09-23-2008, 12:18 PM
Several have made the point that Romans recording what they thought they heard may have influenced--even altered--actual names. Another consideration is that naming--and even more spelling--did not settle into rigid protocols until relative recent times. (We have examples of variant spellings of Shakespeare's name, for example.
The period we're considering experienced an almost constant flux of various tribes bumping against or washing over one another. Some were culturally--and assumedly linguistically--distinct from one another, but some exhibited minor variations--significant to them, undoubtedly, but too subtle for an outsider (our literate Latin recorder) to distinguish.
Additionally some of the cultural contact was violent, some was not. At various times late Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures existed simultaneously in a proximity that we moderns would find hard to believe. And Culture A was not always more advanced than Culture B, whom they just overwhelmed.
Elsewhere on this site, a long dispute unfolds about whether the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons was annihilation, assimilation, displacement or a mix. That was probably played out all over Europe, and in all the possible permutations.
What's reasonable to us is not necessarily what happened. And the records themselves are sparse and sometimes suspect. Much has been made, for example, of the bias of the Jordanes the sixth-century historian. Yet he is a primary source on the Rome-Goth wars simply because his record still exists. Saint Gildas has been sliced and diced many times on this site. Yet us moderns persist in reading between their lines--a risky process under the best circumstances--because they are unique resources.
The period we're considering experienced an almost constant flux of various tribes bumping against or washing over one another. Some were culturally--and assumedly linguistically--distinct from one another, but some exhibited minor variations--significant to them, undoubtedly, but too subtle for an outsider (our literate Latin recorder) to distinguish.
Additionally some of the cultural contact was violent, some was not. At various times late Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures existed simultaneously in a proximity that we moderns would find hard to believe. And Culture A was not always more advanced than Culture B, whom they just overwhelmed.
Elsewhere on this site, a long dispute unfolds about whether the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons was annihilation, assimilation, displacement or a mix. That was probably played out all over Europe, and in all the possible permutations.
What's reasonable to us is not necessarily what happened. And the records themselves are sparse and sometimes suspect. Much has been made, for example, of the bias of the Jordanes the sixth-century historian. Yet he is a primary source on the Rome-Goth wars simply because his record still exists. Saint Gildas has been sliced and diced many times on this site. Yet us moderns persist in reading between their lines--a risky process under the best circumstances--because they are unique resources.
"Fugit irreparabile tempus" (Irrecoverable time glides away) Virgil
Ron Andrea
Ron Andrea
