Why didn't the Britons learn Latin in Roman times?

[ogoogo]

The cultural impact of Rome on Britain must have been overwhelming - a vast empire of some 50m people with a correspondingly vast economy. However, unlike the people of France, Spain and Portugal, who learned to speak Latin in sufficient numbers that their languages today are daughter languages of Latin, the ancient Britons seem to have persisted in speaking Celtic in the main during the time of the Roman occupation.

The duration of the Roman occupation, whilst not as long as in the other countries mentioned, was more than long enough for Latin to have become widely spoken - but this does not seem to have happened. By comparison, the population of England, after the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the middle of the fifth century, seems to have switched from Celtic to what is today known as Old English in a couple of generations.

Surely the cultural impact of the Anglo-Saxons can't have been that much greater than the cultural impact of Rome! Can anybody explain why this happened? Thanks in advance for all your contributions.

[timoneill]

Sept 5, 2013 14:59:55 GMT ogoogo said:

The cultural impact of Rome on Britain must have been overwhelming - a vast empire of some 50m people with a correspondingly vast economy. However, unlike the people of France, Spain and Portugal, who learned to speak Latin in sufficient numbers that their languages today are daughter languages of Latin, the ancient Britons seem to have persisted in speaking Celtic in the main during the time of the Roman occupation.

The duration of the Roman occupation, whilst not as long as in the other countries mentioned, was more than long enough for Latin to have become widely spoken - but this does not seem to have happened. By comparison, the population of England, after the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the middle of the fifth century, seems to have switched from Celtic to what is today known as Old English in a couple of generations.

Surely the cultural impact of the Anglo-Saxons can't have been that much greater than the cultural impact of Rome! Can anybody explain why this happened? Thanks in advance for all your contributions.

The difference seems to lie in the level of Roman colonisation. The territories that adopted Latin had been part of the Empire longer and, partly as a consequence, had seen a lot more settlement of veterans and other Latin speakers in them over the centuries. Britian was much further away, was far less rich and attractive and was considered a rather horrible place to live (think about whether you'd live in Tuscany or Yorkshire - exactly). Other territories had deliberate campaigns of colonial settlement to dominate them and suppress sedition and to exploit local resources. So Dacia was heavily settled very rapidly, which is why Romania still speaks a Romance language today despite only being part of the Empire for a couple of hundred years.

The fact that the population reverted to Celtic languages with the collapse of Roman rule in Britain indicates that the Roman presence in Britain was never numerous. A lot of those "Roman" villas we see excavated on Time Team were probably owned and lived in by Celtic-speaking Britons in togas.

[ogoogo]

Obviously the case of Dacia (Romania) is different from that of Briton. Naturally, Italy is also different. That is why I was careful to refer only to Iberia and France and not Italy or Romania.

However, France is not so different from Roman Britain. The Roman conquest predates that of Roman Britain by less than a century and neither France nor Britain was subject to the same level of enforced 'Romanisation' as Romania.

Indeed, given that the land area of France is considerably greater than the land area of Roman Britain, the population of France must have been several times that of Briton and ought to have 'resisted' Roman linguistic influence more successfully than did Britain.

Yet, this was not the case. The ancient languages of France died out and the Gauls finished  up speaking a version of Latin, a version today called French (by us English-speakers). This happened despite France being conquered by Franks who gave their name to the country but not their language. How weird is that!

Briton, on the other hand, with a population considerably smaller than that of Gaul and already subject to considerable Roman cultural influence even before the Roman invasion and conquest, somehow persisted in speaking varieties of Celtic language all through and after the period of Roman occupation.

Yet the takeover by relatively primitive Germanic peoples during the fifth century was enough to cause the Britons of south and east Britain to abandon their language and adopt that of their new masters in only a few generations. How much even weirder is that!

[unkleE]

Sept 7, 2013 11:06:02 GMT ogoogo said:

Yet the takeover by relatively primitive Germanic peoples during the fifth century was enough to cause the Britons of south and east Britain to abandon their language and adopt that of their new masters in only a few generations. How much even weirder is that!

I don't have any knowledge to add to this. But I do know that when Melvin Bragg did his English language TV series a few years back, he pointed out that the 'English'/Anglo Saxon language was pushed aside by the Norman invasion (among the upper echelons at any rate), but returned a couple of centuries later and won out over French This may suggest that there was some features of Anglo Saxon that were superior to either Roman or French, at least for the English people.

[ignorantianescia]

Sept 7, 2013 11:06:02 GMT ogoogo said:

Indeed, given that the land area of France is considerably greater than the land area of Roman Britain, the population of France must have been several times that of Briton and ought to have 'resisted' Roman linguistic influence more successfully than did Britain.

This is only taking the size of the 'receptor' population into account. The size of the 'invasive' population must also come into the equation and Tim has already noted the following:

Sept 5, 2013 19:23:53 GMT timoneill said:

The fact that the population reverted to Celtic languages with the collapse of Roman rule in Britain indicates that the Roman presence in Britain was never numerous. A lot of those "Roman" villas we see excavated on Time Team were probably owned and lived in by Celtic-speaking Britons in togas.

If the Roman population in Britain was smaller, a smaller population could resist adopting Latin as a vernacular. (Lest I be accused of reductionism, I don't pretend population sizes are the only factors.)

[James Hannam]

Sept 5, 2013 19:23:53 GMT timoneill said:

The fact that the population reverted to Celtic languages with the collapse of Roman rule in Britain indicates that the Roman presence in Britain was never numerous. A lot of those "Roman" villas we see excavated on Time Team were probably owned and lived in by Celtic-speaking Britons in togas.

If the Roman population in Britain was smaller, a smaller population could resist adopting Latin as a vernacular. (Lest I be accused of reductionism, I don't pretend population sizes are the only factors.)[/quote]

Related to this is the way that when the Franks first invaded France and the Goths Spain they seemed happy to adopt much Roman infrastructure and administration. They just produced a new ruling class over the old structures. That's a bit like what the Normans did in England, so the old language prevailed as it was used by what we might anachronistically call the "upper Middle" class.

But the Anglo Saxons appear to have had no interest in preserving Roman structures and abandoned the cities etc. They rebuilt society from the ground up, starting from a very low level where even knowledge of throwing pots on wheels was lost.

J

[ogoogo]

The mystery is not so much the behaviour of the incoming Anglo-Saxons and their comparative 'primitiveness' but why the Britons of the fifth century surrendered their linguistic heritage so meekly in just a couple of generations despite having held onto it through centuries of Roman domination.

Sure, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, pagan barbarians from Germany/Denmark, seem to have been singularly untutored - but that makes it all the more amazing that fifth century Britons switched so rapidly to their tongue, particularly as there doesn't seem to have been any great numerical influx of these Anglo-Saxons and Jutes or whoever. There was no 'swamping' effect.

[ulyssesrexredux]

This article by Stephen Oppenheimer offers a possible solution to the conundrum. He goes into greater details in his 2006 book, Origins of the British.


Myths of British ancestry

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/#.UjIKFn_algY

[ogoogo]

Undoubtedly there were cross-Channel movements of people and goods beween Britain and the continent even before the Claudian invasion of AD 43 and there was some cooperation between Belgic tribes and tribes on the south east British mainland even in the time of Caesar, said by some to have been a possible reason for Caesar's attempted invasions in the mid-50s BC.

Therefore, there may well have been some early Germanic languages spoken alongside Celtic in the south east of England before and during Roman times. This makes it all the more remarkable that the language of the Romans failed to implant itself on these shores if it faced a population divided linguistically amongst itself. In such circumstances, surely the language of Rome ought to have been able to oust the languages of SE England as easily it ousted the languages of Gaul and Iberia (except Basque).

However, the inhabitants of Britain seem not to have adopted the speaking of Latin to the same extent as their cousins on the Gallic side of the Channel, as English is not a Romance language. This seems to be true whether the inhabitants of Britain were exclusively Celtic speaking at the time of the Roman invasion and occupation or whether some of these inhabitants were themselves of recent Belgic origin or indeed of Germanic origin.

However, the possible early arrival of Germanic-speakers in Britain, half a millenium before the Germanic-speakers of post-Roman times, itself raises new questions, such as why so few words from Celtic passed into the fused Germanic languages of the fifth century onwards, barely a half-dozen or so excluding place-names.

The rest of the country remained Celtic-speaking for long after the Romans came and went, and long after the Anglo-Saxons came and stayed, but somehow or another very few words of Celtic passed directly into the fused Germanic languages which we today call Old English. Surely, there would have been numerous contacts between the speakers of fused Germanic and speakers of Celtic and words should have passed freely from one to the other - but that didn't happen. History is full of mysteries.

[humphreyfmclarke]

Few words of Celtic passed into English (possible candidates include brag, brat , curse and baby) but it seems that Celtic-derived grammar and constructions did. Old English as written does not look very Celtic but there is some evidence that in day to day speech Celtic constructions were used. For instance no other Germanic language uses the word 'do' like we do in a meaningless way, e.g we say 'I did not notice' rather than 'I not notice' despite the fact the 'did' does not add anything to the sentence. The other weird thing is that in other languages, if someone asks you what you are doing they would say something like 'I write'; we on the other hand would add an 'ing' and say 'I am writing'. We would say 'did you see what he is doing?' rather than 'saw you what he does?' like in other Germanic languages.

Welsh however - does have do in the same meaningless way we use it ('nes'). Welsh and other Celtic languages also have the same use of 'ing' as we do. Assuming these features did not develop on their own then we speak a Celtic-inflected English. Now the fact is that these constructions did not show up in any document until 1300 which is long after English speakers met Celts. However this may be because speaking and writing are very different things - often the spoken word changes a lot quicker than the written form which tends to be policed and preserved.

As for why the Celts didn't bring more words into the language - this doesn't always happen when large numbers of people learn a language which is imposed upon them. For example, Russian appears to have picked up only a couple of dozen words from the Uralic family (Finnish and Hungarian) despite the fact that Uralic has had a substantial impact on Russian in terms of grammar - e.g a negative sentence like 'I do not see a girl' is expressed as 'I do not see of a girl'; which is the same way the Finns say it. Or 'I have a book' comes out as 'to me is a book' like Uralic rather than an Indo-European language.

In India Dravidian languages and Indo-European languages have coexisted for centuries and many people have been bilingual over than time - however barely any Dravidian words have made their way into the Indo-European languages. Despite this the Indo-European languages show a lot of influence from Dravidian grammar.

[ignorantianescia]

English is also considered closely related to the Frisian languages, so that's one variety of continental West-Germanic to which it's germane. This relation is even proverbial in West Frisian. It seems difficult to account for that in Oppenheimer's model.

Besides, there's another case of a supplanted language having little lexical influence on the replacing language and it's even alluded in the OP: Gaulish.

[ogoogo]

Humphrey

Regarding the possible influence of Celtic on Old English and the use of the continuous present, it seems that Old English had only two tenses, past and present, until coming under the influence of Norman French following the Norman invasion (and Conquest).

The arrival of Frenchified vikings in 1066 changed the language dramatically and gave rise to Middle English. This does not seem to be connected to any residual influence of Celtic on Old English following the fifth century takeover by the Anglo-Saxons (and Jutes, Frisians etc).

Regardless, the mystery still remains why the Britons of olden times were so swift to give up their language when the Germanic barbarians arrived but had held onto their language in the face of centuries of Roman domination.

[fortigurn]

Maybe they just didn't like it. I studied Latin for a year and a half at uni, and all I can say is it's a beastly language; clumsy, inefficient, plagued with redundancy, and basically only good for singing and epigrams.

[himself]

For the record, Gaulish did not give up the ghost until very late in imperial times, very nearly to the Volkerwanderung. Peter Brown, THE WORLD OF LATE ANTIQUITY.

[didi]

Many Britons did speak "British Latin Vulgate" but many also spoke Brytonic.

The Angles were never "masters" over the Britons, as the Angles didnt occupy and rule as the Romans did. There were two Kingdoms side by side: The Anglish and the British. These two Kingdoms fought many battles for a couple of centuries. Although the British won many battles, ultimately the Anglish pushed them back into Wales and Brettany.

The Britons didn't give up their language, rather they gave up territory.