̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - James Clackson

Understanding the ancient world through language

mjg209 — Fri, 22 May 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Language played a key role in state formation and the spread of Christianity, the construction of ethnicity and negotiating positions of social status and group membership in the ancient world. It could reinforce social norms and shed light on taboos. Yet it is often overlooked as a source for understanding ancient civilisations.

A new book by James Clackson, Reader in Comparative Philology in the Faculty of Classics, uses language as a lens for understanding the ancient world.

Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds is about why some languages - Latin and Greek - grew and others shrank and what language can tell us about the way people lived. ̽��ֱ��principal focus is the Greek and Roman civilisations between around 800 BCE and 400 CE. ̽��ֱ��book also catalogues how different states in ancient times managed multilingual populations and it highlights the plethora of different languages that existed at the time. Indeed until the last century of the Roman Republic Latin was a minority language, even in Italy.

̽��ֱ��theme of multilingualism is one which has implications for our current preoccupation with immigration and one which Clackson will address in his forthcoming talk on 29th May at the Hay Festival where he is one of many academics speaking as part of the Cambridge Series.

He will draw parallels between current British anxiety about hearing other languages than English and fears about English being bastardised by other languages and concerns of the Romans about the influx of foreign people and foreign words into the Latin language. “I am interested in the impact of long-term migration on language. In the end, despite concerns, Latin was enriched by migration. Lots of basic Latin words are Greek words and this has translated into the Romance languages such as French where you can trace the impact of Greek in words such as bras, jambe and parler,” says Clackson.

He compares the approach of Greece and Rome to language. Greece had many many minor states, each with their own dialect and often their own alphabet. He says the Greeks were happy to let people speak in other dialects in public places like the courts and lecture rooms. Multilingualism was not an issue. “It was almost invisible. Ancient writers do not generally talk about interpreters or translations. They take it as natural, as something that doesn’t even need to be mentioned,” he says.

It was not until Roman times that something approaching an official language began to emerge. “Roman magistrates, for instance, spoke Latin, even if the audience was Greek-speaking and the speaker could speak Greek. There are documented instances of this,” says Clackson. “It was a way of letting people know who was boss.”

Those in the audience would have to wait for the translation to understand what was being said.

“You can track in Roman times the discussion about how not to sound Greek. In his public speeches, Cicero [pictured] avoids Greek words as much as possible, but in his private letters he is continually using Greek words and phrases. It’s like a different linguistic persona. He said he would never use Greek words in a Latin sentence, but there is evidence that, in private, he did.”

Clackson adds that there appears to have been a gender difference in how language was used, with women who did not have such a public voice, more likely to use native languages.

Despite these differences, there is no written evidence, says Clackson, that language was associated with political resistance to Roman imperialism. Partly this may be because local languages did not have a written system. “If the Romans conquered you, you had to speak Latin and if you wanted to be educated and get on you had to learn Latin,” he says.

People used language fairly pragmatically according to what would get them the best results, he says. “In Roman law, Latin had to be spoken for contracts to be valid so you would be excluded from the economy if you didn’t use Latin, but there was no centralisation of schooling and attempts to impose language in that way. It was not as associated with identity as it is now.”

Nevertheless, the ability to speak the highest form of Greek was also a signifier of status. Many Romans learnt Greek as they saw it as the language of literature and culture.

Clackson’s research is currently focused on whether the Romans treated Greek differently to other languages, whether they were more open to Greek culture and whether that openness was part of their success.

*James Clackson will be speaking at the Hay Festival at 1pm on 29th May on Migration and Language: Ancient Perspectives.

James Clackson's new book looks at what language use can tell us about ancient societies.

I am interested in the impact of long-term migration on language. In the end, despite concerns, Latin was enriched by migration. Lots of basic Latin words are Greek words and this has translated into the Romance languages such as French where you can trace the impact of Greek in words such as bras, jambe and parler.

James Clackson

Cesare Maccari

"Maccari-Cicero" by Cesare Maccari. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Adventures of a palaeolinguist

sjr81 — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:24:42 +0000

It has an alphabet similar to Latin but actually reads from right to left, like mirror-writing. ̽��ֱ��second line is easily decipherable; it reads Frentiaís, meaning that the bronze was cast in Frentani territory. This object is one of the last remaining documents written in this ancient language.

However, scholars disagree about the interpretation of the first line. Dr James Clackson - from the Faculty of Classics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - is a palaeolinguist, who works on reconstructing these ancient languages which have long been lost to the dustbin of history.

He will be giving a talk on his research combining classics, ancient history and linguistics on Monday, 24 October as part of the Festival of Ideas, the UK’s only festival devoted to the arts, humanities and social sciences. https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/

It is thought that human language evolved 100,000 years ago with writing appearing only much later, just over 5,000 years ago.

Dr Clackson said “Palaeontologists are able to reconstruct the forms and lives of extinct fauna and flora, such as the brontosauros and the leptocycas, often basing their results on fragmentary and scattered remains - a skull here, an ankle bone there, or the imprint of a treetrunk on clay. Palaeolinguists attempt to do the same thing with languages which are no longer spoken.”

Dr Clackson argues that the second line scratched into the weight reads kerLITtum, LIT an abbreviation for the synonymous Greek word litra meaning ‘pound’, and on either side of it, the two halves of the word kertum, which like the Latin certum, means ‘fixed’ or ‘certain’. He guesses that the creator did not want others adding any further inscriptions which would falsify the weight’s value, similar to the way we draw lines next to the numbers when writing cheques.

Much of Dr Clackson’s work involves working from obscure texts inscribed on tablets of stone or metal. Often written in obsolete scripts which are only partially understood by academics today, he says that ‘working out the linguistic message of these texts is partly a matter of solving a puzzle, or cracking a code’. Yet with very limited written records of these ancient languages, Dr Clackson meticulously works backwards from other sources that are available to him as a scholar in the 21^st century – modern languages.

He added: “For example, English and German share similarities not just in the most common everyday words but also in basic grammatical structures. By comparing the two languages we can build a picture of what the language they came from looked like, much as the biologist can reconstruct the common ancestor of the dog and the wolf, or the lion and the household cat.”

̽��ֱ��common ancestor of English and German, or its ‘parent language’, is called proto-Germanic. It is one branch of a much bigger family called Indo-European, which encompasses Latin and Greek as well as Sanskrit, the language of Ancient India.

Dr Clackson emphasises that deciphering one word of Frentinian may not seem like a monumental leap in research. He said: “In palaeotological terms, it is the equivalent of fitting a fossilised tooth into the jaw of a tyrannosaurus Rex.”

Yet the importance of Dr Clackson’s works lies in the cultural, social and ethnic information which is hidden within these ancient texts. Studying the use, style and content of ancient languages helps us to re-create the stories, mythology, knowledge and world-view of people alive thousands of years ago.

He added: “It is only through such small steps that we can gradually build up a real picture of lost languages, and get a better understanding of the whole of linguistic evolution. ̽��ֱ��ability to use and understand language is one of the only things that all human societies have in common.

“Every language is unique, and uncovering, decoding and interpreting lost languages gives back a voice to speakers and communities who have been silenced sometimes for thousands of years. Recording and understanding little known languages, whether ancient or modern, adds to our knowledge of the totality of human language - and hence to our understanding of what it is to be human.”

Adventures of a Palaeolinguist will take place on Monday 24 October at the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill lane, 5.30-6.30pm as part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas. Pre-booking not required. Suitable for ages 12+

̽��ֱ��curious bronze, knuckle-shaped object pictured is an ancient weight excavated from the east coast of Italy. ̽��ֱ��inscription scrawled along its side is written in the language of ancient people, known to the Romans as the Frentani.

Every language is unique, and uncovering, decoding and interpreting lost languages gives back a voice to speakers and communities who have been silenced sometimes for thousands of years.

James Clackson

Dr James Clackson

Ancient weight excavated from the east coast of Italy

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