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Royal Irish Academy - Anthony Harvey

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It is often thought that linguistics has to be very technical and complicated (it doesn't), as well as boring (it needn't be). In fact, linguistics can often finesse hard information out of historical documents in a manner that is just as striking and revealing-and just as scientific and objective-as the way in which archaeology helps us to interpret historical artefacts. The process involves looking beyond what is expressed in such a document to the question of how it is expressed; this exposition looks in simple terms at some specific examples that relate to early medieval Ireland, Britain and the Continent. This deliberately informal exposition originated in a 2012 address given at NUI Galway in response to an invitation from the students of that university's Cumann Staire. A version was delivered the following year in Dublin to a workshop of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. It is essential reading for any student of history.

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Publié par	Royal Irish Academy
Date de parution	04 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781911479710
Langue	English

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How linguistics can help the historian
Anthony Harvey
How linguistics can help the historian
First published 2021 Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2 www.ria.ie
Royal Irish Academy
ISBN 978-1-911479-69-7 (PB) ISBN 978-1-911479-70-3 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-911479-71-0 (epub) ISBN 978-1-911479-72-7 (mobi)
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency CLG, 63 Patrick Street, D n Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, A96 WF25.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyeditor: Brendan O Brien
Printed in Ireland by Walsh Colour Print
Royal Irish Academy is a member of Publishing Ireland, the Irish book publishers association
Contents
Introduction
Calendrical confusion
Who was on the pig s back?
England divided
Curmudgeonly Carolingians
The West-Brit syndrome- twelve hundred years ago!
Battling Andrew fights on
The dangers of hypercorrection ( aka trying too hard)
Medieval spin-or modern?
Europe up in arms
Speaking peace
Pentecostal inspiration?
Yes, but how can we know?
Latin lives!
It s OK to say Celtic if that s what you mean
It s not just linguistic archaeology-there s geology too
The Liscahane oghams
So where does all this leave us?
Introduction
From the title of this booklet, at first sight one might think we were just asking How can a knowledge of other languages help the historian? -and of course the answer there would be fairly obvious. Knowing other languages helps not just historians but other humanities scholars too, because it enables them to read foreign documents in the original. And this can be important, because there may not be a translation of a particular document into one s own language but also because, even if there is, it puts one into a position of dependency on the translator. And translators, wittingly or unwittingly, may have imposed their own spin on the piece they are translating: they are themselves products of their environment, just like the original writer (and, for that matter, like you, the final reader), and so they will inevitably have refracted the sense in some way. Later we shall look at an example of this refraction in which the translator responsible was a very respectable Oxbridge academic who hardly had any intention of being misleading! Yet that is in fact what happened ...
However, a knowledge of other languages is not principally what was meant to be implied by the title of this discussion. The reference is, instead, to the discipline of linguistics: namely for our purposes the science-yes, science, in the normal English sense-that analyses not what is expressed in a historical document but how it is expressed; and that, as a result, can frequently cast interesting historical sidelights on the context in which the document was produced. The point is this: whereas composers of documents, ancient or modern, may suppress, spin, or downright corrupt the truth, lying about the subject they are dealing with and giving false information ( fake news ), the fact is that the medium in which they are doing this is always some language or other; and this language, whichever tongue it may happen to be and at whatever epoch, gives out all sorts of signals and clues aside from what is actually being expressed propositionally in its words. Moreover, the less obvious these clues and signals are, the less likely it is that the composers of the documents will have been aware of building them in. Thus the less likely it is that measures will have been taken deliberately to disguise them- and so the more likely it is that, if we analyse the signals and clues correctly, we can gain objective information from them. Indeed, it is fascinating to discover how quite penetrating historical insights can sometimes be finessed out of what seems at first sight to be purely linguistic evidence, which is generally-but wrongly-considered to be as dry as dust. The potential for doing this is not restricted to documents: the clues and signals get woven into the very warp and woof of a language as it is spoken, as well as written. And there are always historical reasons ...
Calendrical confusion
... so here is an example: it is probably fairly common knowledge that the months of July and August bear those names in commemoration of two Roman emperors, namely the Caesars Julius and Augustus. That much is, as it were, explicit in the names, and was done for deliberate effect; as such, it was not something that went on to be lost track of by the speakers. But have you ever been puzzled by the names of the subsequent months of the year? September, October, November, December are the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months; but surely the element sept- normally means seven (as in septuplets), oct- (as in octogenarian) means eight, nov- (as in novena) means nine, and dec- (as in decimal) means ten? What has happened here? Each of the months has been displaced by two slots from its original place in the sequence; and this can only have happened if the people using the names had by that stage ceased to be consciously aware of the original numerical meanings embedded in them.
Now, it is often thought that the displacement was collateral damage caused by the two Emperors months having being shoehorned into the summer. Actually, that is not how it happened: instead, the displacement occurred in the year 153 BC when the months of January and February were moved from the end of the year to the beginning; the subsequent glorification of the two emperors consisted simply in the renaming-as July and August-of two months that already existed, so no further disruption was caused at that stage. But the point for our purposes is this: when the reorganisation of 153 BC took place, it left a trace in what we can think of as the archaeological record of the language. As we have seen, the months were wrenched away from their etymologies-that is, from the original meanings of their names (seventh, eighth, ninth, etc.

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