How did people communicate with each other, for example, in Western Europe in the XI-XV centuries? What language or languages? The overwhelming majority of the population of Western Europe did not know Greek or Hebrew. Latin was the property of an insignificant minority of scribes. Traditional history says that by that time there was no longer vulgar Latin, and a long time ago. There were no modern European languages yet (they were formed in the 16th-17th centuries).
In Alsace, in the monastery of Colmarie, a sad inscription on the wall, which tells the story of the death of 3,500 inhabitants in this city in 1541, is made in Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Who in Alsace has ever spoken these languages? To which parishioners is this inscription made in the 17th century addressed?
The modern German linguist F. Stark (F. Stark. Faszination Deutsch. Langen / Müller. München, 1993) argues that the business language of Europe from London to Riga from the middle of the XV was the language of the Hanseatic League - “Middle Low German”, which was then replaced by another language - “High German” language of the reformer M. Luther.
However, Dieter Forte (“Thomas Münzer and Martin Luther or Principles of Accounting”, Basel, 1970), relying on documents, directly says that the 19-year-old Spanish King Carlos I, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, and his uncle Frederick of Saxony, when they first met in 1519, the common language was not German, Spanish or French. And not Latin. Which one then?
At the same time, the same Karl in adulthood is already considered a polyglot, attributing to him the following winged statement about the languages of Europe: “With God, I would speak Spanish, with men - in French, with women - in Italian, with friends - German, with geese - in Polish, with horses - in Hungarian, and with devils - in Czech.
This statement contains very interesting information. First, Karl mentions such an isolated language in Europe as Hungarian, while completely ignoring English. Secondly, Karl feels the difference between the closely related Slavic languages - Polish and Czech. And if you consider that under the Hungarian language in Europe even in the XVIII century. understood the Slovak language, then Charles V generally turns out to be a subtle Slavist! (See, for example, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1771, v. 2, “Language.” The population of what was then Hungary, with its capital at Pressburg, now Bratislava, was predominantly Slavic.)
This encyclopedia provides an amazing linguistic analysis of the languages of its own and previous times.
The current Romance languages - French and Italian - are referred to the barbarian Gothic (Gothic), only "ennobled by Latin", and it is said about their complete analogy with Gothic.
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But the Encyclopedia Britannica calls the Spanish language (Castellano) practically pure Latin, contrasting it with the "barbaric" French and Italian. (I wonder if modern linguists know about this?).
About German or about other languages of the Germanic group, which are considered today to be related to Gothic, especially about any relationship between English and Gothic in the encyclopedia of the late 18th century. speech at all.
This encyclopedia considers its own English language to be synthetic, incorporating both Greek and Latin and the previous Anglo-Saxon (while the connection with the Saxon dialect of German that has already existed since the beginning of the 16th century is completely ignored!).
Meanwhile, in modern English, two lexical layers are clearly visible, covering, minus later international words, 90% of the vocabulary: about two-thirds are words with the same root with Balto-Slavic-Germanic, with clearly correlated phonetics and semantics, and one third - also words that have the same root with the Balto-Slavic-Germanic, but have undergone medieval romanization (“romanization”).
Anyone can verify this by opening the English dictionary. For example, without exception, all words that existed in the 17th century. and beginning in English in W, belong to the first group of direct root relationship with the Balto-Slavic-Germanic analogs and it is not difficult for them, if desired, to find a match in any of the languages of this group. In contrast, all words that begin with a V in English are "romanized".
The medieval Romanization of Europe was universal. Here is a typical example from German. Not a single strong conjugated verb (i.e., considered native German) begins with a P, although there are many starting with F or Pf.
Here's a vivid example from the Italian language. The synonyms pieno and folto, meaning “full,” reflect two dialects of the same source language with the Balto-Slavic-Germanic root p (o) l: the first from the Greco-Roman dialect, and the second from the Germanic.
The same is true for Latin. The words complex and conflict are perceived today as completely different and independent. However, both are based on the Balto-Slavic-Germanic root pl (e) h (cf. weave). Taking into account the prefix co (n) - corresponding to the Slavic c (o) -, both abstract Latin words go back to the original concrete meaning of the plexus. And there are many such examples.
In the above example, the same phonetic parallel p / f is traced, which was shown in the examples of Italian and German. This directly suggests that Latin, German and Italian reflect the same phonetic picture.
When and why did “the Lord confuse tongues”? The stratification of the common European language began not with the fall of Constantinople, but much earlier: with the global cooling and plague of the XIV century. It was not so much the isolation of certain groups of the population as the scurvy that resulted from the cold snap that dramatically changed the phonetic picture of Europe.
Babies, whose teeth fell out, not having time to grow, could not physically pronounce dental sounds, and the rest of their vocal apparatus was forced to rebuild for a more or less intelligible pronunciation of the simplest words. This is the reason for the striking phonetic changes in the area where the scurvy raged!
The sounds d, t, “th”, s, z fell out with the teeth, and the gums and tongue swollen from scurvy could not pronounce the contractions of two consonants. This is tacitly evidenced by the French circonflexes above the vowels. In addition to the territory of France, phonetics suffered greatly in the British Isles, in Lower Germany and, partially, in Poland (“psekanie”). Where there was no scurvy, phonetics did not suffer - these are Russia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Italy and further to the south.
The most common languages in the 18th century. The Encyclopedia Britannica names two: Arabic and Slavic, which includes not only the current languages of the Slavic group (including “Hungarian” = Slovak), but also Corinthian (Carinthian). However, this is not surprising: the population of the Peloponnese peninsula spoke Slavic - in the Macedonian dialect.
In the most cited Encyclopedia Britannica, the sound “s” at the beginning and in the middle of a word is still conveyed not by the usual lowercase “Latin” letter s, but by the Gothic f, for example, the word success is written as fuccefs. At the same time, the English pronunciation of the final s corresponds to the phonetics of the Russian language: the encyclopedia gives two different pronunciations of the word as in the quoted phrase from Shakespeare “Cicero was as eloquent as Demosthenes”, where the first as is transcribed as afs (reads “es eloquent”), and the second, before a voiced consonant, is voiced, as in Russian, to az (read approximately as "ez Demosphinz").
Documents of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular of Tours Cathedral, testify that the overwhelming part of the population, for example, Italy (and the same Alsace) before the 16th century. spoke in Rustic Romano, at which the Cathedral recommended preaching sermons, because parishioners did not understand book Latin.
What is Rustico Romano? This is not vulgar Latin, otherwise it would have been written! On the one hand, Rustico is the language of the Vandals, a Balto-Slavic language, the dictionary of which is given, in particular, in the book by Mauro Orbini, published in 1606 (Origine de gli Slavi & progresso dell Imperio loro di Mauro Orbini R. In Pesaro appresso Gier. Concordia, MDCVI). It is known that the word rustica in the Middle Ages meant not only rough, rustic, but also a book in leather (morocco, that is, Persian or Russian manufacture) binding. The language closest to Rustic today is Croatian.
On the other hand, traditional historiography says that Northern Italy (and above all, the province of Tuscany) in the 7th-4th centuries. BC. inhabited by the Etruscans (otherwise - Tusks), whose culture had a huge impact on the "ancient Roman". However, in Swedish tysk means German, jute means Danish, and rysk means Russian. Tyski or jute-ryski, they are also Γ? Ται Ρ? Σσι Libya and Arsi-etae of Ptolemy - these are the legendary Etruscans, by origin - Balto-Slavic-Germans.
There is a saying in book Latin - “Etruscan non legatur” (“Etruscan is not readable”). But in the middle of the XIX century. F. Volansky (Tadeu? Vo? Ansky)? A. Chertkov, independently of each other, read dozens of Etruscan inscriptions, using contemporary Slavic languages.
For example, the Etruscan inscription on a double-sided cameo discovered by Ulrich Friedrich Kopp in 1827 (UF Kopp. “De varia ratione Inscriptiones interpretandi obscuras”) reads: “I? W, CABAWΘ, AΔΞNHI -? KΛI E? ΛA = CA, IδyT OΣ TARTAROU SKOTIN”is clear in Russian:“Yahweh, Sabaoth, Adonei - to her! (Old Russian “truly”) - if they bark at him (ie they are scolded), they go to the tartar of cattle”. The absence of any difference between the “Greek” and “Slavic” writing is also evident from this inscription.
Short and expressive inscription on a clay ball depicting a mace (collection de Minices, Fermo. T. Mommsen. Unteritalische Dialecte. 1851): IEPEKΛEuΣ ΣKΛABENΣII, ς. e. "Hercules Sclavensius, aka Yaroslav Slavyansky."
In southern Europe, the original Balto-Slavic-Germanic (continental Arian) language (aka Etruscan-Vandal Rustico) underwent significant changes both in vocabulary and phonetics under the influence of the Judeo-Hellenic (Mediterranean Koine) language, for which, in particular, the indistinguishability of the sounds b and v is characteristic, as well as the frequent mixing of l and r. This is how the Romance (Ladin) dialect was formed, i.e. Rustico Romano, on the basis of which in the XIV century. there was Latin.
Thus, Rustico Romano is a Greco-Roman branch of the same common European Arian (Balto-Slavic-Germanic) language. Under the name Grego (i.e. Greek!), It was brought by the first wave of the Portuguese Conquista to Brazil, where it was also in the 17th century. The catechism was taught to the Tupi-Guarani Indians in this language, because they understood it (and Portuguese of the 17th century model did not!). Much of the successor to Rustico Romano remains the modern Romanian language.
It is obvious that it was after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that Western Europe broke away from Byzantium and continuous Latinization began in it, and from the 16th century. an intensive process of creating their own national languages began.
Despite the many dialects that formed in the post-chum time in the XIV-XV centuries. and became the prototypes of modern European languages, until the 16th century. it was Rustico (and not “vulgar Latin”!) that most likely remained the common spoken language in Europe.
Indeed, even in 1710, the Swedish King Karl XII, besieged at his residence in Bender by Turkish janissaries, went to them on the barricades and with his fiery speech (there is no word about the translator!) In 15 minutes convinced them to go over to their side. What language?
Until now, it has been about oral communication. However, one of the decisive factors of civilization in the XI-XV centuries. was the formation of letter writing. Let us recall that literal writing, in contrast to pictographic one, is a written reflection of the oral language. (Hieroglyphs do not convey oral speech in any way.)
Direct indication that literal writing first appeared only at the end of the 11th century. gives W. Shakespeare (Sonnet 59.):
Sonnet lix
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!
O, that record could with a backward look, Even of five hundred courses of the sun, Show me your image in some antique book, Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whether better they, Or whether revolution be the same.
O, sure I am, the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.
In the 1640 edition, the eighth line is even more categorical: "Since mine at first in character was done!"
The closest to the original is the translation by Sergey Stepanov:
If what is, everything was, and for a long time, And there is nothing under the sun that is new
And it is given to the mind to err, Giving birth to the same fruit again
Let memory be in the gray times
For five hundred years he will penetrate with his gaze, Where in the first book of the original
Displayed your appearance with a pattern.
I'll take a look, as they wrote from time immemorial, Painting such beauty, -
Who writes better, us or them?
Or did times change in vain?
But I know: they were hardly inferior
Original my original
No less expressive is the testimony of Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), a famous researcher of antiquity and the Latin language, who, with subtle linguistic and psychological observations, proved the falsity of the famous “Konstantin's gift” in his famous work “On the beauties of the Latin language”. In the middle of the 15th century L. Valla argued that “my books have more merit before the Latin language than anything that has been written over 600 years in grammar, rhetoric, civil and canon law and the meaning of words” [Barozzi L., e Sabbadini R. Studi sul Panormita e sul Valla. Firenze, 1891. P.4].
It should be clarified here that at the time when L. Valla wrote these lines, the history of Florence had already been artificially lengthened by about 260 years due to the “Byzantine chronicles” brought to Florence in 1438 by Gemist Pleton. It is significant that L. Valla does not mention a single word of the great Dante, whom today everyone considers the creator of the Italian language and the classic of literary Latin. (Most likely, Dante was not yet born at the time when Valla wrote his dates, but this is a separate conversation.)
The fact that the Latin alphabet was created later than the Greek letter, now no one doubts. However, when comparing the so-called. archaic Latin traditionally dating back to the 6th century. BC e., and classical Latin, attributed to the 1st century BC. e., i.e. 500 years later, the graphic design of archaic monumental Latin, rather than classical, is striking much closer to the modern one. A picture of both varieties of the Latin alphabet can be found in any linguistic dictionary.
According to traditional chronology, it turns out that the Latin script first degraded from archaic to classical, and then, during the Renaissance, again approached its original form. Within the framework of the stated concept, there is no such unjustified phenomenon.
Comparing Latin with modern languages, it is also necessary to pay attention to the fact that the inflectional structure of the bookish medieval Latin language almost completely coincides with the system of declensions and conjugations in Russian. It is also inherited by the modern Italian language.
The same applies to the rest of the Slavic languages, except for Bulgarian, and to the Lithuanian language. In other European languages, the inflectional system has been destroyed to one degree or another, and in them the role of inflections is played by service words - prepositions. The case endings are lost in English, French and Scandinavian languages.
This is a direct consequence of Latinization, since the Greco-Roman pronunciation of the Balto-Slavic-Germanic endings, which was influenced by the Judeo-Hellenic language, recorded in Latin, was very different from the Balto-Slavic. The mutual contradiction of the vowel of the written Latin form of the endings in the official Roman Catholic speech and in the spoken language, naturally, interfered with mutual understanding.
As a result, the endings have disappeared altogether in those modern languages, whose native peoples inhabited the regions of confessional schism and subsequent interfaith clashes - i.e. in Western and North-Western Europe and the Balkans. It is characteristic that the intermediate stage of the disintegration process of the inflections is recorded precisely in the modern German language.
From this, it becomes clear both the probable geographical origin of Latin - the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France, and the probable time of the appearance of Latin writing (not earlier than the 13th century) - initially in the form of a Gothic letter (font), edited already in the 14th century, most likely Stefan Permsky. Latin is essentially the first artificially created language constructor.
In fact, the history of the origin of Latin was, as it were, repeated in reverse order by L. Zamenhof, who in 1887 created an artificial language, Esperanto, based on the Romance languages (“restored Latin”), but with Germanic and Slavic elements.
The traditional approach to the development of the languages of modern European civilization, accepted by the majority of linguists, is that all of them are raised by means of various comparisons and reconstructions in the end to a certain single Indo-European proto-language. Thus, a linguistic tree is built, based on living and dead branches, with an attempt to restore a common root hidden in the thickness of the centuries.
At the same time, the reasons that cause this or that branching of the language tree, linguists look for in historical events, while adhering to the traditional chronology. Sometimes they even indicate not only the time, but also the place from where the division of the Indo-European proto-language began - Belovezhskaya Pushcha in Belarus.
A particularly favorite argument of these linguists is the “ancient” Sanskrit, the very concept of which appeared only in the 17th century. Here we will simply note that, for example, in Spanish, San Escrito means “Holy Scripture”. So Sanskrit is a medieval product of missionaries and nothing more.
Another point of view, developed mainly by Italian linguists, is the postulation of several original language centers and independently developing language “shrubs”. This is not surprising, since otherwise the Italian linguists will have to admit, following the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1771, that their native language is in fact closely related to the “barbaric” Gothic, ie. Balto-Slavic-Germanic.
As an example, let us cite diametrically opposed views of the adherents of the two theories mentioned on the origin of the Baltic group of languages, to which the Lithuanian and Latvian languages now belong.
Supporters of a single (Nostratic) language consider the Baltic languages to be the most archaic, retaining the greatest affinity with the Indo-European proto-language. The opposite point of view views them as marginal, emerging on the northern border of the interaction of two independent western (European) and eastern (Eurasian) language families. The European language family refers to the Romance group of languages believed to have originated from the Latin language.
It is interesting to note that with this approach, Greek appears to be the same marginal language on the southern border between these conditional language families. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Greek and the Baltic languages: modern Greek is indeed a marginal, largely isolated language, obtained by the 15th century. as a result of crossing, first of all, Judeo-Hellenic (Semitic) and Arian (Balto-Slavic-Germanic) languages.
On the contrary, the Baltic languages retain both a common lexical fund and direct phonetic correspondences with both Slavic and Germanic and Romance languages, but by no means with Judeo-Hellenic. It should also be noted here that in the Greek language, too, many “ancient Greek” roots are not just common Indo-European, but specifically Balto-Slavic-Germanic.
The branch of linguistics - etymology - deals with the study of the origin of the words that make up the vocabulary, that is, the vocabulary of the language. Adhering to traditional chronology, etymology is, in fact, a heuristic science, and in this sense it can be compared with archeology, since the only reliable criterion is the written fixation of the word. In this case, linguists, of course, are guided primarily by common sense and act by comparison.
However, the dating of “ancient” written monuments that do not have their own date of recording is a very difficult thing in itself, and can lead to serious errors not only in chronology, but also in linguistics. Suffice it to mention that forensics for dating even modern written sources not only uses a whole range of instrumental methods, but also relies on a statistically sound and independently dated database for comparing documents. For ancient written sources, such a database is simply absent.
In the 50s of the twentieth century, M. Swadesh developed a new direction in linguistics - glottochronology. Glottochronology is a field of comparative historical linguistics, which is concerned with identifying the rate of linguistic changes and determining, on this basis, the time of separation of related languages and the degree of closeness between them. Such studies are carried out on the basis of a statistical analysis of the dictionary (lexicostatistics).
It is assumed that the glottochronological method in relation to relatively recently diverged languages (according to traditional chronology within the New Era) gives a systematic error in the direction of approaching our time. However, in relation to the beginning of the division of the Balto-Slavic language, glottochronological calculations give a fairly stable border - the XII century.
On the other hand, the areas of the “Baltic” and “Slavic” languages in Eastern Europe, according to toponymy (names of places) and hydronyms (names of reservoirs) in the XIV century, practically coincide in traditional chronology. This is another evidence in favor of the existence of the Balto-Slavic linguistic community as of the XIV century. At the same time, almost all linguists, with the exception, perhaps, of the Czech scientist V. Mahek, consider the Germanic languages to be separated from the Balto-Slavic languages at least a millennium earlier. This is a linguistic fallacy from traditional chronology.
By itself, the “tree” model (in the language of mathematics, it is called the Bethe lattice) is not quite adequate for describing the process of language development, since it does not include feedback and assumes that languages once separated further develop independently of each other. This limiting case can be realized only as a result of complete informational isolation of one part of the population from another over the course of life, at least for several generations.
In the absence of the media, this is possible only due to geographical isolation as a result of a global natural disaster - for example, a flood, division of continents, a sharp climate change, a global epidemic, etc. However, these are quite rare events, even from the point of view of traditional chronology. Moreover, even the division of Eurasia and America by the Bering Strait did not completely destroy the linguistic connection, for example, the Japanese language and the languages of some Indian tribes.
On the other hand, in the absence of global cataclysms, information exchange occurs continuously both within the language, at the level of interdialectal connections, and between languages. Judging by the Bible and various epics, there were no more than two global catastrophes in the memory of mankind, which is reflected, for example, in the biblical legends about the Flood and the Babylonian confusion of languages.
Let us draw the reader's attention that these two legends indicate a fundamental difference in the results of the two disasters from an informational point of view. The result of the Flood was the isolation of a population group (Noah's Ark family) who spoke the same language. The Babylonian pandemonium speaks of a sudden misunderstanding of each other by different parts of the population, which is the result of a collision of sharply differing language systems, which could only manifest itself when different parts of the population were united. In other words, the first cataclysm was analytical, and the second synthetic. Therefore, all "revolutionary" language changes can be modeled on the basis of only the two mentioned cataclysms. And, as a consequence, an adequate language model should be at least a graph,capable of reflecting the feedback system, and by no means the “tree” of the Bethe lattice. And future linguistics cannot do without involving such a branch of mathematics as topology.
Within the framework of the traditional chronology, there are much more imaginary “revolutionary” changes, and they are of a local nature - for example, the “great medieval shift of English vowels”, which is attributed to the 12th century, when the entire structure of vowels allegedly changed for no natural reason, and only in the language of the population of the British Isles. And after about 300 - 400 years, in the 16th century. also the old system was practically restored “in a revolutionary way”. At the same time, another “revolution” was allegedly taking place in Greece, which was quite remote from Britain. Itazism, when several vowels at once degenerated into one sound "i", which led to a terrible spelling inconsistency in the modern "modern Greek" language, where you can count up to 5 spellings of one word.
Both of these alleged "revolutions" arose for one reason - because of the inappropriateness of the Latin alphabet for the unambiguous transmission of the sound composition of any European language. Any European written language based on the Latin alphabet is forced to convey its own phonetics using a variety of letter combinations, which in different languages often reflect completely different sounds (for example, ch) and / or various diacritics. And, on the other hand, the same sound, for example, k is transmitted by completely different letters C, K and Q.
As an example, we will give the result of group-frequency analysis (frequency of occurrence of letters in the text) in the simplest phonetic Italian language, bearing in mind that the Italian language is the undisputed traditional heir to Latin.
In the Italian language there are 4 groups of letters that convey vowel sounds, different in the way of formation: a, e, i, (o + u) and 5 different groups of consonants: sonorant (r + l), nasal (m + n), alveolar (d + t), labial (b, v, p, f, non-syllable u) and posterior lingual, reflected by the letters s, c, g, h, z, q, as well as letter combinations sc, ch, gh. The group frequency of letters that convey the sounds of these well-defined groups (without taking into account the spaces between words) is practically constant and fluctuates within 0.111 + 0.010. This is a manifestation of inner harmony inherent in any language, striving to equally use all the possibilities of the human speech apparatus.
At the same time, the rest of the letters of the Latin alphabet in the Italian language is characterized by a group frequency almost equal to zero: J, K, X, W, Y. The group of “extra letters” just reflects the artificiality of the Latin alphabet. (For the Italian language, the Slavic alphabet, in particular its Serbian version, would be much more phonetically representative.)
Both “Middle Greek Itacism” and the “Great English Shift” arose due to the introduction of the Latin alphabet precisely in the Latin representation of Greek, English or other words. As an example for those who are familiar with the English language, we suggest to independently voice the “Greek” phthisis “consumption” and diarrhoea “diarrhea”.
Or let's take the famous Latin rotacism, when the sound z supposedly suddenly (on a historical scale) turned into r. Moreover, in the Romance languages he crossed over everywhere, but in the Germanic languages not always, not everywhere and not consistently: cf. German Hase "hare" and eng. hare, it. Eisen "iron" and eng. iron, but dumb. war "was" in English. was.
The sounds z and r are fundamentally different in the nature of their formation. What conceivable phonetic reasons for a normally developed speech apparatus can such an unnatural shift have?
But in conditions of scurvy, front-lingual dental sounds are forced to imitate throat sounds. And the palatal throat (“Ukrainian, Greek”) g and the German-French reed (“burnt”) r are just phonetically very close.
An analysis of the totality of European languages shows that the appearance of r is associated precisely with the instability of palatal g and by no means z, which itself is one of the products of the evolutionary transformation of palatal g (compare, for example, English yellow, French jaune, Czech? luty, Italian giallo, Latvian dzelts while maintaining the explosive character of the initial sound in similar lit. geltas, German gelb, Swedish, Norwegian gul and Greek xanthos).
Therefore, Latin “rotacism” is an obvious nonsense associated with the alleged “antiquity” of written Latin, when the letter Z (which conveyed z) was supposedly abolished in the indicated order as “unnecessary” in 312 BC. (there was "rotacism"!). And then, that way, after 300 years, they began to use it again, and only for writing "Greek" words.
This mythical story of the same nature with the history of the artificial appearance in the Latin alphabet of the letters X, Y, J, and in the Church Cyrillic alphabet of unnecessary Greek letters. Both stories belong to the same medieval period of the formation of the alphabet.
An analysis of a sample of 25 major European languages shows that, firstly, in all European languages, the same evolutionary phonetic processes occur, albeit at different rates, and, secondly, that the common lexical fund of European languages (without accounting for Finno-Ugric, Turkic and other borrowings), and today contains about 1000 key words (not including Latinized international words of the XVII-XX centuries!), belonging to about 250 common root groups.
The vocabulary based on these root groups covers almost all concepts necessary for full-fledged communication, including, in particular, all verbs of action and state. Therefore, L. Zamenhof might not have invented Esperanto: it would have been enough to restore the Rustico language.
Appearance in the XVI century. dictionaries in itself are evidence not only of the level of development of civilization, but also direct evidence of the beginning of the formation of national languages. Moreover, the time of the appearance in the dictionary of a word reflecting a particular concept directly indicates the time of the appearance of the concept itself.
The Great Oxford Dictionary (Webster) is an excellent witness to the development of civilization in this respect.
In this dictionary, words, in addition to the traditional interpretation and etymology, are accompanied by an indication of the date when this word in the specified form first appears in written sources.
The dictionary is undoubtedly authoritative, and many of the dates given in it contain contradictions with the version of World History accepted today. Here are some dates:
Almagest - XIV century.
Antique - 1530 g
Arabic - XIV century
Arithmetic - XV century.
Astrology - XIV century
Astronomy - XIII century.
August - 1664 g
Bible - XIV century.
Byzantine - 1794
Caesar - 1567 g
Cathedra - XIV century.
Catholic - XIV century
Celtic - 1590
Chinese - 1606
Crusaders - 1732
Dutch - XIV century
Education - 1531
Etruscan - 1706
Gallic - 1672
German - XIV century.
Golden age - 1555
Gothic - 1591
History - XIV century.
Iberian - 1601
Indian - XIV century
Iron Age - 1879
Koran - 1615
Mogul - 1588
Mongol - 1698
Muslim - 1615
Orthodox - XV century
Philosophy - XIV century
Platonic - 1533
Pyramid - 1549
Renaissance - 1845
Roman - XIV century.
Roman law - 1660
Russian. - 1538
Spanish - XV century.
Swedish - 1605
Tartar - XIV century
Trojan - XIV century.
Turkish - 1545
Zodiac - XIV century
It is clearly seen that the entire "antique" cycle appears in English in the middle of the 16th century, as well as the very concept of antiquity, for example, Caesar in 1567, and August in 1664.
At the same time, the British cannot be called a nation indifferent to world history. On the contrary, it was the English who were the first to begin to study antiquity on a scientific basis. The appearance of the concept of the Golden Age (Golden Age), the cornerstone concept of all classical antiquity - Virgil, Ovid, Hesiod, Homer, Pindar in 1555 suggests that these authors were previously unknown to the British.
The concepts associated with Islam appear in the 17th century. The concept of a pyramid appears in the middle of the 16th century.
The first astronomical catalog of Ptolemy Almagest, which was the basis of modern chronology, became known only in the XIV century. All this is in flagrant contradiction with traditional historiography.
This dictionary contains many much more prosaic, but no less expressive, examples of English history itself.
For example, it is well known what universal love horses enjoy in England and how much attention is paid to horse breeding in England. Derby is generally a national treasure. The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1771 devotes the longest article not to anything, but to the art of grooming horses (v. 2, "Farrier"). At the same time, in the introduction to the article, it is especially emphasized that this is the first competent review of the veterinary information about horses that existed at that time. It also mentions the prevalence of illiterate horsemen, often crippling horses when they are shoeed.
However, not only does the word farrier appear in English, according to Webster, only in the 15th century, it is also borrowed from the French ferrieur. But this concept means a blacksmith who knows how to shoe horses - a profession absolutely necessary for equestrian transport!
And here one of two things: either before Henry Tudor there were no horses at all in England, or all horses before that were barefoot. Moreover, the first is much more likely.
One more example. The word chisel, which denotes a carpentry and metalwork tool absolutely necessary for any artisan, appears in the same dictionary only in the XIV century!
What discoveries of Roger Bacon in the XIII century. can we talk if the technical culture was at the level of the Stone Age? (By the way, in Swedish and Norwegian primitive flint tools are called kisel and pronounced almost the same as the English chisel …)
And the British could shear their famous sheep only from the 14th century, and they were primitive, made of one iron strip, shears (it was at this time that the word for the shearing tool appeared), and not scissors of the modern type, which became known in England only in the 15th in.!
Traditional historiography creates anecdotal things with language. For example, the great Dante is considered the creator of the Italian literary language, but for some reason after him, Petrarch and Boccaccio, for another two hundred years, all other Italian authors write exclusively in Latin, and the Italian literary language as such is formed on the basis of the Tuscan dialect (toscano volgare) only to early 17th century (Dictionary of the Academy of Krusk. 1612)
It is known that French became the official state language of France in 1539, and before that Latin was such a language. But in England, allegedly in the XII-XIV centuries. the official state language was French, 400 years before its introduction into the state administration of France itself! In fact, English is being introduced into official business in the British Isles at the same time as French in France - under Henry VIII in 1535.
From the second half of the XX century. Through the efforts of the Americans, first of all, English has firmly taken the place of the main international language.
It's funny that it was the British who actually transferred the concept of the common European language of civilization from Rustico to their own - English. They (the only ones in the world!) Believe that a civilized person from a barbarian anywhere in the world is distinguished precisely by the knowledge of the English language, and they are perplexed, discovering that this is not entirely true …
Traditional historiography in the field of linguistics is like the unfortunate Michel from a poem by an unnamed German poet, published in Innsbruck in 1638, a quote from which is given in the aforementioned book by F. Stark (original spelling):
Ich teutscher Michel
Versteh schier nichel
In meinem Vaterland -
Es ist ein Schand …
I, German Michel, don't understand shit
In your country
what a disgrace …
Author: Jaroslav Kesler