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1、covernext page Cover title:Romance Languages author:Harris, Martin; Vincent, Nigel. publisher:Taylor cf. p. 23), largely to the profit at that time of Germanic and Slavic languages within Europe and, from the later seventh century onwards, of Arabic in north Africa. Despite the military and politica
2、l collapse of the Western Empire and the subsequent loss of territory by Romance, Germanic and Slavic actually made less headway within Europe than might have been expected. In Iberia, for instance, the incoming Visigoths were already Latin-speaking before they arrived, and retained many aspects of
3、the civilisation they found there, with themselves now in a dominant role; the continued use of Romance is therefore hardly surprising. In northern Gaul, to take a second example, a Catholic Frankish kingdom under Clovis emerged by the end of the fifth century, in which Latin was established from th
4、e outset as the language of both religion and administration and where a Romance vernacularwith a significant Frankish overlayrapidly began to develop. The persistenceor reintroductionof Romance in the area of present-day Rumania, on the other hand, is more difficult to account for, and is discussed
5、 in some detail below (pp. 23). The survival or otherwise of Romance when political mastery passed into other hands can be ascribed partly to the extent and profundity of earlier Latinisation and partly to the density and pattern of settlement of the newcomers; the use by the Christian church as its
6、 official language of Latin/Romance (what some scholars call Late Latin is the same as what others call Early Romance) is certainly also a relevant factor. It is with the subsequent fate of Romance in those areas where it did persist that this chapter is primarily concerned. Of course, as was indica
7、ted earlier, even when Roman power was at its height there was not one single homogeneous form of Latin used by all speakers throughout the Empire: social and regional variation, particularly in the spoken language, would have been apparent at all times. There would, for example, have been considera
8、ble differences between the speech of Cicero and that of his slaves, or between the Latin spoken by a Roman provincial governor and that of his subjects, and the question of how such varieties should be distinguished and denominated is discussed below (pp. 267). During the period between the collaps
9、e of the Empire in the west and the emergence of the first Romance vernacular texts in various parts of Europe, one must envisage a situation in which this everpresent variation within Latin was accentuated as the language developed Page 3 in ever more divergent ways in different localities. There a
10、re three main reasons for this. The first is simply the general tendency towards linguistic fragmentation inherent in the language acquisition process, counter-balanced at all times by the need to communicate with others within a shared speech community. Given the loss of a single uniform education
11、system, and given the increasing separation of various groups of Romance speakers from one another, particularly after the rise of the Moslems in the eighth century shook the cohesiveness of the Western Romance world, this shared speech community must have grown progressively smaller for most speake
12、rs; thus the pressures offsetting fragmentation weakened and dialectalisation proceeded apace. Secondly, there were already during the Empire incipient divergences between the Latin of various provinces, partly at least because of the different language or languages which were spoken (and often cont
13、inued to be spoken for centuries) in various regions before Latin became the pre-dominant language. Thus there are, for example, considerably more words of Celtic origin in contemporary French and north Italian dialects than in Spanish, standard Italian or (even more so) Rumanian, reflecting the Cel
14、ts domination before Romes expansion both of Italy north of the river Po (Gallia Cisalpina: Gaul this side of the Alps) and of most of present-day France (Gallia Transalpina: Gaul beyond the Alps). One representative example may be found in derivatives of a Latinised Celtic word RUSCA bark (cf. Wels
15、h rhysg rind), surviving with various meanings ranging from peel and skin through bark to cork and (cork) bee-hive in Gallo-Italian dialects, throughout Gaul, and in Catalan. Within Iberia there seem to have been several languages spoken in various parts before the arrival of the Romans, including (
16、in addition to Celtic) both Basque, a non-Indo-European language still spoken in the western Pyrenees on either side of the Spanish- French frontier, and also another language or language family, Iberian, of unknown provenance and genetic relationship. Very often, the precise source of a word peculiar to all or part of Iberia is unclear; for this reason, those lexical items found in Ibero-Romance that are clearly of long standing and which are apparently neither o
