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Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.
A little perturbed by the certainty and monolithic view of compounding words being championed here, I switched off the television (a strangely modern latin/greek compound) and went down the pub. I told some bloke at the bar about the nature of the current discussion and he made 5 points, all of which seemed rather good to me:

(1) Latin was related to Greek, rather as English is related to French.  It took in large chunks of Greek vocabulary in particular subject areas (such as seafaring, medicine, and religion) and applied Latin rules of grammar and spelling.

(2) The vast majority of the 570-odd ancient British place names that have survived appear to have been created in a sort of "extended Latin", using elements that Cicero or Ovid might not have used in polite Latin society, but probably came from the multi-ethnic mix of the Roman army.  Imagine comparing the English of a technical manual for exporters of car parts with the English of Jane Eyre.

(3)  Native British (proto-Welsh) peasants seem to have had very little input to the names that have survived.  The vast majority of "Celtic" etymologies that still infest Wikipedia etc do not stand up to critical examination.  However, Celtic nationalists are still doggedly attached to them and do not like hearing that there are better etymologies from the Germanic speech of most of the Roman army or from Greek.

(4) It is completely normal that related words were in common usage (with subtle differences, of course) across many Indo-European languages (including those that have vanished completely), yet we have surviving examples in only a few language families.  Greek supplies a lot of those examples because it was put into writing so early and so extensively.  One of the big questions about early British names is how far the Greek parallels are just proxies for other languages versus names actually created by Greek speakers, who were often the technicians of Roman society.  Remember too that educated Romans used Greek as their second language and to be posh (rather like Russians or Turks used French) and that Greek-speaking Constantiople was booming when Rome had become a shanty town.

(5) The epigraphic record is full of Latin/Greek mixtures.  We still create them today,

this all sounded quite compelling to me and not at all Gadus morhua.
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Messages In This Thread
Re: Calling all armchair generals! - by Ensifer - 03-11-2010, 03:13 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-18-2012, 06:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 12:02 AM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 02:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 05:40 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 11:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 05:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 09:42 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 10:10 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:25 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 08:36 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-26-2012, 02:57 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-27-2012, 01:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 08-05-2012, 02:24 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-07-2014, 02:18 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-08-2014, 01:50 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-11-2014, 02:03 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-18-2014, 07:54 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-20-2014, 02:37 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-25-2014, 08:29 AM
RE: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand. - by John1 - 05-31-2016, 05:42 PM

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