Hi, I'm working on a project for a video game, and I'd like to find a source for villages that were part of the Iga Republic, or just in Iga territory. Does anybody know where I can find this information (I already looked at Wikipedia)? Thanks!
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I was looking at all the answers already existing on this sub about the spread of Latin in the Western Roman Empire, the subsequent vanishing of pre Roman languages, and then the slow transformation of Latin into the various Romances Languages.
And well, at first, I found most answers pretty satisfactory.
But then I thought about my grandparents and realized that the point concerning the vanishing of pre Roman languages wasn't really clear.
In post Roman times, it seems that the only language existing in what are today Spain, Portugal, France and Italy is vulgar Latin. None of the pre existing Languages survived, except, for whatever reason, Basque. All other non-Latin Italic languages died, along with all the various Etrusques, Celtic, Hiberic, Gaulish, etc., languages. The Germanic languages existing in current countries that were, in Roman times, Latin speaking, arrived after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. Same thing with Breton in Brittany.
I got that Latin was spread because it was the language of the administration, of commerce, and was mandatory if you wanted to move upward in Roman society, but is it really enough to result in the vanishing of pre existing languages ?
Let me explain : I am a Frenchman. And well, I guess you know it, until really recently in France, Parisian French was more of a sociolect that a language actually spoken by the population inhabiting France. So, while the nobility and really wealthy people living in important cities spoke Parisian French, regardless of where they lived in France, the vast majority of the population spoke only a really local language, and not Parisian French. I even saw figures saying something like 75% of the French population not speaking French well into the 19th century (don't know if it was really that high though).
Which was exactly the case for my grandparents. Unlike for me, their native language wasn't Parisian French, but respectively Breton, Basque and Alsatian (my grandparents all moved to Paris from their native regions), whereas they all were French citizen and their families had always lived in French territory.
And that's what made me realized that I hadn't read something really explaining how could Latin completely wipe out pre Roman languages in the Western Roman Empire.
I mean, if even well into the 20th century, in a world where technology, science, but also population density, means of transportation and more importantly means of communication are light years ahead of what existed in Roman times, allowing to spread information and languages way much more easily than in Roman times, there still were non Parisian French languages, how could Latin achieve to completely replace other languages in the Western Roman Empire ?
Not to forget that Parisian French, with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, was the official language in France for pretty much everything since the 16th century, but unlike Latin in the Western Roman Empire, didn't wipe out other languages. In fact you have to wait until after the middle of the 20th century to see all non Parisian French languages dying and Parisian French becoming the native language of pretty much everyone, and only because of the really aggressive linguistic policy of the French government.
But France isn't the only example making me wonder what happened with Latin in Western Europe. If the French and English ex colonial Empire allowed the spread of French and English in Africa, they didn't wipe out, at all, the native languages. There is still an incredible linguistic diversity in theses former colonial Empire. When Arabs conquered all of North Africa, the various Berber and Kabyles languages never died, they're still widely spoken in some area of Maghreb. The Ottoman Empire had Ottoman Turkish as the ruling language, but never wiped out all the other languages pre existing, and the fact that everyone in current Turkey only speak Turkish (well there's still the Kurds actually) is a recent phenomenon, only allowed by various genocide and population transfer. Even Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy, albeit violent dictatorship, had only really limited success in spreading a "standard" form of language across their country and destroying regional languages and identities.
When the Normans came to England and completely wiped out (I love that word) the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, and made French the language of the ruling class, they indeed greatly transformed the English language, but English itself never disappeared, in fact it even came back a few centuries later as the dominant language in England.
Well I think you got what I mean. Overall, it seems that the replacement of multiple language by one other on a great scale, both in terms of population and surface area, leading to a more or less homogeneous language continuum like it existed with Vulgar Latin in the Western Roman Empire and the death of any other pre existing language is a relatively new phenomenon, and that no country really achieved to do it before the 20th century.
So why didn't the Language spoken by Vercingetorix survive ? Or why didn't something similar to what happened in England post 1066 happened, i.e., a conservation of pre Roman languages but heavily modified by Latin ?
What made Latin in the Western Roman Empire so exceptional ?
3 Answers 2014-12-26
1 Answers 2014-12-26
Hi, I'm not to sure if this is the correct place to post, but if the cold war were to go full scale, what were the nuclear attack plans of NATO and Warsaw nations. Also, what would be the aftermath? I remember reading that the USSR had a plan to start a ground war where all remaining soldiers would fight to the death, to wipe out any chance of the enemy ever rebuilding. Was this true for either side?
3 Answers 2014-12-26
Its the end of the year, and that means its time for a little reflection. We are going to be having a little "Best of the Year" contest to reward our wonderful contributors for helping to make this subreddit what it is!
This thread is for the Best Question of the year. We will be handing out a single award in this catagory! We've taken the liberty of seeding the thread with some of the standouts from this past year, but please feel free to nominate questions not listed here.
To keep this thread streamlined though, we do ask that top posts be exclusively nominations, and not discussion of the awards process itself. Feel free to discuss the various questions as replies to those posts though.
You may nominate multiple answers, but please make separate posts for each. ONE NOMINATION per post. And please make sure to link to the answer, not the whole thread, thank you! And while we will do our best to check for double nominations, try to check and see if what you want to submit already has been. To facilitate this for everyone, please use the full title of the thread in your post.
There will also be a separate award for the Best Answers that were given this year. You can find the thread for this Here.
Looking for Questions to Nominate?
28 Answers 2014-12-26
Its the end of the year, and that means its time for a little reflection. We are going to be having a little "Best of the Year" contest to reward our wonderful contributors for helping to make this subreddit what it is!
This thread is for the Best Answers of the year. We will be handing out 'Gold', 'Silver', and 'Bronze' to the top three vote getters! We've taken the liberty of seeding the thread with some of the standouts from this past year, but please feel free to nominate answers not listed here.
To keep this thread streamlined though, we do ask that top posts be exclusively thread nominations, and not discussion of the awards process itself. Feel free to discuss the various threads as replies to those posts though.
You may nominate multiple answers, but please make separate posts for each. ONE NOMINATION per post. And please make sure to link to the answer, not the whole thread, thank you! And while we will do our best to check for double nominations, try to check and see if what you want to submit already has been. To facilitate this for everyone, please use the following format for nominations:
There will also be a separate award for the Best Question that was asked this year. You can find the thread for this Here.
Looking for Answers to Nominate?
38 Answers 2014-12-26
Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
13 Answers 2014-12-26
Seems illogical doesn't it?
1 Answers 2014-12-26
It's fairly obvious to the uninformed observer that tornadoes rotate, but I'm wondering when it became accepted knowledge that hurricanes did the same on a larger scale. I recall that the USS Wasp had an typhoon eye wall on radar in 1944, but that seems quite late as a possibility. Am I not giving our forbears enough credit?
2 Answers 2014-12-26
I can't think of the exact name for it, but anyone who has spent several days at sea in a relatively small boat and then gone onto land knows the feeling... Where you still feel like you're on a rocking boat. I think it happens because at sea you're body is constantly trying to compensate for the rocking, you get off, then the rocking is gone but your body is still anticipating it.
So how after months at sea did they deal with what must have been really terrible dizziness / vertigo because of this phenomenon?
2 Answers 2014-12-26
I have always wondered how Napoleons empire really worked. He had established Conferedation of the Rhine, had siblings rule different kingdoms and duchies but what I wonder is: was there French Soldiers in all major cities for example in Germany and Italy etc. ? Did he also have soldiers in Vienna or Berlin ? Would for example the Dutch have a own army under France or were all foreign troops just massed into the Grand Arme ?
2 Answers 2014-12-26
Basically what the title asks.
Why did Napoleon go on all those campaigns and start all those wars?
What was driving him? What were his ultimate aims?
2 Answers 2014-12-26
Im interested in this subject but i cannot find many/any books on the subject. So far the only one i can find is
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Russias-Steppe-Frontier-Colonial-1500-1800/dp/0253217709
1 Answers 2014-12-26
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I have heard a lot of clatter from different sources. I've heard that the X is a slang term from the 1960s in the United States but I have also heard that the X derives from the Greek letter "chi" and was used in antiquity.
2 Answers 2014-12-26
It seems like a risky thing to do. What could the Chinese possibly have offered in exchange? Did the Soviets wrongly predict that their relationship would always be a cozy one?
2 Answers 2014-12-26
Did they have some sort of special division that was responsible for field testing of new hardware like new helmets and armour? Did they have boys 'back at the lab' so to speak who came up with tweaks here and there and who studied the hardware and creation techniques of other cultures? Am i getting to into this question?
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I'm not sure of the figures but in Canada and the U.S. it seems like the Native population was almost completely replaced by Europeans, Africans, and other immigrants, whereas South of the border that doesn't seem to be the case.
1 Answers 2014-12-26
The mythos that surrounds World War Two commonly depicts Nazi Germany being a super power in economic and military terms. Is this true?
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I mean, the C64 was the world's best selling computer. The Amiga was way ahead of anything in its time and had more sex appeal than the Macintosh. Most of their products had a cult of loyal fans just like Apple, Sony and Microsoft do now. They even had one of the first 32-bit consoles and it was the best seller in 1993, just a few months before they filed for bankruptcy..
So what went wrong? Why were there no efforts to revive them as was done with Apple? And can the same kind of thing happen to a major company today?
(of course Wikipedia has a section about that but maybe someone who was there as it happened can add a user's PoV; why did their fans stop supporting them?)
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I heard of one in Charleston(or was it Charlotte?) that was almost successful, but Im a little fuzzy on the details. If you know any websites, books, and even videos on the topic please share.
4 Answers 2014-12-26
We have much more food than they did. Are we taller? If so, by how much? What about in terms of muscle? We aren't nearly as active as we used to be, but we still have a lifetime of more food and less hunger.
This question came to me by watching History channel's "Vikings". The english princess/queen in season 2 was super impressed by their size, and even before she met them, she was expecting "giants" among men.
2 Answers 2014-12-26
In our times the US Army is by far the strongest army, far surpassing every other military. But compared to that how was the situation in 1939? Would the general power be as equal, lower or even higher than Nazi Germany at the beginning of the World War? As Germany wanted world domination.
1 Answers 2014-12-26
I recall a conversation with a Polish friend of mine, who told me something along the lines of "-ski" being a very common suffix for a surname in Poland because it onces denoted nobility, but that as names/nobility waned in power, commoners would take the opportunity to embellish their own names by adding such a suffix.
How much of what I am remembering is correct?
While I can find other threads regarding surnames on this subreddit, they don't answer a very particular question: generally, when did surnames amongst commoners start to be used in the same way as surnames amongst nobility (i.e. passed down the patrilineal line)? This thread suggestst that it might have started around the 1200s in England, but if my friend is right, then it was much more recent (last 200 or 300 years) in Poland?
The above question deals with the concept of a surname in Europe, but could others comment on how surnames evolved in other places of the world? When did they really start to "gel" in places like India or China, for instance?
1 Answers 2014-12-26