Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

[The Gauls are] in their conversation terse and enigmatic, often speaking in allusive riddles.

iodorus Siculus, v.31

Trí húaithaid ata ferr sochaidi: úathad dagbríathar, úathad bó hi feór, úathad carat im chuirm.

Three scarcities that are better than plenty: a scarcity of fine words, a scarcity of cows in a meadow, a scarcity of friends at beer.

The Triads of Ireland , ed. Kuno Meyer, 93

nor was it fitting for the government of the Romans…given that they were possessed more than anyone by a hatred of the very nature and name of absolute power (’tyranny’).

Arrian, Alexander’s Campaign , vii.15.6

hoc vero regnum est, et ferri nullo pacto potest.

But this is kingship, and can in no wise be tolerated.

Cicero, Letter to Atticus , ii.12.1

…et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter ancipitia clarescunt magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare.

Peace is disliked by the [German] nation; they distinguish themselves more easily in a crisis and you will not see them in large numbers except in wartime.

Tacitus, Germania , 14.2

Want her dô ar arme wuntane baugš, cheisuhngu gitšn, sô imo se der chuning gap ,

Huneô truhtîn: ‘dat ih dir it nŭ bi huldî gibu.’ Hadubrant gimahalta Hiltibrandes sunu

’Mit gěru seal man geba infšhan, ort widar orte.’

He took from his arm twisted tores worked with specie gold, given him by the king, lord of the Huns: ‘This I now give you in friendship.’ Rejoined Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand:

’With spears are gifts to be taken, point against point.’

Hildebrandslied , 33-8

The history of Europe, over the three thousand years for which we have evidence, is dominated by the changing fortunes of four closely related families of languages: Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Slavonic. In every age, their advances across the continent have been warlike: there is a depressing brutality about the heroics in which they all gloried. But like the languages themselves, the cultures they fostered characterise different peoples, each with rather different values.

This chapter focuses on the crucial part of that history, which witnessed a major shift in ambient language, all over western Europe, from Celtic to Latin. This linguistic shift was unambiguously due to military conquest, and the sheer clarity of it lives on to this day in Europe’s everyday conception of what changes languages: control, backed by military and economic strength. And yet, as if to provide an object lesson in the inadequacy of that simple view, this conquest was itself overwhelmed. After half a millennium of stability, the military balance was overturned in a wide-ranging military catastrophe from which there was no recovery: indeed, it set the pattern of political and national boundaries that has lasted to the present day. Yet while the linguistic effect of all this in most of the West was nil, in Britain, and in the Balkans, it proved decisive.

Looked at as a whole, the history of these crucial thousand years, approximately from 500 BC to AD 500, has a certain symmetry. It begins and ends with the triumph of mobile military societies organised round kinship relations, the Celts at the outset, the Germans and Slavs at the close. In between, we see the triumph of a civic society, which unified Europe, organised its defences and provided good communications throughout, through well-kept roads and well-patrolled sea routes.

For the first 250 years, Gaulish raiders (backed by the best weapons technology available, in iron) dominate the continent, then settle down. They may have participated then in large-scale trade up and down the Atlantic coast, which also spread their language. Then, over a period of 250 years, they are gradually but systematically overwhelmed, by a better-organised and strategically self-conscious foe, the Romans. Ironically, it is only when the raiders begin to unify and organise themselves jointly for defence (under Vercingetorix) that they can be undone with finality. Four hundred years of stability ensue, while the Roman empire effectively resists continuing pressure for immigration from Germany. Under greater stress (originating in north and east Asia), the resistance fails, first sporadically, then totally; and the last hundred years are spent watching the effects of allowing new sets of raiders to pass as they will through the old imperial domains.

All in all, the major changes of language in this period, the spread of Latin across Italy, and into Gaul and Iberia, the spread of English in Britain, and the spread of Slavic in the Balkans, are the best markers of serious cultural change. The cases where serious language change failed to follow on from conquests expose the hollowness of much military glory—the conquests in western Europe by Franks, Vandals and Visigoths, even the conquests in Britain by Romans and Normans.

We now turn to look at this tale in more detail. It costs some effort to forget the well-known recent centuries, and see these languages as they appeared at the beginning. Perhaps the best way to begin is to consider how they appeared to those ever curious, but in this case uninvolved, bystanders, the Greeks.

At the start the Greeks simply saw the Celts as one of the framing nations of their world: Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, says that they lived where the river Istros (Danube) came from, farthest west of all European nations, but for the Cynetes. [451]He places them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, effectively on the Atlantic coast where Portugal is today, just as the historian Ephorus [451]does a century later, Celts in the west, Scythians in the north. There was something of conventional legend in this story, reminiscent of the Chinese world image which saw the familiar, civilised, world surrounded on all sides by unknown barbarians (see Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 158). But if so, the cliché had been a lucky guess. On modern evidence there were at the time Celtic speakers all the way across from the source of the Danube to the north of Iberia.

Their first real appearance is in the tale of the young prince Alexander’s reception of Celtic ambassadors from the coast of the Adriatic in 335 BC. It was apparently reported by his friend Ptolemy, who as it happened went on to be king of Egypt. [451]They were big men, he says, in stature and in opinion of themselves, and demonstrated this with a famous remark. They offered their friendship to Alexander—his empire-building had then yet to begin—but when challenged by him to say whether they were frightened, they declared that there was only one thing which filled them with dread, and that was the thought that the sky might one day crash down on them. This remained a byword for Celtic grandiloquence, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding of a Celtic oath formula. A thousand years later, Irishmen were still binding themselves ‘unless the firmament with its showers of stars fall upon the earth, or unless the blue-bordered fish-abounding sea come over the face of the world, or unless the earth quake… ‘ [451]

Subsequently the Celts (also known as Gauls: Galatai in Greek, Galli in Latin—Caesar comments that Celtae is the Gauls’ own word [455]) did gain a certain reputation. It is set out at length by the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century BC, and probably following the personal researches of the Greek polymath Posidonius. [451]Physically, they were supposed to be tall, lithe and fair, often with their hair artificially bleached with lime, the nobles sporting moustaches that covered their mouths and served as de facto wine-strainers. (This particular joke is over two thousand years old.) Their language sounded deep and altogether harsh. They were not without flair or subtlety, but did lack fixity of purpose, delighting to talk tersely in aphorisms and riddles. Nevertheless, they grew wordy when the time came to build themselves up, or belittle an opponent, in the lead-up to a fight. They dressed in bright colours, with cloaks often in check patterns, and—distinctively in the ancient world—the men wore trousers, called bracae [832]