Latin Culture: Should be back history no longer

[Orko80]

This might seem like a nice thing, but it seams very unrealistic. Culture and languange is a ever evolving thing. Changed by outside and inside influances. New word's and what is accepted behaviors change dramastic over time. Even if you are isolated. Never has there been a step backward's in cultures.

The whole norman culture melting pot problem is one of the representation's in the game of this. You alway's have cheat's if you realy want to have Latin in the culture tab. But i think this is nothing PDS should focus on.

If anything they should try to implement a way to simulate cultural melting pot's, shifting in new kind's of culture group's. But than we would need new immaagined culture tag's for hundret's of thousends possibility's cultures might have merged.

Imagine the emergin culture of a Viking taking over part north afrikas, than reconquista from ibera. Followed by invasion of atztec. Only to be again purged by WC golden hord mongols. There would be quite a different culture than berber...

 

[Thorv]

Firstly (to the OP's arguments 1 an 2), though it's not completely clear at all times what Paradox means by a character's 'culture', it's always a good rule of thumb not to draw an equals sign between language and culture.

I love this thread, and am persuaded by the OP.

Just a comment is response to above point made by Classicist:

Whenever someone uses linguistic evidence to justify an argument about cultural identity, the objection “culture is not language” is invariably raised on these forums. I find this complaint baffling, for it seems to me that sameness of (native) language is the best evidence we could possibly have for sameness of culture -- arguably, even more so than ethnicity.

Now, I don't know what Paradox means exactly by “culture” (they probably don't have any specific definition in mind, but just exploit this vagueness in the interest of game-play, stretching the concept as they see fit). But whatever Paradox’s concept of “culture” is, surely language must play a crucial part in comparing cultures. This need not entail that the concept of “culture” is identical to the concept of “language”. Rather, the point being made is that people who natively speak similar dialects most likely share similar cultures. (Putative counter-examples such as, say, the Americans vs. the British don’t really disprove the point–for one can plausibly argue that geographically or temporally separated cultures are similar at least to the extent to which their share a common linguistic background.)

Personally, I find that the OP's arguments (1) and (2) are stronger and more persuasive than (3).

 

[Thure]

Whenever someone uses linguistic evidence to justify an argument about cultural identity, the objection “culture is not language” is invariably raised on these forums. I find this complaint baffling, for it seems to me that sameness of (native) language is the best evidence we could possibly have for sameness of culture -- arguably, even more so than ethnicity.

Okay... Hungarian and Finnish are in the same language group... Thit this mean Finnish culture is similiar to Hungarian culture? I don't think so. Language is one point... Culture is another point. Yes language is part of a culture. But culture isn't the same as language. This was my point. You can't group the cultures after language groups.

 

[DominusNovus]

I certainly hope that Paradox would at some point devise a way to model the different kinds of Roman onomastics. I'm not sure how much recognizing religious names helps in this, but it may - at least with the later onomastics. Even so, the Late Imperial naming conventions, especially the so-called signo names (aka qui et names - essentially being personally adopted nicknames, e.g. Smaragdus, Quidvultdeus, etc.) might be a nice thing to see. If the studio is ever planning to do EU: Rome II, then of course the forming of the 'classical' Roman tria nomina should be modelled in some way, and preferably the gender differences taken into account.

ADDITION: Well, actually I've long wanted to have the genderified name forms also in Byzantine names. It seems so silly to have to read e.g. Zoe Palaiologos when it would have been rendered Zoe Palaiologina, etc.

I'm not too hopeful they'll include the Tria Nomina, but even just a demarkation between the Christian names and non-Christian names would be quite useful. For example, Christoverus, Maria, Theodosius, etc.

 

[SBolshevik]

Okay... Hungarian and Finnish are in the same language group... Thit this mean Finnish culture is similiar to Hungarian culture? I don't think so. Language is one point... Culture is another point. Yes language is part of a culture. But culture isn't the same as language. This was my point. You can't group the cultures after language groups.

Vlach is in the South Slavic group for the very same reason (although they did write in (Church?) Slavic in the Middle Ages).

 

[Thorv]

Okay... Hungarian and Finnish are in the same language group... Thit this mean Finnish culture is similiar to Hungarian culture? I don't think so. Language is one point... Culture is another point. Yes language is part of a culture. But culture isn't the same as language. This was my point. You can't group the cultures after language groups.

I didn't make myself clear then. The point being made is not that language is the "same" as culture (whatever that means). Rather, we can use linguistic evidence, as the OP did, to justify our views on cultural similarities. That is legitimate evidence, as legitimate as anything can be when arguing about cultural similarity and sameness. Regarding your Finland vs. Hungary objection -- well, this is the exception that proves the rule. Granted, Finnish culture is not the same Hungarian culture, but neither is Finnish language the same as (or similar enough to) Hungarian language. Even so, the linguists' classification reflects the fact they did in fact belong to the same culture group, namely the so-called 'Finno-Ugric' culture, before they got geographically separated.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

I didn't make myself clear then. The point being made is not that language is the "same" as culture (whatever that means). Rather, we can use linguistic evidence, as the OP did, to justify our views on cultural similarities. That is legitimate evidence, as legitimate as anything can be when arguing about cultural similarity and sameness. Regarding your Finland vs. Hungary objection -- well, this is the exception that proves the rule. Granted, Finnish culture is not the same Hungarian culture, but neither is Finnish language the same as (or similar enough to) Hungarian language. Even so, the linguists' classification reflects the fact they did in fact belong to the same culture group, namely the so-called 'Finno-Ugric' culture, before they got geographically separated.

How similar would you consider English, Danish, Dutch and Austrian cultures to be? All four are areas with Germanic languages.

 

[Thorv]

How similar would you consider English, Danish, Dutch and Austrian cultures to be? All four are areas with Germanic languages.

Again, I would just say that this classification reflects the fact that so-called "Germanic" languages share a common cultural ancestry -- in your example, a culture group consisting of Angles, Saxons, Jutes (and possibly Frisii). The problems with these kinds of classification is that (1) they are too broad; (2) these languages have diverged too much from their ancestors. So they aren't much useful when trying to establish similarities between *contemporary* cultures. However, narrower criteria of linguistic similarity (based, say, on regional dialects with a limited degree of divergence over time) would provide much better evidence of cultural similarity. The OP's arguments are persuasive precisely because they are based on this sort of more specific considerations.

 

[ejnomad07]

How similar would you consider English, Danish, Dutch and Austrian cultures to be? All four are areas with Germanic languages.

Which is a completely different case point as you're trying to compare languages that have evolved over a period of time that isn't related at all to the current point. I'm talking in the year 867 not 2013. English, Danish, Dutch, and Austrian don't all have the same direct parent language they all directly broke off from. They evolved from separate subfamilies so that's really a silly point. My point and the one I made in the first place was modern Sardinian language and Old Corsican both evolved directly from Vulgar Latin. Case in point. They didn't evolve much over the last 1000+ years. So what are we really going to expect in the 800's? Meanwhile, if you look at the evolution of the languages Italian is so much father down the tree it's laughable to lump them together.

And let's table language for a second and talk about culture. If you say culture is also the way they act, carried traditions and viewed themselves. I made the very clear in point 3. They were under constant Roman rule except for shortly before the game start but were still set up and presenting themselves with Roman jurisdictions and titles. They viewed themselves as Romans, and conducted their courts and the feudal system not like the rest of Europe, but in a more Roman way. What more can you ask of a culture based definition than that?

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Which is a completely different case point as you're trying to compare languages that have evolved over a period of time that isn't related at all to the current point. I'm talking in the year 867 not 2013. English, Danish, Dutch, and Austrian don't all have the same direct parent language they all directly broke off from. They evolved from separate subfamilies so that's really a silly point. My point and the one I made in the first place was modern Sardinian language and Old Corsican both evolved directly from Vulgar Latin. Case in point. They didn't evolve much over the last 1000+ years. So what are we really going to expect in the 800's? Meanwhile, if you look at the evolution of the languages Italian is so much father down the tree it's laughable to lump them together.

And let's table language for a second and talk about culture. If you say culture is also the way they act, carried traditions and viewed themselves. I made the very clear in point 3. They were under constant Roman rule except for shortly before the game start but were still set up and presenting themselves with Roman jurisdictions and titles. They viewed themselves as Romans, and conducted their courts and the feudal system not like the rest of Europe, but in a more Roman way. What more can you ask of a culture based definition than that?

I was trying to draw a parallel with the "Finno-Ugric" grouping, and wondering how similar he views the much tighter Germanic group.

I can however draw a parallel to the Italian situation as well, with Latin splitting, giving Vulgar dialects. One branch from what you're saying (and I don't have the ability to argue it, not being familiar with the basal language or the dialects you talk of) became Sardinian/Corsican, and then later split again; another set became the various dialects of the various areas of Italy, and then mixed and became standardised into modern Italian.
To test whether they are really as basal as you say, we'd need to find if Vulgar Latin inscriptions are intelligible in the two dialects, and how mutually intelligible they are.


On culture, the areas don't seem large enough to preserve anything of Roman culture above the (quite small) minor provinces. Did they claim to be the successor to (Western) Rome after it was sacked?

 

[classicist]

Whenever someone uses linguistic evidence to justify an argument about cultural identity, the objection “culture is not language” is invariably raised on these forums. I find this complaint baffling, for it seems to me that sameness of (native) language is the best evidence we could possibly have for sameness of culture -- arguably, even more so than ethnicity.

Oh but 'ethnicity' is even more complicated. It's usually a very good idea not to take that aboard as extra baggage - I've recently had to read through a lot of scholarly literature dealing with the 'ethnicities' of migration age communities (denoted by ethnonyms 'Goths', 'Vandals', etc. you know the lot) and it's really quite striking how fundamental interpretational problems are encountered when past population groups are given 'ethnic' labels retrospectively. BUT! To your point (sorry about digressing). In his post above Thure took up a very good, one might even say a classical example - which I too know well, being a Finn. Culture, especially material culture, and language are not carried jointly in population groups. To us, raised as we are in the post-Westphalian world of culturally quite homogeneous states and surrounded by the post-Napoleonic rhetoric of national states, it can appear that a language is a good marker of ethnicity, and must correlate with a certain cultural set. Sociolects, cants, argots and code switching complicate the picture vertically, and horizontally the evidence for cases of populations switching material culture but not language or switching language but not material culture, are pretty convincing.

I was trying to draw a parallel with the "Finno-Ugric" grouping, and wondering how similar he views the much tighter Germanic group.

Indeed. Even the most jingoistic of my countrymen should be able to admit that our closest cultural relatives are (in addition to Estonians) Swedes and Russians, none of whom share the same language family. (Possibly spooked by some aspects of it, who knows: http://rikocb.tumblr.com/post/65128986914/english-a-dog-swedish-what-english-the)

Now, I don't know what Paradox means exactly by “culture” (they probably don't have any specific definition in mind, but just exploit this vagueness in the interest of game-play, stretching the concept as they see fit).

This seems to be the case. But to be fair they are certainly on a better track than Civilization series, as I noted on another thread. And of course, 'culture' is a flexible concept, easily to use. But, not unreasonably in my view, with the ease that is bandied about nowadays should always go a certain awareness of the tendentiousness of such definitions.

And now for something almost completely different:

I'm not too hopeful they'll include the Tria Nomina, but even just a demarkation between the Christian names and non-Christian names would be quite useful. For example, Christoverus, Maria, Theodosius, etc.

Me neither. It seems that the current modelling couldn't handle the inherited parts of the tria nomina, especially with the additional agnomina.

 

[ejnomad07]

On culture, the areas don't seem large enough to preserve anything of Roman culture above the (quite small) minor provinces. Did they claim to be the successor to (Western) Rome after it was sacked?

No, but why would they? They quickly became incorporated into the Eastern Roman Empire so as far as they were concerned they were a part of the legitimate Empire, and at the time of the sacking you will remember even the Eastern Roman Empire was latin.

 

[DominusNovus]

How similar would you consider English, Danish, Dutch and Austrian cultures to be? All four are areas with Germanic languages.

English and Dutch? Very similar. During the game period, even more similar before the Normans frenchified English. Ever see the piece where Eddie Izzard goes over to Friesland and buys a cow, speaking Old English?

 

[mudcrabmerchant]

well, this is the exception that proves the rule. Granted, Finnish culture is not the same Hungarian culture, but neither is Finnish language the same as (or similar enough to) Hungarian language. Even so, the linguists' classification reflects the fact they did in fact belong to the same culture group, namely the so-called 'Finno-Ugric' culture, before they got geographically separated.

Nononononononononono. For one, that phrase is inherently dumb and just wrong in the way you use it - it's meant to refer to stated exceptions which imply the existence of a rule.

Secondly... Finnish culture has no more in common with Hungarian culture than it does with any other culture in Europe, and if they have anything particularly in common it would be their difference from their major neighbors (Finnish has Estonian and other nearby Finnic cultures). The ancestors of the Hungarians moved away from the Finno-Ugric forest homeland and integrated themselves with the Turkic-dominated steppe culture, before moving into Europe and integrating themselves into that cultural world.

Similarly, back in Roman days, modern Romania certainly belonged in the same cultural grouping as Italy. However, with the fall of the empire, they lost virtually all contact with their western relatives, and until they became more conscious of their Latin heritage in the 19th century, Greek and especially Slavic culture had much more influence on the Romanians than any other Latin people. You can even see it in the language in the Eastern Romance languages that didn't re-Latinize themselves in the 19th century (look at the Istro-Romanian example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalmatian_language#Language_sample).


As linguistic boundaries are a great way to segregate populations, and cultural identity often spreads or dies with languages, they're often linked to valid cultural groupings. But it isn't a perfect match up, and Paradox often goes overboard with it (like the culture grouping in Indochina in EU games). But they're spot on here, grouping Vlachs with South Slavs and Hungarians with their neighbors (though a case could be made to make Hungarian an isolate group).

 

[ahhheygao]

But they're spot on here, grouping Vlachs with South Slavs and Hungarians with their neighbors (though a case could be made to make Hungarian an isolate group).

Random passerby here. Hungarian are indeed in their isolated Magyar culture group, at least in the more recent patches.

 

[mudcrabmerchant]

Random passerby here. Hungarian are indeed in their isolated Magyar culture group, at least in the more recent patches.

Ah, thanks. Though I do think Hungarian is grouped with West Slavic in Europa Universalis.

 

[Tob.Ristlin]

Well, these problems of representation (or rather: the level of distinguishing) are a prime example of what is encountered when people try to chop down a dialect continuum into linguistic (not to mention cultural!) blocks. It appears forced every which way you portion it. The probable situation in the field for most of the medieval era was, as in most dialectal continuums, that each neighbouring village or town from Porto to Fiume would have understood each other, yet between any two further-away points along that line mutual intelligibility would have been broken.

Well, obviously, this is almost the case even today

 

[icedt729]

A lot of this weirdness could be avoided if each culture had a unique relation set with each other individual culture rather than having good relations with its group and equally bad relations with all other groups, but I think it's just a little more complicated than PDS wants to get with it. Ultimately it's a gameplay device to nudge certain countries or characters towards each other, but it raises predicaments like the Sardinian-Corsican one. Are they in the Latin group because of common linguistic roots, or are they in the Byzantine group because of continuing Roman political culture? How much did medieval Europeans really care about language or ethnicity, as long as everybody had the same faith and could speak decent Latin? Does it make sense for Italians to see Swedes as being just as foreign as Turks? It's just a bit of a mess.

 

[Keioel]

I don't think based on what you said that the Sardinians should be Latin I think they should be Roman.

 

[SovereignGrave]

I don't think based on what you said that the Sardinians should be Latin I think they should be Roman.

I think that's what he meant, since there is no individual "Latin" culture.