4 ms·
> This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason behind the Romance family and its wide spread. Keep in mind that Celtic and Latin are both Indo-
by cryptonector 3y ago
> This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason behind the Romance family and its wide spread.
Keep in mind that Celtic and Latin are both Indo-European languages that split off about 4kya, so 1.5kya-2kya they were a lot closer that Romance languages and Celtic are today, and so what's more likely to have happened is that the Celtic spoken by the Gauls blended with the Latin spoken by the Romans. Germanic and Slavic languages are also Indo-European, so this dynamic worked in much of Europe over the past 2ky.
The point is that the other languages, where they were Indo-European, did not get "ousted", rather they blended with Latin.
Basque, Finnish, Hungarian -- these are not Indo-European, and those haven't Romanized, which I think helps my thesis :)
- piranha 3y agoBasque - sure, but Finnish and Hungarian? :-) Those were too far away for Romans even to have contacts with them. :)
- cryptonector 3y agoFair point, but it's not like they've not experienced interfacing with Romance language speaking peoples in the last 1ky.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoItalic and Celtic languages are probably more closely related to each other than to any other branch of IE languages. I also have the impression that the Romans viewed the Celts as more closely related to them both linguistically and culturally than almost any other group. Which is possibly one of the reasons why Gaul adopted Latin so rapidly.