Andrew Dalby

Actually, yes. 'Traditional' reconstruction techniques have been tested on families such as the Romance family, to see if, given the modern languages, could one reconstruct the 'proto-language' and come out with Latin. In nearly all cases, either the Classical or Vulgar Latin terms were reconstructed, including the morph-syntactic elements (case, number, gender). You didn't quite engage with my question: are there really aspects of a given language which will 'push it towards change', as your earlier posting said? The experimental answer would have to work forwards, not backwards -- from Latin to a reconstructed future language. If that's impossible, then the theory that features within a language 'push it towards change' has to be called into question. I began to worry about this long after my Romance Philology classes, when I began to ask myself why it is that Greek phonology and grammar appear to have changed very rapidly in Hellenistic times, and why Latin phonology and grammar appear to have changed rapidly in late Republican and Imperial times. I find it difficult to disengage this problem from the fact that in those particular periods, because of political factors -- the spread of empires and cultures -- many thousands or even millions of people were learning those languages as a second/third language and as adults. I said some of this, in more detail, in chapter 2 of /Language in Danger/. My aim in that chapter was to explore why so many languages died under the Roman Empire -- as background to the question of why so many languages are htreatened now.

Baldi, Philip (1999). The Foundations of Latin. New York, Mouton de Gruyter. ... Elcock, W. D. (1960). The Romance Languages. London, Faber & Faber. ... Elcock is amazingly readable considering his chosen topic! Well worth looking at. I did all this stuff too, about a generation earlier than the Doc. Many of his recommendations are texts that I know well -- which shows things don't change that much in Romance philology. Of the newer books I've looked at, Baldi is certainly very good.

He was all those things, and a tyrant, and the man who detached Romania from the Warsaw Pact, and drove his country from relative prosperity to polluted poverty, and one of the few communist heads of state who rode down the Mall with Elizabeth II; but they did also, towards the end of his career, call him Conducatorul 'the Leader'.

I think that depends on which Greek you take as example. I bet Plato didn't.

Thanks, Pantagathus -- I never realised the phrase occurred in Polybios. It was previously used by Herodotos -- it was his name for the beer they drank in Egypt. For Egyptian beer, later Greek authors used the term zythos, but presumably this had not been coined in Herodotos's time. My assumption was that oinos krithinos was used in Greek, before the specific names became familiar, because it would be the only way to explain to a Greek reader what beer was: a vaguely wine-like drink, with vaguely wine-like powers, made out of barley. But, yes, maybe after all this oinos krithinos was something much more special! I like the idea!

It's an interesting theory. If valid, it ought to be possible to identify which aspects of a given language will 'push it towards change', I'd suggest. Could you show Latin to a researcher who doesn't know the Romance languages and get a prediction of which aspects will push the language towards change? Again, I'm looking for evidence here -- but historical this time! Is there evidence for nomadic lifestyles in Roman Britain?

He's not so clear about it as all that. The publisher's binding may say fiction, but Dan Brown's bit inside starts with a page labelled 'fact' (and I have checked some of the items and found them to be something quite different from fact).

This question has had lots of good answers. It seems worth adding that 'senatus' literally muust have been a 'collection of old men'. In lots of societies old men = heads of families congregate more or less formally and get to take some of the decisions. So, to take an early but semi-fictional example from Greece, when the people of Ithaca are meeting while Odysseus is still on his wanderings, there's a circle of old men that makes room for Telemachus to join them -- he's Odysseus's son -- but it's the oldest of the old men who speaks first -- one who 'knows ten thousand things'. I guess, when Rome first had a senate, 'powerful clans' would have to be understood in very small-town terms, and that senate was a circle of old men. But, yes, powerful enough to elect a small-town king.

I admire those who had a go at this, plus or minus gusto. Trying to think of the Latin for ambiance made my mind go blank.

Another couple of corrections to this: ae is a diphthong, i.e. one syllable, with no 'h' before the 'e', probably sounding something like the y in English 'my'; and a final 'r' has to be pronounced in Latin, though exactly how it was pronounced is another question -- so the final 'h' is wrong. For Caesar try 'ky-sar', I would say.

I don't like the book -- for one or two reasons which I might put in another post -- but I have to disagree with this. There are female figures in the book's mythology, yes, but the only actual female character seems to spend most of her time listening to pseudo-historical lectures with her mouth open. Or am I wrong?

Interesting question. all that occurs to me is this: the cognomen 'Postumus/Postuma' meant 'the last of the siblings', therefore, sometimes, 'the one born after the father's death'. I wonder whether there are cases in which the cognomen was given to a child whose mother died in giving birth?

Love of the fatherland leads me Or words to that general effect. Fatherland is a sexist concept! Latin has no 'matria' motherland, so far as I remember. Fatherland also has some Fascist/Nazi connotations now. For that matter, so does the 'lead' bit: Mussolini was Il Duce = the leader = der F

Turkey does have a lot of issues to face in terms of current human rights of women and minorities. And it won't find it possible, as it approaches membership, to go on glossing over the Armenian massacre etc. But this is a step too far. Hagia Sophia has been sacred to two religions successively. If it can be satisfyingly restored and function as a museum, accessible to all visitors, that will be good. There is no logic in restoring it to Christians, and certainly no logic in making an EU issue of it.

Indeed! Roma Victor has a number of different kinds of guild groups: Cult, Legion, Auxiliary legion, and House. RedBedlam being an English company which is producing this game, I guess it's not surprising. It's curious that English and French handle this in opposite ways. In English you say: the Smiths (meaning the family whose surname is Smith). In French you say: les Martin (meaning the family whose surname is Martin). You don't add an s for the plural of surnames, although with normal French words, you do. I would certainly say 'the Julii' or 'the Julian house'. I will now ask a French neighbour what he would say.

Your point about punctuation is absolutely right, though. A good Latin motto ought to read itself (so to speak) even if there's no punctuation to be seen. So I prefer yours, Capitolinus!

*raspberry* All right, all right, I promise not to finish all my glossary items with "Caesar couldn't be stabbed enough." But Carthago delendum est, I'm sure you aren't about to forget that.

OK, but a translator finds it hard to work on a confusing text. You don't translate words, you translate meaning, so there has to be a meaning to translate. How about Aliquid novi: ex Oriente Graecus! Literally this means 'Something new: a Greek from the East!' It borrows from the existing Latin 'Ex Africa semper aliquid novi', Always something new out of Africa (which gave the title to the novel and film Out Of Africa).

If you ask a linguist, the linguist will tell you that there is no /single/ way to distinguish a dialect from a language. The linguist will go on to say that there are (at least) two totally incompatible ways to make the distinction. 1. If two forms of speech are sufficiently different to be mutually incomprehensible, they represent two languages, not two dialects of the same language. 2. If a dialect is adopted (officially or in everyday practice) by a state, it is a language. If you go by the first definition, then the generalisation that aroused hackles ('a language is a dialect with an army') is meaningless. If you go by the second definition, then the same generalisation is true and very much to the point. You can't really appeal to a linguist to solve the dispute, because a linguist will recognise both definitions. How does this apply to Latin? By the second definition, Latin became a language, and spread as a language, at least partly because it was the vehicle of a state and of an army. That's it, then. It was and is a language.

Why didn't you mention this in the first place? Now I'm convinced that Dacia wasn't backwards! Cato! no, now your not the real cato, the REAL cato wouldn't have been factional, he would've supported Rome, not Pompey, Pompey was not Rome. Sigh cato, am I the only real republican left. Not factional? I'm not so sure. Maybe he was more factional than our colleague Cato ever is. In putting together a brief biography of Cato for my translation of his /On Farming/, I developed the impression that Livy was right: the political feuds aroused by Cato's censorhip 'occupied him for the rest of his life' (Livy 39.44.9). Here's more on the Cato translation, by the way! http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/books/CatoFarming.html

That may well be true! The British and French are heartily sick of it (most of them). The Russians are probably about to throw in the towel. But are the Americans tired of it yet? Sorry. Off topic.

Maybe not strong evidence, but apparently the best we have? Oh, yes, agreed. The etymology of Latin often goes ahead on much weaker evidence than that!

Dacia was remarkable for its architecture as well as its gold. The fortified palace of Old Sarmizegethusa was really something, as you might gather even from the partial depiction on Trajan's Column. Where did I read that under one of the Dacian kings wine was banned? Does this mean they had got as far the the US in the early 20th century? Had they noticed that wine had corrupted the Celts?

Fair question -- always question assumptions -- but no, that doesn't work as an explanation, I don't think, because Romans in the north could have made bread in the same way that it was made all over the Roman world. So why go to the fag of making beer, as part of that process, in the outlying provinces only? Maybe in the outlying provinces, where soldiers were on garrison duty, individual soldiers had to make their own bread, but to get the bread to rise, they had to use yeast, which was too difficult for individual soldiers to keep active. Therefore, soldiers lit upon the solution of using the local yokels' smelly alcoholic beverage (glorious beer to us barbarians) for baking bread, and thus great quantities of the stuff were kept on hand for soldiers on the frontier. Also, maybe (in a pinch) they drank some too. I don't think there's much disagreement between us! Whether you drink the beer, or pour it into your bread dough, might depend on your state of mind ...

No, Scerio, I would say Latin is excellent evidence for the generalisation (a language is a dialect with an army). Latin began as the sub-dialect spoken in small-town Rome of the dialect of Italic that was spoken in Latium. It crowned its career as the language of the whole western Roman Empire. How did it do that? You can't deny the Roman army had a hand in it! To put it into perspective - just by learning Latin I was able to read a little bit of Italian. Italian is the closest (the Romanian thing is utter BS), followed by Catalan, Spanish, then Portuguese. The rest diverge severely from there. The Romanian thing has something going for it. You do find Latin words that survive in Romanian only, and Romanian noun declension and verb conjugation have lots of comforting reminiscences of Latin. Admittedly, there are also many Slavic and Balkan words in Romanian, so lots of extra vocab to learn.