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    Default Re: Question about Brennos' interview

    I think we have to be careful in considering either culture (archaeological data) or ethnicity (as a narrow genetic concept, a more prominent idea than I find intelligible) as markers for language. As a (simplistic) example; if, in a thousand years or so, someone is digging up a number of current cultural artifacts and sees a distinction between a coke bottle and a coke can phase, would we look for coke bottle and coke can people? That is simplistic, but it is useful in pointing out a cultural milieu that we call 'the West'. Do we all speak one language? Two of the major religions of this milieu contain the names of Semitic deities/prophets. Do we speak Semitic languages? If we were left with only a rare sample of literature, would Dutch, Croatian/Serbian, Estonian be visible? Would Catalan? Would Welsh? And that's with a highly literate society.

    We see in the post-Roman era a huge diversity of languages, a plethora of petty Kingdoms - of differentiated social identities. Shouldn't we see greater convergence in such things, given the reach of Rome and the length of time it spent in these areas? Where did all these differentiations come from? The answer is, they were always there. We think in terms of 'Celtic', 'Germanic', 'Scythian' because they were the generalised terms the Romans and Greeks gave to people they weren't particularly interested in. The difference pre- and post- Roman is that these others (non Romans and non Greeks) are now leaving their own written records, where before they left no such record.

    The idea that wholesale language replacement is a reasonable phenomenon does not hold out against recent evidence. Even where we have pretty genocidal behaviour (North and South America in particular) and massive recorded migration still the old languages exist (no matter how precariously). Somehow, though, we are supposed to believe that a pretty small insertion of elites wiped out any trace of the previous language (this is what we are supposed to believe about post-Roman Britain and is, fundamentally, the story of 'Indo-European').

    As I said before, the languages closest to Rome (those they speak of at any length) in the Italian peninsula are hugely divergent. The Greeks acknowledge dialectical differences within the Hellenic world. The whole of Northern Europe 'becomes' linguistically divergent post-Rome - it 'becomes' so on the basis that the Romans said they were Celts and Germans and that, ipso facto, they spoke some notional 'Celtic' and 'German' languages...

    I just have a notion that history, if it is to mean anything, must be understood within a real-life world. There isn't, in a real-life world, any mechanism for a continent wide series sound-shift.

    I will quote Lt-Col. J. A. Garton from The Doones, 1971 from an article called "A Somerset Dialect"

    "The dialect is not, as some people suppose, English spoken in a slovenly and ignorant way. It is the remains of a language—the court language of King Alfred. Many words, thought to be wrongly pronounced by the countryman, are actually correct, and it is the accepted pronunciation which is wrong."

    The reason I quote it? Because the idea that dialects, accents are 'wrong', lazy, slovenly etc. derives from an idea driven by the tree model and the thinking that is axiomatic of that model. That languages exist in some notional 'pure' state which then devolve into daughter languages. This is patent nonsense. It is not what we see, at all, anywhere in real-life. What we consider standard English is, in fact, the expression of one dialect as being 'more correct' than others. Simply put; there was never a 'perfect English', a singular proto-English spoken across 'Anglo-Saxon' lands from which the dialects have diverged. What we have is a phonological, orthographical and grammatical imposition of what English 'should be'.

    Languages, we see (in real-life) change through creolisation; in the context of taking on a language it is often taken on as an initially second langauge, and the first language (the mother tongue, literally..) is introduced into the new language. That is why we have such disparate vulgar Latins - they are Latin creoles, with the local phonology, lexicon and grammar creating, with Latin, new dialects.

    Just take a little step back from the whole thing and... the idea of a proto-Germanic, a proto-Celtic etc. etc. to a proto Indo-European, can be seen for what they are. A nonsense.

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