
The Language of the Roman Empire - diodorus
https://www.historytoday.com/katherine-mcdonald/language-roman-empire
======
80386
You can tell "rufus" is a loan because it contains medial -f-, and native
Latin words don't contain medial -f-, except after prefixes. The only Latin
sources for /f/ are Proto-Indo-European _bh_ dh *gʷh in initial position;
elsewhere, they generally become /b d v/, in a process that probably
paralleled the rhotacism.

This sound change wasn't shared by Oscan, Umbrian, or Faliscan -- compare
Faliscan "carefo" to Latin "carebo", and Oscan "mefiaí" to Latin "mediae".

~~~
tuomosipola
Weiss's book is full of this kind of stuff. Actually, the whole point of the
book is to list. Apparently there will be a new edition this year.

Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin.
Beech Stave Pr Inc (December 31, 2009).

[http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm](http://beechstave.com/weiss.htm)

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fosk
It’s incredible to realize how foundational the Roman Empire was to what we
now commonly consider Western civilization.

Rome certainly was a highly advanced society in its time, but what a shame to
think that because of vast abundance of slaves the Roman society never pushed
further with technological innovations, effectively preventing the human race
from having mobile phones by the year 1000, if not earlier.

Some argue that with less slaves an industrial revolution might have triggered
much earlier, and Roman society was certainly ingenious enough to push the
boundaries if there ever was a need to do so.

~~~
lkrubner
Slavery overlaps with the Industrial Revolution by at least 100 years, and
even longer in the colonies, such as India and Kenya. The resources needed for
industrialism were dug up by slaves. It is tough to make the case that slavery
impeded industrialism, when there are many cases where slavery seems to have
helped industrialism. I think its best to look elsewhere for the roots of
industrialism. Descartes and Newton helped form certain intellectual
foundations, and the willingness of English peasants to fight and die for
their religious beliefs lead to the end of the witch burning and heresy
trials. That's important because a few years later Jethro Tull and Charles
Townshend begin the Agricultural Revolution. Jethro Tull was 26 years old when
he started working on his machines, in 1701. He was not necessarily smarter
than all previous farmers, but he belonged to the first generation in history
that had a guarantee that they could violate tradition and they would not be
burned at the stake for it.

~~~
WalterBright
> It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism

Compare the free states of the Union vs the slave states of the Confederacy.
The free states rapidly industrialized from 1800-1860, the slave states did
not and pretty much did not advance economically at all.

~~~
Sangermaine
If you read about the economics of this period you'll find that, as with most
of history, the reality isn't this simple. A lot of Southern capital went into
financing Northern industry, for example. It's difficult to neatly divide the
nation's economy in this way as if they were two separate spheres, as much
they as they may have want to think of themselves that way.

~~~
WalterBright
Not one southern city industrialized.

Investors tend to invest in things they know about and can keep an eye on,
which tends to be local. Investment capital uniformly fleeing the slave states
to the free ones suggests that investing in slave states was a bad investment.

In those days, different states were like different countries today.

~~~
zeveb
> Not one southern city industrialized.

There's also the climate of the South to consider — until the invention of
air-conditioning, factory work in the South would have been at a significant
disadvantage. Malaria, too, was an issue within living memory.

People don't realise nowadays how very inhospitable warm climates can be.

~~~
WalterBright
And yet millions of people lived and worked there. Agricultural work is
backbreaking.

The South didn't even have a shoe factory.

Really, how productive can a workforce be that can't read, that have to be
forced to do anything, that will not contribute any improvements, that have to
be guarded at all times, that will sabotage the work if they can get away with
it, etc.?

How productive would _you_ be if you were a slave?

Slavery is a terrible economic system when compared with free labor. It isn't
remotely a surprise that free economies economically bury slave economies.

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tomcooks
Fun fact: celtic runes were created on the lakes region by the border between
Switzerland and Italy, inspired by Etruscan (coming from Phoenician), probably
a Roman invention to get celtic troops to write reports

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_o...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script#Alphabet_of_Lugano)

~~~
dghf
I was going to raise an eyebrow at the use of the word "runes" in that
context, but that really does show similarities to futhark.

~~~
80386
Futhark is occasionally said to have developed from a variant of Old Italic.
Another hypothesis is that it's descended directly from Phoenician:
[http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_...](http://www.academia.edu/20097046/Origins_of_runic_writing_A_comparison_of_theories)

~~~
tomcooks
Etruscan being a Phoenician derivate I don't understand the difference between
the two thesis

~~~
80386
Latin and Cyrillic are both descended from Greek, but Latin isn't descended
from Cyrillic, nor vice versa.

For descent from Phoenician, we should expect that the futhark developed
relatively early, and was transmitted to the Proto-Germanic urheimat (almost
certainly Denmark) by sea; for descent from Greek or Etruscan, we should
expect that it developed relatively late, and may have been transmitted by
land.

Vennemann's argument in favor of descent of the futhark directly from
Phoenician is that there are features preserved by the futhark that were lost
by the Old Italic alphabets, and that there are features of the futhark that
are best explained by an early date of development.

For example, Vennemann considers the ansuz rune to have developed from
Phoenician hē; but we'd expect a descendant of hē to represent /e/, not /a/.
As it happens, Proto-Germanic _ē shifted to_ ā in the descendant of all
Germanic languages but Gothic. In a Greek or Etruscan descent theory, ansuz
would likely have developed from some descendant of aleph, since by that time
the shift would have already occurred. Unfortunately, hē and aleph are equally
plausible as sources for the letterform.

And the runes are named by appellative acrophony, like the letters in
Phoenician, but unlike the letters in Greek (where the Phoenician names were
borrowed as otherwise meaningless lexical units) or Latin (a, be, ce...). If
the runes developed from Etruscan, where would appellative acrophony have come
from? Then again, Glagolitic also uses appellative acrophony...

------
YeGoblynQueenne
I find it so surprising that Greek was once the language spoken by scarcely
educated people in a big part of the ancient world. I am Greek and I can
manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know, speak
it), mostly thanks to my exposure to the new testament when I was young, but I
find Latin a much easier language to learn.

I guess that's saying something about the ability of humans to learn language
at any age, or about the misconceptions we have about what is an "easy" or a
"hard" language to learn. Still, I can't shake this feeling that if there was
one language that it made sense for so many people to learn so they could
easily speak simple things to each other, that should have been Latin, not
Greek- the English of the ancient world, not its German.

~~~
baldfat
> I can manage koine (I can read it, though I wouldn't be able to, you know,
> speak it)

We don't really know what Koine Greek sounded like but it certainly doesn't
sound anything close to modern Greek. Having several years of academic Koine
Greek and Classical Greek I am almost able to make out quite a bit of modern
Greek. I swear modern Greek and Konie are closer then Shakespeare and modern
English.

Classical Greek possibly how it sounded -
[https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-
ancien...](https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389975/the-sound-of-ancient-
greek-in-the-illiad)

In Seminary we talked about the tonality of the language but we lost all that.
Chinese for example is tonal.

------
viach
This weird feeling, when I try to read ancient greek words on these pictures,
it feels like just a broken cyrillic. Like seeing a newspaper, just a very old
one...

~~~
tomcooks
Well cyrillic is indeed old greek + gliphs for slavic sounds, created by sains
Cyril and Metodius

~~~
dbuxton
Interestingly there's a pretty good argument that Cyril and Methodius didn't
create Cyrillic at all but instead were the creators of Glagolitic, a now-
more-or-less-extinct script that was developed in what's now (roughly) the
Czech Republic and was used in Croatia until the 20th Century:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script)

Exactly how Cyril got credit for the script he _didn 't_ invent is unclear.

------
tuomosipola
For those interested I would recommend J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin
Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003. It is more on the linguistic side
with many examples in the old languages, but a really interesting book
nonetheless.

------
artificial
Patrick Wyman has a great podcast on the fall of Rome (among others) and
spends some time talking about the impact of regional dialects and the slow
process of how those became romance foundations. Really neat stuff!

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cicero
The Christian Liturgy in Rome was originally celebrated in Greek and was only
later translated into the Latin language, which dominated the Church until
modern times.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie#In_Western_Christianity)

------
jcoffland
> But we cannot ignore that the majority of Italia’s coinage was bilingual,
> suggesting that Latin was already the lingua franca among its multilingual
> forces.

US coinage is bilingual but few Americans speak Latin.

------
jerry40
Wow, the Oscan language had the letter "Я". I thought it exists in cyrillic
alphabets only. I know they are different letters having (perhaps) different
pronunciation but still. Interesting!

~~~
ithkuil
It's very common for writing systems of that time to mirror the letters when
switching write direction. In some cases text used to be written as
boustrophedon, i.e. switching direction each line (like an ox plowing a
field).

Early Greek thus had not a fixed direction and derivative alphabets such as
the Etruscan have settled to one direction of text flow and of letter shapes
at random, namely right to left.

Latin has "forked" from the Greek alphabet at another point in time and thus
has reversed direction of writing and reverse glyphs with respect to Etruscan
and Oscan

~~~
jerry40
Thanks for the explanation! Mirroring the letters is very unusial concept for
me. I've tried to write down a mirrored word and it was not very difficult
actually. It is definitely readable.

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, people talk about Da Vinci writing backwards as a "code" but it's an
easy trick if you want to write left-handed without smearing your ink (which
was even worse with older inks with longer drying times). Our brains do really
well with mirroring operations, especially if you switch hands when mirroring.

~~~
John_KZ
I've noticed this too, I think it has something to do with the fact that the
two hands are "mirrored" in a sense, and operations like opening/closing arms
are identical except for mirroring. Who knows, maybe they're even encoded like
this somewhere in the brain.

After getting used to it it's not that hard to write mirrored text with the
opposite hand. It's definitely a lot easier than doing it with the dominant
one.

------
ilamont
_They were written by the last generation of the city who could read and write
Oscan: after the Social War, Latin-speaking Roman colonists were sent to
settle in Pompeii and many of the other towns of Italy to prevent future
rebellions._

Along with educational policies favoring the ruling language and other forms
of cultural assimilation, the resettlement strategy has been effectively used
in modern times, including the United States, China, and the Soviet Union.

