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So do we have any idea what sort of accent the Romans might have had? I mean, I suppose linguistics is probably some help here and we may never truly know, but surely we can come up with an approximation?
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Jun 10, 2012 03:00
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On that topic. Why is Latin such a dead language? Aside from maybe people in the Vatican speaking it. I mean I understand why it's a dead language, kind-of. I just have a hard time grasping the concept considering how large and dominant the empire once was. I mean, was everyone speaking Latin? I understand that Rome was so large and stretched out that the Latin eventually turned into dialects which turned into our modern Romance languages. Which, while very similar, are still quite different. Also the people that they were taking over obviously had their own language before Latin came about. You mention Rome letting people live their lives freely as long as they didn't oppose and paid their taxes. But I guess thousands of miles and years will do all that to a language. I understand these languages didn't come about over night and I'm overseeing just how long of a time it was. I vaguely remember someone telling me about someone of importance trying to standardize the language spoken around 300 ad? throughout the Empire but realized everyone was too far into their own dialects and what they considered to be the original Latin that it was a lost cause? Actually tell me all about the linguistics surrounding the Romans. Nostalgia4Dogges fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jun 10, 2012 |
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Jun 10, 2012 03:42
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Latin isn't really gone: it just turned into Italian, French, Portuguese , et cetera.
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Jun 10, 2012 03:52
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Yeah exactly, Romance languages are alive and kicking.
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Jun 10, 2012 04:10
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Except for French, which underwent saponification.
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Jun 10, 2012 04:14
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Christoff posted:I mean I understand why it's a dead language, kind-of. Speaking of, do Catholic priests still do Mass in Latin? If so, how close is it to the Roman Latin? Groda posted:Except for French, which underwent saponification. It got turned into soap? Man no wonder France smells so clean
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Jun 10, 2012 05:42
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Farecoal posted:Speaking of, do Catholic priests still do Mass in Latin? If so, how close is it to the Roman Latin? One of the big deals in Vatican II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council#Liturgy Forgot to answer: Pretty much, no and Church Latin is much more sinister sounding than Roman Latin, where the V's are W's. Weenie, weedy, witchy.
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Jun 10, 2012 05:44
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Farecoal posted:Speaking of, do Catholic priests still do Mass in Latin? If so, how close is it to the Roman Latin? In the mid 1960s the Vatican finally allowed masses to be performed in the vernacular. however, every good Catholic can at least recognize the basics of the latin mass, and there's still tons of poo poo said in it. hell, I remember my parents forcing me to learn the Agape, not a word of which I understood.
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Jun 10, 2012 05:46
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Church Latin is medieval Latin. I believe (again, my Latin knowledge is limited) that the grammar/vocabulary are largely the same as classical, but the pronunciation is different.
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Jun 10, 2012 05:48
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Here's a nice little PDF showing different Latin pronunciations: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/latinpro.pdf Basically it says in Roman Latin, the G is always hard, the C is always pronounced like a K, a V is like a W, a CH is like an emphatic K, PH is a like a P (philosophy=peelosopeea), TH is like an emphatic T. So Venus is like waynoos, or for fun, weenus.
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Jun 10, 2012 07:18
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On the subject of military when a nobleman wanted to join up where would we he get his training? I remember in Rome, Atia hires Titus to train Octavian in combat, though I'm sure that took a bit of liberty in that I imagine a higher ranking officer would be in charge of that.
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Jun 10, 2012 07:44
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Christoff posted:On that topic. Why is Latin such a dead language? Aside from maybe people in the Vatican speaking it. Latin is a dead language because humanists killed it. The original vulgar Latin mixed into other local languages and languages of the invaders, eg. Spanish was influenced by Iberian languages and Arabic. The only living branch of vulgar Latin survived in Catholic monasteries spoken by monks, until during the Renaissance humanists made it seem like a retardation of classical Latin. Wikipedia posted:Ad fontes was the general cry of the humanists, and as such their Latin style sought to purge Latin of the medieval Latin vocabulary and stylistic accretions that it had acquired in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. They looked to golden age Latin literature, and especially to Cicero in prose and Virgil in poetry, as the arbiters of Latin style. They abandoned the use of the sequence and other accentual forms of metre, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used in Latin poetry during the Roman period. The humanists condemned the large body of medieval Latin literature as "gothic" — for them, a term of abuse — and believed instead that only ancient Latin from the Roman period was "real Latin". Today's ecclesiastical Latin is a dead form of the language, stored in formaldehyde so it wouldn't evolve.
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Jun 10, 2012 08:12
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Nenonen posted:Latin is a dead language because humanists killed it. The original vulgar Latin mixed into other local languages and languages of the invaders, eg. Spanish was influenced by Iberian languages and Arabic. The only living branch of vulgar Latin survived in Catholic monasteries spoken by monks, until during the Renaissance humanists made it seem like a retardation of classical Latin. I don't follow this post. What does humanist mean in this context? I assumed that latin was dead because all languages that old have transformed into another language or other languages.
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Jun 10, 2012 08:32
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Mescal posted:I don't follow this post. What does humanist mean in this context? I assumed that latin was dead because all languages that old have transformed into another language or other languages. Renaissance humanists were scholars who idealized ancient Greek and Roman texts and tried to return Europe back to those ideals in contrast to the 'dark' Middle Ages. Renaissance = rebirth. Languages don't die because they get old. Modern English has been used for 500 years now, and it has evolved during that time. But it has remained a dominant language in the areas where it is mostly used (UK, USA, Canada, Australia etc.) so it hasn't been subjected to heavy influence from other languages during that time. Shakespearean or King James era English are different to modern English, but not so different as to be only remotely understandable. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, was under very heavy pressures during the Middle Ages and it became creolized (I don't know if this is a proper term here, I ain't no linguist), eg. in France mixing up with Frankish and finally becoming Old French, essentially the beginnings of a new language. At the same time though, people throughout Gallia would have been speaking different dialects and mixtures of languages and dialects, rather than everyone adopting the same mixture at the same time. While later on the state tried to standardize the French throughout the empire and exterminate other languages, the regional dialects and other languages like Catalan and Basque are still used by small minorities (still over a million speakers when all are combined). 
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Jun 10, 2012 09:21
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FizFashizzle posted:He'd charge the city exorbitant fees just to watch him as well, and he horrified them. He'd go out there and just murder defenseless giraffes which horrified the people of Rome. 
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Jun 10, 2012 14:32
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Mithra6 posted:Here's a nice little PDF showing different Latin pronunciations: But if it's a dead language, how can we be sure of how Latin was pronounced anyway?
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Jun 10, 2012 16:35
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:If you could choose any Accents (Speaking English) to portray Roman Nobles, which would you pick? Amused to Death posted:So were the capite censi allowed to vote? I would assume if they did it'd be in the tribal assembly since they're too destitute to be plebians and part of the plebian council. Alan Smithee posted:On the subject of military when a nobleman wanted to join up where would we he get his training? I remember in Rome, Atia hires Titus to train Octavian in combat, though I'm sure that took a bit of liberty in that I imagine a higher ranking officer would be in charge of that.
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Jun 10, 2012 16:43
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General Panic posted:But if it's a dead language, how can we be sure of how Latin was pronounced anyway? The same way any ancient language is reconstructed: you look at its various descendants, work out what different shifts each one has and work backwards. Proper nouns written in other languages help as well, so any Roman names written down in Greek can give you a clue, for instance. Incidentally Romanian is closer to Roman latin than modern Italian
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Jun 10, 2012 16:53
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For a 'dead language' Latin is a super easy one. Linguists and phonologists have tons of material due to the language being used continously for millennia over a huge area, up to this day. Try one that is neither spoken any more nor has left too many written records - like Etruscan. Deciphering ancient Mayan glyphs is 'easy' in comparison, as there are still people who speak the language. quote:Only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests, such as Varro, could read Etruscan. The last person known to have been able to read Etruscan was the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – AD 54), the author of a treatise in twenty volumes on the Etruscans, Tyrrenikà (now lost), who compiled a dictionary (also lost) by interviewing the last few elderly rustics who still spoke the language. Urgulanilla, the emperor's first wife, was Etruscan.
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Jun 10, 2012 17:40
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Tsaedje posted:Incidentally Romanian is closer to Roman latin than modern Italian Yep, everybody forgets about them because it's eastern Europe but it's the closest language to classical Latin. Trajan conquered Dacia so hard that it's still called Romania to this day. 
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Jun 10, 2012 23:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep, everybody forgets about them because it's eastern Europe but it's the closest language to classical Latin. Trajan conquered Dacia so hard that it's still called Romania to this day. I thought it was because they settled far more legionairres and Romans there than most regions to prevent an uprising and to keep the gold a flowin?
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Jun 10, 2012 23:40
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:I thought it was because they settled far more legionairres and Romans there than most regions to prevent an uprising and to keep the gold a flowin? It was heavily colonized, but the Dacians Romanized too. Or were exterminated, depending on what you believe--the documentation in Dacia is very limited, unlike a lot of the other places like Gaul. I don't personally see any reason to believe the extermination hypothesis.
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Jun 11, 2012 00:15
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Someone asked about Roman magical belief so I thought I'd mention the Sibylline Books. We're not really certain what was in them since no copies survive, but they were apparently a collection of prophecies and rituals that the Romans would turn to in times of chaos or uncertainty. They were consulted all the time in the early days but as years went by it became less popular, in part because some of the prescribed rituals were bizarre even by Greco-Roman standards. For example, it's a solid bet that what little human sacrificing the Romans ever did was after following the instructions in the Books. Another classic from the old days was the act of devotio, where the Roman general, in exchange for victory, would pledge all the souls of the soon-to-be-defeated enemy army to the underworld. Then he'd seal the deal by pledging his own soul, and charge head first into the enemy formation and essentially commit suicide. Probably a good thing for the development of tactics and strategy that this never really caught on beyond the very early Republic.
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Jun 11, 2012 00:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep, everybody forgets about them because it's eastern Europe but it's the closest language to classical Latin. That would be Sardinian, which is considerably more conservative than any other living Romance language. Romanian and Italian are probably the next closest to Latin.
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Jun 11, 2012 00:43
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Ras Het posted:That would be Sardinian, which is considerably more conservative than any other living Romance language. Romanian and Italian are probably the next closest to Latin. Which reminds me, what's the deal with Sicily, Sardenia and Corsica? I would have thought they'd all end up being more important, but they seem like hillbilly parts of the Empire.
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Jun 11, 2012 01:49
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TildeATH posted:Which reminds me, what's the deal with Sicily, Sardenia and Corsica? I would have thought they'd all end up being more important, but they seem like hillbilly parts of the Empire. Yeah, they don't show up much, do they? Sicily is a big farming territory, it supplies a lot of the food for Italy. Sardinia too. Sardinia's native population never totally assimilates, Cicero has a famous passage making GBS threads on them. I honestly can't remember ever reading about Corsica. The Romans settle around the coasts a bit and the center of both islands is mountainous forest that they never bother with. Corsica had a big wax industry apparently. You'd think someone would give a poo poo about them but it doesn't appear that anyone ever really did.
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Jun 11, 2012 01:56
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What was the most important/influential part of the empire other than Italy? And what was generally the second biggest city in the empire?
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Jun 11, 2012 02:23
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Farecoal posted:What was the most important/influential part of the empire other than Italy? And what was generally the second biggest city in the empire? Going off of this, why did the Romans treat Capua like Carthage when it joined with Carthage in the 2nd Punic War? I can understand them destroying Carthage, but Capua is in Italy, not very far from Rome, etc.
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Jun 11, 2012 02:27
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Farecoal posted:What was the most important/influential part of the empire other than Italy? And what was generally the second biggest city in the empire? Until Augustus it was Greece, and after him it was Egypt. Alexandria was by far the largest and richest city besides Rome until Constantinople got going. Influential areas were also Syria and the city of Antioch, and then Gaul in Trier. Spain was extremely Romanized and produced the first non Roman Emperors, but was never a huge area of influence besides that.
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Jun 11, 2012 02:29
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Farecoal posted:What was the most important/influential part of the empire other than Italy? And was generally the second biggest city in the empire? What do you mean by important? Generally the east has the money so you can choose somewhere there depending on the era. Greece and Egypt are influential culturally (and economically in the case of Egypt), Gaul is influential militarily, Syria is a critical province both for money and strategic location. The second biggest city changes over time as you might imagine. Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople all probably held the title at some point. Alexandria's a safe bet most of the time though. Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Going off of this, why did the Romans treat Capua like Carthage when it joined with Carthage in the 2nd Punic War? I can understand them destroying Carthage, but Capua is in Italy, not very far from Rome, etc. Traitors. Even worse! Campania was an allied area, not actually Roman, so they had no qualms about crushing them for being disloyal. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 02:31
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TildeATH posted:Which reminds me, what's the deal with Sicily, Sardenia and Corsica? I would have thought they'd all end up being more important, but they seem like hillbilly parts of the Empire. Sicily was a very important territory during the Greek golden age, when Syracusa was possibly the largest city in the Greek world. It also played a big part in the Peloponnesian Wars, and was important enough for Carthage to obsess over. After the Punic Wars and with the decline of Greek power, Sicily's importance waned, as the power in Italy shifted towards the north, and it still hasn't recovered.
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Jun 11, 2012 02:56
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Conversely, what was the shittiest, most backwater worthless province in the Roman Emprire?
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Jun 11, 2012 04:07
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Orkiec posted:Conversely, what was the shittiest, most backwater worthless province in the Roman Emprire? Germania Inferior or Moesia are good candidates. Germania Inferior is the furthest-flung part of Germania within the empire (superior/inferior in this context just means upriver/downriver, not that it's an inferior province). Moesia never had much wealth, like the other Balkan provinces, and was a popular raiding target later on. And Corsica et Sardinia as we were talking about. Comedy answer: Britannia. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 04:21
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Marutania too.
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Jun 11, 2012 04:32
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Sicily was hugely important up through and including the Punic wars and then through the end of the Republic. It was a big warzone. It was run by enourmous latifundia in the empire and basically devoid of civilization other than agriculture. As far as backwaters Cyrenaica basically grew crops for 600 years and nothing else.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:28
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Going off of this, why did the Romans treat Capua like Carthage when it joined with Carthage in the 2nd Punic War? I can understand them destroying Carthage, but Capua is in Italy, not very far from Rome, etc. Ancient Rome was very factional. Pre-empire even more so since a lot of Romans still had some semblance of heritage and identity based on their old Italian roots. The Social wars is a pretty good example of how long these identities simmered below the surface.
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Jun 11, 2012 06:40
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Amused to Death posted:I still don't see how exactly the century assembly functioned once you start getting to the 2nd-1st century BC when soldiers are often stationed far from Rome, yet the century assembly had the pretty important role of electing consuls and other higher magistrates, so obviously there were still soldiers there voting. It's a serious flaw in the republican system that doesn't get addressed. To vote, you have to be physically present in Rome. This is fine for centuries but once there's an empire, it becomes exactly as big an issue as you might imagine it to be. Vigilance posted:Can you talk about Roman aqueducts? I remember reading about them a few years ago but sadly I've forgotten most of what I read. I remember being blown away reading about them though. Sure. Major Roman cities typically get their water from aqueducts or wells, since the river is going to be gross as hell. The Romans didn't invent the concept but they perfected it. They're all gravity systems to bring clean water from the nearest available source. The ones in Rome lead into the mountains.  This is our usual picture of them, though most aqueducts were underground. They were covered and many used lead pipes. Simple stone channels are quite common too, then the pipes would be used once they got to the city. There would also be reservoirs at various points to help maintain constant water pressure in the city. Some of them were so well made that they are still in use. Aqueduct systems could provide an absolute shitload of water, and Roman cities wasted it extravagantly. Fountains (both decorative and for drinking), homes with pressurized water, pools, baths, et cetera. They show the usual Roman skill and precision in engineering. Vitruvius' recommendations on gradient match up pretty well with what we find archaeologically. For every kilometer an aqueduct would descend about 35 centimeters. One of the coolest systems is in the arena at Capua, which is one of the few places we can verify actually held naumachia, the naval version of gladiatorial games. It's also a precise copy of the Flavian Amphitheater.  This is one of my pics of the understructure. The grate in the ceiling is one of the holes that could be opened up to allow water through. These also had elevators attached to them (though probably not this particular hole) so you could raise up scenery or have lions pop out of the ground or whatever. Down here would be gladiators waiting to go up, animals in cages, doctors, all sorts of crap for the games. Down at the end...  ... is the channel that connects both to the aqueduct system and the sewers. For a naval game, you'd clear out the whole understructure, open up the valve and flood. The sources claim it was incredibly quick, as if the water just appeared and disappeared. Judging by the size of all the pipes and holes this is not unbelievable. Afterward, open the gates to the sewers and let the water recede. Roman sewers are equally complicated, they're a similar kind of system to aqueducts, just sluicing the poo poo out and into the local river. Some of them are still being used too. Together, the aqueducts and sewers not only allowed for larger populations because of all the water available, but they significantly reduced the amount of people dying from shitwater and shitwater-borne disease. In the pre-modern world this is no small advantage. There are still plenty of parts of our world where a Roman aqueduct/sewer network would be a big improvement over what they have now.
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Jun 11, 2012 07:35
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Grand Fromage posted:
This is rather fascinating! I just finished re-reading "Lives of the Caesars" and "Claudius the God" and was always slightly skeptical about the reported size of the naval games. Well, the more you know! A small question on names: would the Romans have known the adult Caligula as Caligula, or as Gaius? Or would it have depended on context? My translation of "Lives" refers to him as Gaius, but dunno if that's the translators call (Robert Graves) or Suetonius'...
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Jun 11, 2012 09:39
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Elissimpark posted:This is rather fascinating! I just finished re-reading "Lives of the Caesars" and "Claudius the God" and was always slightly skeptical about the reported size of the naval games. Well, the more you know! There are a lot of issues with the naumachia, but they definitely happened and were big. They seem to have been very rare though. He would've been known as Gaius at the time. The nicknames like Caligula or Caracalla exist during their reigns but weren't used. It wasn't like you'd be killed for it, it just wasn't common practice. Later historians preferentially use the nicknames because there are approximately ninety billion important people named Gaius but only one Caligula. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 10:11
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I have a bunch of pictures of Conimbriga that I took. It was a Roman settlement in Portugal just outside of Coimbra. You guys mind if I share? Maybe I'll link them so I don't clog the thread.
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Jun 11, 2012 10:27
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