Ad Infinitum

[Rumo]

But where do you base that on. It might be, and it might be due to modern influences that have shaped it more recently.

Some statements may be some introductions, one is advised to fully read a text before reply only to some sentences of it.

Another important concept here is the burden of proof. After all, you're making the statement that in France (or in Spain or in Italy) there was another very important language but a Romance one which survived until the modern times, when it faded out being suppressed by the evil modern nation states. What language was it and what is the evidence for it? There's more than enough evidence for Romance speakers in these territories from Antiquity to modern times.

I already see some p[roblems there, such as the Belgian sector. Much more Flemuish was spoken than the map suggests.

Where it was spoken and when?

Such maps are always problematic, because the tend to give absolutes where no such information exists. What do the 'gains'represent? A majority of people who spoke Germanic? 75%? 55%? 100%? Or maybe place-names in german? Especially for the early Middle Ages it would be very hard to come by such information, let alone create such a map from it.

The map is mostly drawn from toponymy and follows closely the reconstructions proposed by linguists such as the Belgian Maurits Gyselling ( check this review )

Moreover, as I already pointed out, it's not in the specifics depicted on the map I'm interested in (so no absolute), but in the relatively narrow geographical extent of the frontier shifts. What is the distance between the old Roman frontier (Rhine and Danube) and the actual Western frontiers between Romance and Germanic dialects and what are the distances between Normandy and Calabria or between Venice and Lisbon? Unless you can make a point about the numerous Germanic speakers in Aquitaine or the numerous Romance speakers on Elbe, I'm afraid you have no argument against my use of this map.

Hardly. But we had Breton, Picardian, Occitan, Burgundian, Poitou, and more that I can't think of right now.

Most of them are still spoken today and most of them are Romance dialects (languages such as Basque or Celtic Breton are rather exceptions) Yes, there are even more dialects, but they are Romance, therefore of Latin origin!

And this is a phenomenon (literary language vs sub-standard dialects) which I fully covered in my earlier post.

Now you're downplaying what we do have. And if Sidonius Appolinaris complains about his fellow-provincials preferring Celtic over Latin, he's not complaining about a sheperd in some far-off valley... :wink:

I am not downplaying, I just cannot take seriously such comments.
On one hand Sidonius is constantly complaining, he is fearing that Latin language is under assault by barbarian languages, so we have to be careful about his hyperboles.
On the other hand we have no way to tell whether Sidonius is referring to a Celtic language or a variety of vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul. I think there are good reasons to prefer the latter interpretation (see also J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin language, CUP 2004, p. 690, n. 8 )

We have the some epigraphic evidence of Celtic-Latin bilingualism in Gaul (such as the La Graufesenque pottery inscriptions).
While we still have Latin inscriptions in the Late Empire, how many texts in Celtic are there? There are some late authors attesting Gaulish words, but we can't interpret that as evidence for a widely spoken language. For instance Marcellus Burdigalensis is perhaps just reproducing the terms he found in the works of earlier authors such as Scribonius Largus.

Or from a different perspective, the oaths of Strasbourg (842) were written in Latin, a Romance dialect and a Germanic dialect. Few decades earlier, at a council held in Tours (813) it was decreed that the priests were allowed to preach in vernaculars, Romance or Germanic. Clearly by 9th century Celtic was not a widely spoken language in the Carolingian world (which contains many of the territories under discussion), Romance and Germanic dialects were. But looking back, this displacement happened in the Roman empire or in the fragmented Merovingian realms? I guess the answer should be obvious.