Hecetaeus of Miletos

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

Well that is sorta what I'm saying, narrowing it down to the contacts and regionalism, from the last 'econo-political' supra-structure that was latin. (was just putting into the relevant context, for that specific case. The regional qualites obviously predate any of that. Constantly reshaping, influenced by any new societies and local phonetics) I'm not saying that vulgar was identical from the Alps to Sicily, but orally they moved towards some kind of intelligibility. Much like what is Italian today, with political disunity the rural population wouldn't have been neither in contact nor in need of a 'common' language for the whole peninsula. The quotidian use and the regional inflections/forms become more and more 'dominant', diverging to almost unintelligibility (which would occur at some point imo).

As far as I'm concerned it is obvious that French was the product of the mixing between a Gallo-Roman speaking community and several 'Germanic/Iranian' speaking newcomers. If the technicalisms of linguists deny this, then I suppose what I consider to be evolution of languages isn't that far away from what you are arguing for ^^ I'm just terribly equipped to properly describe it :P
The linearity of it is temporal and attributable to a 'branch' of it, but this in turn received the input from others, resulting in changes...
So yes, I can see how by calling it linear I was stretching it a lot XD

I'm not accusing you of stretching things alot, I was trying to point out that what you seemed to understand (what you were describing as language change) is not linear, but the model within which language change is discussed is linear, in a very fundamental way.

The thing is, linguists understand this as well and argue that; proto Indo-European/proto Celtic/proto Germanic etc. did not actually exist in any spatial sense (and also, therefore, any temporal sense); that 'borrowing' /'loan' words are adequate to interpreting mixed languages. This is what I mean by describing the model as being flawed. In order to have some structure (no matter how irrelevant to reality) they have held onto the same structure as it was formulated in the eighteenth Century. That's like chemists still talking about phlogiston, air, heat etc. as 'elements' for the sake of a structure.

In short, it is not you that is terribly equipped to properly describe it, it is the model itself which does not adequately describe the complexity of language change. I don't think it is simply a minor irritation, I think it has a fundamental impact on how information is understood. If we continue to use invasion-ist models then an invasion-ist story still keeps getting told. You only have to search through Wikipedia to see how these outdated ideas still have such a hold on the wider public.

As for the archaeological record, it is outdated to think of 'conquest/expansion': such destruction did not occur, the newcomers brought new technologies/practices and joined to form new societies. There's even ground for them to have literally saved the agricultural locals, who had been exploiting the land beyond recovery, simply abandoning settlements and build new ones when there wasn't any yield. Survival makes for a pretty good incentive to develop a form of communication...

To get back to the 'known/recorded' migrations of later periods, they show how huge numbers and utter 'take overs' weren't necessary for the linguistic/cultural world to change. Human priorities aren't about ideological preferences...

Exactly. The archaeological record does not support migration-ist/invasion-ist ideas yet....we're still talking about Indo-European as if there was a language that swept away pre-existing languages...? Within the context of a smaller 'trickle' of incomers, why would the native population drop its whole prior lexicon? I can understand why new terms would be introduced, given new technologies, but ... what do we see with small immigrant communities within a larger 'native speaking' population? Unless the newcomers are militarily over-whelming then we generally see continuation in language with small adjustments. What we see with militarily strong incomers is a nuanced (socially stratified) taking up of the incomers' language.

As for ideological preferences; I understand what you are saying but equally; Rome's expansion was based upon an ideological conception of what Rome was (or, perhaps many of which one particular concept won over the rest). The idea of a shared Italian (as well as English. German, French) languages are ideological concepts. Ideology has an impact linguistically, culturally and economically. In fact it was on the basis of the ideological (and consequent economic and cultural) impact of Rome that I argued its legacy as not being particularly positive in another thread.


And..cheers @Catiline