name of Engla-land (the land of the Angles) . .

• Angles or Angels?

This play on words was created by the future pope Gregory the Great, who, according to Bede the Venerable (673-731) (who tells the story) is at the origin of England’s conversion to christianity. Noticing on the Roman market young and pretty slaves with blond hair, and having been told that they were

Angles, Gregory immediately declared that their names suited well their “angelic” faces.

Faithful to his word, when he became pope, he sent in 597 Augustine and fifty other monks to evangelize the Kent region, where there was already a small Christian community. Three months later, the king was baptized and, seven years later, the whole kingdom of Kent was christian.

• Bis Repetita Placent (“Things said twice are pleasing”)

As mentioned earlier, on a territory “shared” between Celts and Romans, then Celts and Saxons and Scandinavians, then Saxons and Normans, intercommunication was not a givem. Hence the existence of numerous tautological forms, which are in fact juxtaposed translations of the same word: mansionhouse; haphazard; or even more explicit courtyard.

It’s probably also from the need to be better understood that were created expressions where both terms are practically synomymous. Here are a few examples:

part and parcel first and foremost

lo and behold odds and ends

far and away (the best) hue and cry

hale and hearty ways and means

hue and cry lord and master

The Latin proverb quoted above, “bis repetita placent”, must have been

invented for the English language! We constantly come across doublets (English and French or vice-versa) such as liberty and freedom, deep and profound, etc. (more on this later).

• Talking About Latin

Traces of the Celtic languages may be rare in English, but there is no English sentence where one doesn’t recognize words of Latin origin.

One could imagine that the long Roman presence on the whole territory below the Hadrian Wall (built in 122 A.D.) or the Antonius Wall (built in 139) had contributed to impose the Latin language to the population, but nothing of the sort took place. The Romans - builders par excellence - had

constructed important roads (we should say streets, since strata means paved road), such as Ermine Street, The Fosse Way, and especially Watling Street, the most famous, which linked London to Chester. They also had created cities, such as Chester, Leicester, Lincoln or Eburacum (York), where

economic and political power had indeed concentrated. But centers or foci of Latinization remained only in the cities, and outside of these urban centers, Latin had remained a “foreign language” to the insular Celts, who soon would be confronted to the arrival of Germanic tribes.

The Romans withdrew from England in 410, and the first Anglo-Saxons landings took place in 449. It’s through their intermediary that the first elements of the Latin lexicon entered the English language; a vocabulary that Germanic peoples had themselves acquired before leaving the continent.

Among these very ancient borrowings from Latin, which we find in modern English, dominate terms that recall, for example, the Roman origin of:

- new products: copper < cuprum

- new techniques: street (paved road) < strata; wall < vallum (fence)

- inch < uncia (the twelfth part of a whole)

- new types of foods: cheese < caesus; wine < vinum; plum < prunum

- new “ways of life” (or is it yet “art de vivre”?): cup < cuppa (large wooden vase) ; dish < discus (tray) ; kitchen <coquina ; pillow < pulvinus.

The adjectif cheap goes back to Latin caupo (innkeeper). There is still in London a city street named Cheapside, meaning “the market side”. It’s from the same caupo that comes the German verb kaufen (to buy).

From the end of the VIth century, new borrowings from Latin increased in English as a result of the conversion of Great Britain to Christianity, which took place from two centers of diffusion: in 563, Saint Colomban, who had come from Ireland with 12 companions, founded a monastery in the small island of Iona, in the northwest part of the country, from where were sent missionaries to Scotland, while in 597, sent from Rome, (as mentioned earlier), the monk Augustine established himself in Kent, where the monastery of Canterbury was to become a renowned place of pilgrimage.

Religious life brought in many terms, for example the vocabulary of

- religious life: abbot, psalter, bishop, alms, pope, monk, nun, etc.

- school life: school, verse, master, provost <praepositus “one placed

before” (and therefore “presides”).

• Just for Fun: Why d for pence or £ for pound? or what’s Gatwick?

Answer: Simply because these abbreviations are not those of an English word, but a Latin word.

d = denarii > pence, but since 1971, the abbreviation is instead of d.

s = solidi (French sou) > shillings

£ = librae > pounds

Other Latin initials are common in modern English:

i.e. = id est

e.g. = exemplum gratia or v.g. = verbum gratia

viz = videlicet (namely) [the z of viz is not the letter z, but just an ancient

abbreviation sign pronounced as a z]

The name of the London Gatwick airport is also a good example of the many hybrid Latino-Germanic compositions. It is composed of gat where

an etymologist can recognize the word goat (of Germanic origin) and -wick

(of Latin origin), from vicus, meaning village, which often carried the meaning of farm. So Gatwick is nothing more than an old “goat farm”!

Now, can you guess what the following names stand for?

Cowick, Butterwick, Chiswick, Honeywick, Bewick or Fenwick.

(The only one you may not know is Fenwick, where fen- stands for marsh).

• The Paradox of English

On these islands where Latin had been for three and a half centuries the language of people in power without taking anything away from the secular attachment of local populations to the Celtic languages of their ancestors, fate - for lack of of a better word - resulted in the fact that another language, of Germanic origin this time, succeeded in implanting itself: the language of the new invadors: the Jutes (from Danemark), who settled in Kent in the Vth century, the Angles (from southern Danemark), the Saxons (from Northern Germany), as well as the Frisians (from the actual Netherlands, map 18).

First settled on the eastern and southern coast of England, these Germanic peoples made their way inside the country, pushing away Celtic language populations toward the west (Cornwall, Wales) and the north (Scotland), or chasing them away toward the Irish coast and to French Brittany.

Three centuries later, the language that had taken form on the British Isles was quite different from the language of the other Germanic peoples who had

settled on the European continent.

• English Resembles Frisian

One trait in particular distinguished English from other Germanic idioms and made it resemble Old-Frisian: a particular evolution of the pronunciation of the Germanic /k/. Whereas this consonant has remained [k] in Danish or in German, it has evolved in ch in English: chin is said Kinn German and kind in Danish. Compare cheese, chalk, cheap, church with their cognates in German or Danish, even though church comes from Greek and cheese and cheap from Latin.

• Scandinavian elements in English

Many terms of everyday life have a Germanic or Scandinavian origin. Here is a brief selection:

- verbs: to get, to give, to hit, to cut, to lift, to take, to cast, to withdraw, to raise, to trust

- nouns: leg, skull, root, egg, steak, knife, dirt, birth, anger, or window (from

vindauga = eye of the wind)

- adjectives: low, weak, meek, ugly, ill, odd, rotten, tight, flat, or awkward.

Among the first borrowings, we find the word that gave husband, which at the origin designated “the master of the house”. We recognize in hus- the

Germanic common form that gave house, and a form of modern Danish, bonde (land owner), which reminds us of the importance of rural life under Scandinavian domination.

When the Anglo-Saxons borrowed the word fellow from the Vikings, the term meant “the one who “laid” money in an association”: in fellow, there is fee + to lay.

Other changes of sense have taken place for words of common Germanic origin, which already existed in Old English. For example, the word that became dream meant joy for the Vikings ; bread changed from a a piece, a morsel to a piece of bread and to the loaf itself. The Scandinavian form to die replaced the old verb to starve, which became to die from hunger. Finally, the adjectif wrong first meant crooked.

Oftentimes, the Scandinavian term has not completely supplanted the Ango-Saxon one, and both forms have been retained, without sometimes a nuance in meaning. Thus wish (Ango-Saxon) has remained in addition to

want (of Scandinavian origin); or the two words hide and skin. Other examples are supplied with words such as craft (Anglo-Saxon) and skill

(Scandinavian), or to rear and to raise, less and loose, from and fro, or

again whole and hale, which is retained in the expression hale and hearty.

In summary, Scandinavian influence has been quite profound on the English language, and you may be surprised to learn that there are more than 1400 names of places in England that reflect their Scandinavian origin, with

about 600 names ending in -by (indicating settlement). Thus Derby was at the origin “deer farm” and Rugby, “rook farm”.

Here are a few other examples where we can compare places with names

of Scandinavian origin and names of Saxon origin:

Scandinavian Origin Saxon Origin

- beck (brook) - don (hill)

Caldbeck “cold brook” (Wimbledon)

- by (settlement, farm) - ing (resident of)

Rugby “rook (crow) farm” (Reading)

- thwaite (cultivated land) - stowe (sacred or gathering

Braithwaite / Allithwaite place) Christow

- skill (hill) - ton (“farm” than “village”

Ranskill (“Raven hill”) Brighton

• A Memorable Date: 1066

After defeating Harold, the Saxon King, at Hastings in 1066, William the Norman, once he became king of England, installed his court there. He named French bishops in the cathedrals and French abbots in the monasteries, and distributed lands to gentilshommes (noblemen) who

came from France as well. Thus, progressively, English disappeared from the court of England to the advantage of French, and a long silence reigned over written English, replaced by Latin, the erudite language of both Norman and Saxon nobles.

The situation of England was then quite particular, with three languages on its territory, which were not distributed geographically, but divided in three strata, like three hierarchically superposed layers, with Latin being having the monopoly of knowledge and of the written form, French the language of elegance and of the ruling class, and English, in its various forms, the language of common people. Testimonies on this vertical type of separation are numerous. Toward the end of the XIIIth century, the historian Robert of Gloucester complained that only the people who spoke French were esteemed or well considered.

The split was so neat that the fact of speaking one or the other language was an infallible mark of one’s social class. Under the reign of King Richard

Coeur de Lion (the Lion-Hearted), at the end of the XIIth century, the bishop

William of Ely, who had fallen into disgrace, learned it at his own expense.

Attempting to leave England, under the disguise of a woman with, a piece of cloth under his arm in the manner of the merchants of the time, and having arrived sans problèmes at Dover, he was caught there, because he was unable to answer in English when a prospective buyer asked him how much he wanted for the cloth he had brought along for his disguise.

The trilinguism of English of the country did not correspond in a person who could speak the three languages. Latin was the sole written language, and everyone, it seems, spoke only his or her own language: English for the larger part of the population and French for the ruling classes as well as people engage in commerce and trade, so much more so that many merchants and crafstmen had come from France and settled in England.

• Anglo-Norman

Let’s not forget that when Guillaume le Conquérant, William I, known as “the Conqueror”, who led the Norman conquest, the language of his companions was not yet French, but Norman. In 1066, the langue d’oïl was still just a modest patois in a little region in Ile de France, around Paris. This is the reason why the first English borrowings bear the mark of their Norman (more exactly their Norman-Picard origin), which we call Anglo-Norman, while later ones reflected a new situation, when the Ile-de-France dialect expanded in the XIIth and XIIIth century to become the common language of the French kingdom.

There are in English, for example, a whole series of words still bearing the Norman mark, an initial w, when the French term had then - or still has today - a g. Thus is the case for the following words:

wafer French, gaufrette

wage French, gages

war French, guerre

warden French , gardien

warrant French, garantie

waste French, gaspiller (to waste) and gâter (to spoil)

Later borrowings no longer bore the Norman mark, but that of French: thus, next to warrant, we also have in English guarantee, a term borrowed from French at a much later date; the same as we have guardian in addition to warden. In both examples, the u in guarantee or in guardian has remained

as a witness of French borrowing without being pronounced in either language.

Another criterion allows us to recognize, for words that in Latin included

- ca -, borrowings from Norman: the presence in English words of the [k] consonant, instead of the Frech ch. Thus the verbs to catch and to chase come both from Latin captiare, the first via Norman and the second via French. The word cattle gave in French cheptel (heads of cattle), a word

later on borrowed by the legal langage under the form of chattels, to means

an article of personal, movable property (French: “biens meubles”, in opposition to “biens immeubles” i.e. real estate). Similarly, the word case came from Anglo-Norman whereas the French form is châsse (reliquary, shrine, not to be confused with chasse (hunting). Finally, to cancel has retained its /k/, whereas the word chancellor, first attested under the form canc(h)eler, later lost its initial /k/ to become chancellor.

Here are a few other examples of words with a Latin origin borrowed either from Norman-Picard or from French:

Norman-Picard French

market merchant

castle to change

to carry chapel

case chain

to escape chair

cauldron chamber

• The Double Filiation of English

Thanks to this double filiation, Latin on one side - via Norman and French - and Germanic on the other, English very often can afford the luxury of having two words when other languages have only one.

For those whose native tongue is not English, here is a brief sampling of the amazing lexical possibilities of English.

Verbs Nouns

to begin to commence bill beak

to bother to annoy blossom flower

to clothe to dress bough branch

to did to perish folk people

to end to finish inner interior

to feed to nourish lookin-glass mirror

to fight to combat might power

to give up to abandon outer exterior

to help to assist/ to aid share part

to hide to conceal spell enchantment

to hinder to prevent weqriness lassitude

to keep back to retard wish desire

to look dor to search for wits reason

to overcome to vanquish work labor

to put up with to tolerate

to rise to mount Adjectives

to shun to avoid blunt brusque

to spit to expecgtorate clever intelligent

to take to apprehend darling favorite

to win to gain deep profound

hazy vague

hearty cordial

holy saint

Adverbs loney solitary

indeed in fact loving amorous

raw crude

You’ll have noticed that words of Germanic origin are always more common and familiar, whereas words of Latin or French origin are more

literary.

The opposite is less frequent. However, we have an example in dale, more poetic than valley, yet of Latin origin. We also have deed (Anglo-Saxon), more literary than action or exploit (both of Latin origin). Remember: there are no rules without exceptions!

The existence of two sources in the English vocabulary allows not only for stylistic effects but also for useful nuances and distinctions. The example that has marked the most the imagination is that of the distinction in English between a living animal - swine, saw, pig, cow, calf, sheep, all of Germanic origin - and the same animal known as the meat on the table - pork, beef, veal, mutton, all borrowed from French. This particularity was made fampus in 1819 by Walter Scott in the following extract of Ivanhoe.

• “Pork is good Norman-French” and “Beef, a very French gallant”

In Walter Scott’s novel, there is this unexpected lesson of English vocabulary:

- A advise thee, said Amba, [. . .] to leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort.

- The swine turned Normans to my comfort! quoth Gurth; expound that to me, Amba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles.

- Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about their four legs? demanded Wamba.

- Swine, fool, swine, said the herd, every fool knows that.

- And swine is good Saxon, said the Jester; but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels like a traitor?

- Pork, answered the swineherd.

- I am very glad every foold knows that too, said Amba, and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha? . . . [. . .]

- [ . . .] There is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou. but becomes Beef, a very French gallant, when he arrives before the worhipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.

to England.

• Just for Fun:

New trades had developed with the Norman occupation, and their names bear witness of their French origin. For example, can you recognize the six words that have a Norman or French origin among the list of more traditional professions that have retained their Anglo-Saxon form?

baker butcher

carpenter fisherman

joiner mason

miller painter

saddler shepherd

shoemaker smith

tailor weaver

wheelright

Butcher, carpenter, joiner, mason, painter and tailor are of Norman or French origin. Did you know that, in French, a boucher designated at the origin the seller of goat (bouc) meat. In the word joiner, there is the connotation of the craftsman joining together pieces of wood. The same as Taylor stands for French tailleur, the patronymic Bollinger stands for boulanger (baker).

• The Effects of a Prolongued Bilinguism

Up until the beginning of the XIIIth century, relations between England and France were close, so much more so that the kings of England were at the same time dukes of Normandy. Not only did the whole aristocracy and high clergy spoke French, but, as mentioned before, merchants and crafstmen had moved to England.

Henry II Plantagenet, King of England and already Comte d’Anjou and

the Maine province, enlarged considerably his kingdom by marrying Aliénor of Aquitaine in 1152: his domains spread then on the whole of Western France, from the Channel to the Pyrenees. Furthermore, almost all English nobles possessed estates in both countries, which contributed to exchanges with England.

This did not mean that exchanges between the two communities were without problems. There are traces of this in English literature, with conversations half French, half English, like the following example taken from one Shakespeare’s plays.

• En “bilingue” dans le texte (Extract from Henry V, Act V, scene 2)

The scene is taking place in 1420, in Troyes (Champagne region), between the king of England, Henry V, who defeated the French at Azincourt, and was to become King of France and England, and Katharine, a French princess and daughter of French king Charles VI, whom he wants to marry. Alice, the lady’s companion, who is French also, serves as an interpreter:

Henry Then, I will kiss your lips, Kate.

Katharine Les dames et les demoiselles pour être baisées devant leurs

noces, il n’est pas la coutume de France.

Henry Madam my interpreter, what says she?

Alice Dat it is not to be de fashon pour les ladies of France, - I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish.

Henry To kiss.

Alice Your majestee entendre bettre que moi.

Henry It is not fashion for the maids in France to kiss before they are married, would she say?

Alice Oui, vraiment.

Note: The following extract is rated R. Shakespeare wasn’t one to pass up the chance of a jeu de mots either, least of all if it presented the opportunity for a little smut. Take the passage in the same act where Katharine is now trying to learn English from Alice. To Katharine’s inquiry, “Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?” (How do you say foot and gown?” the maid replies, to her mistress’s horror, “De foot, madame, et de coun.”

Apart from the more obvious ‘de coun’, Shakespeare knew perfectly well that foutre was the exact equivalent of the obscene f word.

Paulo majora canamus. (‘Let us sing about more lofty things’ or Let us move on to a more elevated subject.

• When French Yields its Place

In the XIIIth century, the French language, which by then had greatly expanded beyond the limits of Ile-de-France, was becoming for France and soon for Europe the language of culture and refinement. It stil retained a preponderant place in England, where at the same time was appearing a growing interest for English, which finally won over French by the end of the XIVth century. From then on, even in the English nobility, French will no longer be a language spoken from childhood, but a language that must be learned as a foreign language. This new situation is confirmed by the many textbooks on the teaching of French in England, as well as the first French grammar ever written in English and the many French-English translations that appeared until the middle of the XIVth century.

Several reasons have been offered to explain this reversal, in particular the great plague of the middle of the XIVth century, known in England as the Black Death. There was also the “One Hundred Year War” (1337-1453), which had accelerated the decline of the daily use of French. Finally, from 1349 on, professors at Oxford did their teaching in English, and the Parliament opened its session in English for the first time in 1362.

In short, by the end of the XIVth century, English was England’s tongue.

• With Chaucer (1340-1400), the decline of Old English

In the Canterbury Tales, it’s relatively easy to read the description of the pilgrims, and in particular that of the knight:

He was a verray parfit gentil knyght

in which you recognize easily the French forms parfit (parfait = perfect) and gentil (of noble birth). In the adjective verray, you need to see vrai (true, veritable), which later on became the adverb very.

• Culture & Religion at the Service of English

Another element, religious this time, must have played a role in favor of the diffusion of English: with the Reformation, not only was the teaching monopoly taken away from the clergy - who spoke Latin -, but the translation of the New Testament in English in 1525 enhanced the prestige attached to English. Thus Latin was losing its monopoly in both the religious and the pedagogical domain.

• English Spelling & its Debt to Greek and Latin

Why do we write debt or to doubt with a -b- ? Simply as a reminder of Latin debitum and dubitare. The same remark can be made for the s of island (from insula) and the final -p- of receipt. In the case of fault (Middle English was spelled faute, another French borrowing), the -l- (a reminder of Vulgar Latin fallita < fallere) has finally influenced the pronounciation, perhaps influenced by the word fall.

It won’t be until the XVIIIth century that English imposed itself as a written language and that scholars didn’t feel compel to write in Latin any longer. Newton, who in 1687 had written his Principia in Latin, published

in 1704 his Opticks (sic) in English.

In the meanwhile English had enriched itself of hundreds of Greek and Latin terms, such as encyclopædia, thermometer, skeleton, pneumonia, atmosphere, gravity, chronology, or words such as catastrophe, paradox and lexicon. Often Latin forms were borrowed as such: epitome, exterior, climax, appendix, delirium, axis, circus, vacuum, etc.

• Divided between three Languages: Scotland

Until the death of Elizabeth I, standard English had not reached Scotland, which had remained divided between Scottish Gaelic (a Celtic language) and Scots (a Germanic language resulting from the evolution of the Anglo-Saxon

invadors). In 1603, James VI of Scotland had reunited the two crowns, and once he became James I of England, he transferred his court to London, from where the king’s language radiated all over England.

(Already in the XVIth century, a book on poetics had recommended to imitate the language spoken in the London area “in a radius of sixty miles, but not beyond.” )

Thanks to the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), the English-Speaking world knows the famous parting song Auld lang syne.

Before its decline, however, Scots had continued to live elsewhere, namely in Ireland. James I of England, when fighting against Celtic Ireland, had confiscated lands situated in the northern part of the island and had donated them to English or Scottish “planters”. Because the Scots where

physically closer and poorer, they composed at the time most of the emigrant

population of Ireland. There were about 200 000 at the beginning of the XVIIth century to embark for Ulster (Northern Ireland), and it is estimated that as many as 2 000 0000, in the following centuries, have emigrated to North America

One of the characteristics of Scottish English (not to be confused with Scots) is the presence of the consonant r, absent from standard - and New England English -, but pronounced in our standard American English.

• Constant Enrichment of the English Vocabulary

While the English language was being exported worldwide, it had not stopped from accepting and absorbing quantity of foreign words.

French continued its steady supply of new words: bizarre, detail, genteel, schock, vogue, but also cartoon, connoisseur, routine, coquette, etc.

Italian words, such as cupola, portico, stucco, design, violin or volcano, had also penetrated the English language, and even some Italian-sounding forms were created, such as braggadocio, from English braggart, plus the augmentative and pejorative Italian -accio > empty and pretentious bragging.

Spanish had furnished desperado, armada, cargo, embargo, anchovy or barricade, and it also had been the vehicule for words imported from Las Américas, such as cocoa, vanilla, potato, mosquito, tobacco, canoe, ranch, lassso, bronco, etc. The gold rush brought in bonanza, but also cockroach

(la cucaracha, la cucaracha...), stampede, etc.

Borrowings from Dutch are divided between words belonging to arts

(sketch, easel, landscape) and the seaworld: reef, deck, cruise, to smuggle. . .

And with the settlement of Dutch people in North America, new words

came from the New World: boss, cookie, waffle, to snoop, coleslaw. . .

• Words for Our Modern Times

During the XIXth and XXth century, discoveries made by science have profoundly marqued the English language, which, thanks to the media, has

given the common reader a whole scientific vocabulary previously reserved to the sole specialists. Thus, words such as radioactivity, enzymes, allergy or cholesterol are part of our everyday vocabulary.

The word photograph dates from 1839, that of refrigerator from 1841, Thomas Edison’s phonograph was created in 1877, and the word cinema made its apparition on 1899, at the same time as moving pictures. Later on, Americans showed a preference for movies rather than pictures used in England.

The wars have also left their legacy in terms of new words. For WWI have remained tank, air raid, camouflage or the word ace, that is an air pilot who had shot down at least five enemy planes. . .

Between the two wars have appeared the words black market and nylons (1938); and during WWII the word pin-up, a young woman’s picture “pinned up” on barracks’ walls by the soldiers. If this is a cheery picture, the word countdown, on the other hand, recalls the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. The word brainwashing is from the Corean war

(1953). As for the Vietnam war, it has left the euphemism to escalate, which existed already in 1938, but became famously unpopular in 1965, when the Johnson government had to explain that the conflict had “escalated”.

More pacifically have also appeared in Europe the word cellophane (1921),

rayon (1924), and zip (1925)

• On Both Sides of the Atlantic

American advance and superiority in technology has made English the

lingua franca par excellence. It is spoken by four times more speakers in the

US than in Great Britain, and probably by many more people who speak it as their second language than their first.

In addition, the differences that we often stresss between American English and British English (hood vs. bonnet, trunk vs. boot, windshield

vs. windscreen, when talking about automobiles, for example) are less important than a century ago. If the differences have subsisted in the above examples, terminology about aviation, astronautics or computer science is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

There are, however, identical forms meaning different things. We know what it means in this country when we ask someone: “Would you like to wash up?” In England, as you may know, it would be an invitation to do the dishes. . .

• Novelties in the Last Thirty Years

It’s strange how words that were considered as slang not many years ago as today common and proper English. Such are phone, bike, bus, pub (public house).

The same thing had taken place in the XVIIIth century for snob, sham, slump, and even joke, then considered as slang words.

A dictionary published in 1991 indicates that 2700 words and expressions have entered the English vocabulary since 1960. Here are a few examples of

the new entries:

- brain drain (1963) - cassette (1960) - mouse (1960)

- *hawk (1962) - **to zap (1964) - microwave (1965)

- cult figure/ movie (1966) - doggy back (1968) - CD (1980)

- silent majority (1970) - smart card (1977) - video (1980)

- spaghetti western (1969) - wicked (1985) - safe = extreme (1988)

* hawk (warhawks) is a metaphore created in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson to indicate those who wanted to engage war with France. The expression was revived in 1962 with the addition of doves to indicate (at the time of the Vietnam conflict), those who favored negociations instead.

** to zap in the sense of to kill is an expression created by American soldiers in Vietnam. (This is the sole sense indicated in the 1991 English dictionary of neologisms). Today, zapping coexists with channel hopping, which has been in French usage since the word zapping has been adopted.

• English in the World

With the global extension of the English language and the supremacy

of American technology, it’s still a fact that the language can still be analyzed according to two main attraction poles: British English and American English.

The geographical position of Canada places Canadian English on the side of the American varieties - although they prefer tap to faucet and braces to suspenders!, as well as the forms of American English spoken in the Caribbean.

Are closer to British English, the forms of English spoken in Australia,

New-Zealand, and South Africa, as well the forms of English spoken in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Kenya.

B. THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

- Official and First Language:

United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Canada (except Quebec and part of New Brunswick), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (white minority),

and U. S.

In toto, an estimated 360 000 0000 people

- Official Language (sole or with other languages)

In Europe: Gibraltar, Malta, and Gozo

In Africa: South Africa, Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Kenya.

In the Caribbean (or Lesser Antilles): Antigua & Barbuda, Belize, Dominic, Grenada, Jamaica, St-Christopher & Nevis, Santa-Lucia, St-Vincent & Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago, Anguilla, Virgin Islands, Caiman Islands,

Monserrat, Turks & Caicos . . .

In the Atlantic Ocean: Bahamas, Guyana, Bermuda, Ste-Hélène, Falkland Islands

In the Indian Ocean: Maldives, Ile Maurice, The Seychelles

In Asia: Sri Lanka, Singapour, (former British) Hong-Kong

In Oceania: Fiji & Pitcairn, Kiribati, Nauru, New-Guinea, Salomon

In toto, and estimated 312 000 000 people

- Vehicular or Teaching Language:

In Asia: Bangladesh, Brunei, India, Pakistan, Myanmar (Birmania)

In the Middle East: Israel

In Africa: Sudan, Egypt

In Oceania: Vanuatu

CONCLUSION

• Languages are like sponges

If there is one common characteristic between all languages, it’s their

permeability. Foreign elements have crept in into each of them, sometimes for so many centuries, that we no longer can recognize the foreign implant. French and English, for example, have enjoyed such intimate relations that we can follow their history, which is like a long love story between the most Latin of the Germanic languages - English - and the most Germanic of the Latin (or Romance) languages - French.

For a long time, for English, it was “French love”, with an influx of thousands of words imported from France; nowadays we see the opposite,

English is enriching the French vocabulary. In fact, quantity of words have moved back and forth, changing their sense in the course of time. Take the word interview, which was borrowed from entrevue, it has returned to the French lexicon, but with a more restricted sense: an interview (in French) is always destined to the public.

The story of the word sketch brings other surprises. Borrowed in French in its English form, it does not let show through its Italian origin. Yet everything began with the word schizzo (esquisse: rough sktech) which, in Dutch, took the form schets. It was then borrowed from Dutch by English, where it became sketch, and finally adopted in French, under this same English form, but with a restricted sense (which we also have in English): the sense of skit, i.e. a short scene or play, often satiric in tone.

• An International Vocabulary

Often the common origin of a word makes it easy to recognize a word. Take, in the Romance languages, the word for rain. From Latin pluit, we have: il pleut in French, chove in Port., llueve in Spanish, piove in Italian). There are also identical creations from Greek and Latin: biologie, biologia, biolology, . . . or transport, transporte, trasporto . . .

The European Union has brought in multi-lingual dictionaries. If you take, for example, the 8000-words dictionary for travelers in the E.U. in six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, more than 1200 words are “homograph” i.e. written exactly in the same way, the great majority of them (1009) of Greco-Latin origin.

• Just For Fun

Will you be surprised that just about 20 words (out of the 8000) are perfect

“homograph” - perfect if you don’t take accents into account - Here they are

with their French spelling:

album jockey motel taxi

diesel karaté paranoïa télex

embargo laser radar virus

gangster libido radio yoga

hôtel mafia revolver

jazz matador sauna

Have you notice the diversity of origins?

- From Sanskrit: yoga - From Greek via German: taxi

- From Latin: radio, virus - < Latin via French: hôtel

- From Latin via English: revolver - < Arabic via Spanish: matador

- < Latin via American-English: motel - < Arabic via Sicilian: mafia

- < Latin via German: album, libido - < Finnish: sauna

- < Japanese: karaté

- < German: diesel (eponym, i.e. giving one’s name to something)

< German engineer Rudolf Diesel)

- < English: gangster, jazz, jockey, radar (acronym), laser (acronym).

• Total Difference

Out of the 8000 words from our European multi-lingual dictionary, there are about 300 that are totally different to say the same thin. Here is for your

information a mini-selection:

match lighter handkerchief trash can tip

FR allumette briquet mouchoir poubelle pourboire

IT fiammifero accendino fazzoletto pattumiera mancia

SP cerilla mechero pañuelo cubo de basura propina

PT fósforo isquiero lenço caixote de lixo gorgeta

DAN tænstick cigaret-tænder lommetørklæde skraldespand drikkepenge

GER Streichholz Feuerzeug Taschentuch Abfalleimer Trinkgeld

DU lucifer aanstecker zakdoek vuilnisbak fooi

• Don’t Trust Appearances

- For example, “sale” equals “dirty” in French, “salt” in Italian and

“s/he goes out” in Spanish’

- “salir” means “to go out” in Spanish, but “to go up or to climb” in Italian

and “to soil, to (make) dirty” in French

- “subir” means “to undergo” in French, but also “to go up” in Spanish

- “a kiss” may be a very sweet and tender gesture in French, but it is a

a sugary cookie in German.

• As long as there are Languages

It’s a fact that, in the course of the last thirty years, English has abundantly penetrated other European languages. The proportion of borrowings from English, however, does not exceed 5% of the total lexicon, and a kind of international balance seems to help reestablish the equilibrium: for example, the word disco or discotheque, used in this country, as in many others, is of French origin (discothèque, a calque of bibliothèque), but its basis is Latin and Greek. Or, if bronzing is a borrowing from English, it’s at best English à la française, for you probably would not guess what it means. Again, how would you know that tight in Italian is a dressy item of clothing for . . . a man?

All languages are “contaminated”, but each one resists and survives the periodical invasions of the languages that surround them both by absorbing, or “naturalizing” these foreing words and by exporting it own productions. New words are created to name new realities and others disappear because they no longer have any utility or have been unable to integrate themselves. But we must not forget that a borrowing, like any new creation, is a source of enrichment and a renewal in the possibilities of expression. As long as there are languages, they’ll continue to exchange their words without fearing of losing their “soul” , for a living language is a language that both gives and receives.

© 1997, Joseph E. Garreau

Based on

L’aventure des langues en Occident by Henriette Walter, Paris: Laffont 1994

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