Andrew Dalby

Yes, agreed. But when someone offers you food and drink, do you look down on it and say 'That's un-Roman/un-British/un-American'? Or do you taste it? If I were a hungry and thirsty legionary, I'd try it, no matter what Cato might have said.

When I was at school and university, I heard classics teachers who said 'No! The ancient Greeks have no descendants in Greece! The modern lot are all Romans, Slavs and Turks!' When I first visited Greece, I saw people who could have been mistaken for Socrates, Herodotus and any other ancient figure you may have seen. And, yes, the language carried right on through all these conquests and invasions. I learned from this and other observations that teachers talk nonsense some of the time. The real answer is that none of us have pure bloodlines, whatever bloodlines may be, but the modern Greeks are as closely related to their ancient compatriots as anyone else is.

And very rare. I've never seen it on an oak (this is central France incidentally). Apples and pears and poplars, occasionally hawthorns. You have to get it off your apple trees -- mistletoe is death to an apple tree, local people say.

I don't know of any evidence for beer in ancient Italy (or Greece). It was made in places where wine wasn't available or had never become popular: northern and western Europe; also Egypt and Mesopotamia, where vines had maybe been difficult to grow. (Though there was also some wine in Egypt and Mesopotamia.) Because of the high cost of transport of bulk liquids in ancient times, beer retained its popularity in such places even during the Roman Empire. Wine would have been expensive, so people who migrated had to get used to the local drink. Beer was certainly drunk by legionaries etc. in these places, either from choice, or because they couldn't afford wine most of the time.

I'll go halves with you on that. 'Torna, fratre!' is good, but not quite good enough, eh? Yes, Bulgarian and Albanian both have suffixed definite articles, reminiscent of Romanian. It can hardly be Slavic influence, since Bulgarian is the only (major) Slavic language that does this, just as Romanian is the only (major) Romance language that does it.

I don't see how this can be. The oaths are recorded in Nithard's /History of the Sons of Louis the Pious/. Lauer, editor of the 1926 edition, aims to show in his introduction that Nithard was a contemporary of the events, gradually compiling the book from 841 on. Even if Lauer is wrong here, the only important manuscript of the /History/ (Paris BN 9768) is dated to the end of the 9th century, so the oaths were on record by that time. They can't be 10th/11th century fakes.

Effective in producing an answer, but not necessarily in producing the truth. Under torture, I think I would say whatever I believed the torturer wanted to hear.

The thing that troubles me with the Bible-translation argument is that would be done at a 'higher level' of language speakers--by clerics and the like--and the lower-class speakers would not have much control over that change. This 'tends' to contradict what has been shown about language change, that it tends to be a 'bottom-up' phenomena. I'm happy with that last sentence, but it doesn't knock out the Bible argument. It's not a question of who translated it, but who read it and recited it afterwards. The Bible wasn't like a literary text. Christians tended to belong to the lower classes, and if they were quoting the Bible to one another, with all its un-classical definite articles, they might well begin to talk like it. This isn't just guesswork, after all -- we know the German and English Bibles have both had a significant effect on their respective languages!

Interesting. Someone, some time, will have to give a real explanation of why English is more closely related to Frisian than to any other language. Does Nomad's comment help?

familia -- the family, including the slaves

Sappho

I'm not sure of this. Cato, dealing with a farm staffed by slaves, tells you how to word the contract when you hire a gang to pick olives or harvest the grapes. The reason is not necessarily that these were skilled jobs, rather that they demanded a lot of labour for a short period.

I'd love to know if there is any positive ancient evidence that the 'bog bodies' represent human sacrifice. Tacitus (maybe others too) definitely says that criminals guilty of shameful crimes were executed in this way. So who first had the idea that you sacrificed people to the gods by pushing them into bogs? Some modern historian or archaeologist, I suspect. I say this because I have seen a school textbook from the era (are we still in it?) when schoolchildren had to do history by studying the evidence and reaching their own conclusions. A great idea, but the textbook I saw shamelessly slanted the quotations from Tacitus etc. so that they proved human sacrifice was involved in bog burials. If you look at the real texts, they don't say that at all. But give the kids the slanted evidence, and they'll all reach the conclusions you want them to. 100 per cent success.

Yes, these are good points. 1. In Britain nowadays (maybe the US too?) accusations of sexual nonconformism are the easy way to kill a politician's career and give everyone else a laugh. Maybe in early imperial Rome too. 2. We don't know -- even Suetonius didn't know -- what Caligula and Drusilla did, if anything, when the lights were out. Note this joke among Roman students of law: 'You can do half of it in Athens, all of it in Alexandria;' i.e., according to provincial law you can marry your half-sister in Athens, you can marry your full sister in Alexandria.

Yes, agreed

Yes, borrowings beyond just words are hard to find -- maybe partly because our knowledge of pre-Roman languages is pretty weak? For Greek > Latin, one obvious example is the definite article. I have heard it argued that the Latin translation of the Bible was the vehicle for getting a definite article into Latin. Have you a view on that?

We get round that, I suppose, by reading the ancient sources. The problem is that for the Seleucid period few survive. Arrian's history of the Diadochi (the succesors to Alexander) is lost, except in summary, and I know of no translation of that summary. Diodorus Siculus covers this period (available in Loeb) but only parts of his work survive. Polybius covered some of the early-to-middle Seleucid period, but his real focus was on Rome ... There is some gossipy Seleucid history in Athenaeus, but that means searching through Athenaeus (who is my favourite author, as it happens, but I'm a bit odd).

My daughter went to university in Wales, and at the graduation ceremony everything was in Welsh first, in English second. The language still has half a million speakers and a great deal of national pride going for it. Its problem is that it is relatively little spoken in Cardiff (the capital). But a lot of children are still learning it. That's the crucial feature, probably. Not under immediate threat, but, let's face it, all languages except English are under long term threat. Thanks very much for the link, Virgil. All such small rural minority languages are very seriously threatened. Parents want their children to learn the national language and English, and local languages get squeezed out. Gerhard Rohlfs, whose work is cited by docoflove elsewhere on this forum, put a great deal of work into recording this Greek language of southern Italy.

Interesting. One common (and excellent) contemporary Italian pork product called proscuitto is heavily salted and preserves easily. There are several others. I wonder this or a forerunner made up part of an Italian soldier's diet. Yes, surely. For one way with pork, see Cato's instructions for salting it http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/texts/CatoTranslation.html I have a feeling that fermentation invents itself, like yogurt, but perhaps unlike pasta. My own experience: having made apple juice from my French orchard, and taking it back home to England (when we still lived there) in a plastic bottle, and opening the bottle after several hours en route for a picnic, and getting a highly drinkable faceful of sparkling cider. I have profited by this reinvention of fermentation and now make cider all the time ... Maybe the Olympians will move this into the beer thread?

For native speakers, Doc, I'm with you and against the functionalists 98%. You can consciously change your speech, but you do it very rarely. And I agree that parents and their peers are only one part of the influence on the language-learning of second-generation language switchers (such as provincials switching to Latin). Yes, modern experience is that the second generation (e.g. of Hispanics in the US, and of Commonwealth migrants to the UK) is likely to be almost perfectly bilingual. And yet their language, in some of its registers, will be sharply different from that of non-switchers. In fact they stretch the language they have switched to. I bet you won't deny that young speakers of Black English and other comparable forms of English are stretching and enriching our language? So I bet you won't deny that the millions of Gauls and Iberians (etc.) who must have switched to Latin over quite a short period must, similarly, have stretched Latin (after all, we are pretty certain that the local languages were dead (excepting Basque) by the end of the Empire, so everyone had switched by then). I will add that I don't believe, whatever the history books may say, that school education was 'usual' among the urban poor, peasants and labourers in the Roman provinces. Remember, the switch of language was not confined to an elite.

I used to think this must be true. By the time I had finished /Language in Danger/, I felt that to say that would have been to make a logical error. If the language phenotype evolved out of nothing, yes, it can hardly have done so more than once -- because all languages share a universal structure) and it is impossible to accept that it evolved without being used. So its first bearers must have spoken the first language, ancestral to all others. But animals do communicate, so in all likelihood the language phenotype evolved gradually out of something simpler. In that scenario, more than one prototype human language might have developed (with mutual influence) in parallel. As I said in that book, in all likelihood Eve was multilingual, like so many of her descendants.

Well, it depends how those specialists define the term 'the language they're speaking' and maybe also 'consciously'! When I learn a new language or dialect (because of migration, trade, employment, marriage, upward/downward mobility, joining the army ...), I am at least partly conscious of the fact. Is that excluded from the definition of 'the language I'm speaking'? As I said before, from say 200 BC to AD 200 millions upon millions of people must have taken up Latin in this way, and most of them (the first generation learners) would never have spoken it like a native. Just as English is different on the lips of speakers of different origins world wide, so Latin must have been. And their children learned it (partly) from them.

Has anyone seen a guesstimate of what proportion of abandoned children died and what proportion were picked up by someone else? I ask this because many Greek comedies turn on family rediscoveries -- an abandoned child brought up by another family and eventually recognised because of the tokens left with him/her -- so, clearly, this must have happened sometimes, even if much more rarely in truth than in fiction.

The Chinese had noodles, but Europeans invented pasta independently. I believe the Etruscans may have invented it and passed it on to the Romans, but I can't remember the source which spells this out... See, you can manage perfectly well without me! As it happens, people in one of the language threads are considering right now whether there was originally a single human language or whether language originated more than once. However it may be with language, it was almost certainly the case with pasta -- invented in China and the Mediterranean region independently, as Ursus says. What's more difficult is, a. what was the name for ancient pasta and, b. why it occurs so little in ancient texts, when these days you could hardly spend a day in Italy without mentioning pasta. a. Here are some names: itria (maybe like vermicelli), laganum (maybe like lasagne), collyra (maybe like maccheroni). b. I don't know the answer to b,: presumably, for whatever reason, it failed to become a dietary staple. The sources suggest its use in sweet more than in savoury dishes. In spite of what writers quoted above may say, I don't think there's any evidence that soldiers ate a lot of it, and I would doubt strongly whether soldiers had the time and inclination to make it themselves (NB without a pasta machine!)