Should there be Roman culture on the map in the new DLC?

[Opus]

Except that they aren't.
I'm half Italian, and I don't get a word of French, and I have to struggle to understand Spanish, especially when it goes into words with an Arabic origin.
I'm also half Dane, and I struggle to understand any of the Scandinavian spoken languages. Written is easier though, especially written Norwegian.

But they're in the Latin family, and in the Nordic family, but they're no longer Latin or Norse.

This is a bit interresting. I'm half Spanish-Half Finn, but grew up and live in Sweden. I understand Italian pretty well though, but can't make sense out of Danish at all. To the point that I actually speak English when in Denmark.

I think that it's because Swedish is my first language, I'm so used to it that Danish becomes harder to understand. I focus more on the differences then the similarities. I lernt Spanish at a later age, so I do focus more on the similarities with (for exampel) italian. I had no problem getting around when I visited Rome and Napoli two years ago, but have a hard time buying a beer in Copenhagen.

Finnish is just strange and I don't understand a word of it, exept the word for Wheelbarrel...

 

[Emre Yigit]

Except that they aren't.
I'm half Italian, and I don't get a word of French, and I have to struggle to understand Spanish, especially when it goes into words with an Arabic origin.
I'm also half Dane, and I struggle to understand any of the Scandinavian spoken languages. Written is easier though, especially written Norwegian.

But they're in the Latin family, and in the Nordic family, but they're no longer Latin or Norse.

You're just a bad linguist, sorry.

I'm neither Italian, nor Dane, hell, my mother tongue isn't even in the same language group as either, but having learnt French, and a smattering of (Anglophone) Latin, I can still read Italian newspapers and generally get the gist (though sometimes I get nothing) and in the days I could speak Danish, I could also understand Swedish. Certainly not error-free, but I wouldn't have starved in either country, so to, ahem, speak.

Finnish is a class unto itself.

 

[ejnomad07]

Eh.


3. If Sardinia is that distinct from the mainland its Sardinian, but many of his points are silly in any event (how could it not have contact with the mainland right next to it while having 'contact' with the ERE? The ERE in 6-800 was very much not the ERE of 400 let alone the Rome of 100 or 0 AD in any event - thus why its reconquest of Italy didn't 'restore' anything, so it being a nominal province is meaningless.

It's not Sardinian or Old Corsican yet, because you can't prove the language or culture had evolved into Sardinian yet. As I pointed out in my post even the people in 1300 were still calling them backwater Latin speakers and that's hundreds of years later and the society still followed old Roman traditions!

Isolationism leads to stagnation of culture. It's why their language is still so conservative today. A good example of this is the Icelandic language. It's been in contact with the rest of the mainland norse but it's language is so conservative from isolation factors they can still read old norse writings and easily understand them.

The ERE of 600 wasn't the ERE of 400 but neither was 867 the same as the ERE at end date yet that doesn't stop the game as lumping the culture together for game play purposes.

The Reconquest of Italy didn't restore anything, because obviously they didn't hold onto their reconquest for a long enough lasting period to make any changes. Also, the islands were never lost to the Empire and settled by another culture of people. Italy was. Completely different cases.

EDIT:

Here's another example to paint the picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_language#mediaviewer/File:Romance-lg-classification-en.png

You see how the Island Romance languages and Continent Romance languages even have their own branches! Completely different evolution with the islands languishing behind in the culture's evolution from Latin. A good example and vindication of this is Corsican and Old Corsican. You can see how the continued control of the island by Italy (Tuscany to be exact) later in the 900's shifted the culture and language into their branch. Coincidence? I think not.

 

[yourworstnightm]

Bah, there's nothing Roman about Vulgar Latin.

 

[NewbieOne]

One could argue that at least the County of Rome and the Duchy of Latium could have "Roman" culture not the same of the "Romans" that conquered Europe but a close descendent of them? Sure... maybe the name could be "Italo - Roman" if one want to be more precise.

What is sure is that the french as we know it only appeared in the last centuries of the last millenia. in the new start date, french did not exist nor in 870 altough in that date the transformation to french was already in the process.

in 769 it is very likely gallo-roman/roman still existed and with frankish contact and the loss of latin education will make the language slowly evolve into french and other romance dialect.

So I'd say if latin even vulgar was still spoken in Italy, and the roman culture was still preserved somehow, they deserve to have the roman culture.

Okay, guys, you've convinced me. It's true. 'Frankish' as used in the game from 1066 onward and even from 867 essentially means 'Old French', possibly in connection with the fact that the King of France was generally referred to as the King of Franks until late middle ages. And crusaders of all extraction were referred to as 'Franks' by 'Saracens' (of all extraction).

... Whereas back in 769 I suppose 'Frankish' would have applied to the real Frankish aristocracy and warriors rather than the general post-Roman populace. And yeah, the language, even in the treaty of Verdun (843) sounds like bad Latin more than old French. True that.

So perhaps 'Salic lands' should be Frankish, as in really Frank-ish, the rest being some sort of late Gallo-Roman under Frankish rule and political dominance. Merely political dominance does not decide culture, although it's close to (which is why e.g. Welsh/Romano-British flips to Anglo-Saxon so easily).

For convenience, however, I guess explaining 769 Frankish in the proper context of very early French society would also work. I can't be sure, but I don't think the Roman-derived inhabitants of France identified with the Basileus as their emperor the same way Roman populace did under barbarian kings earlier on. Nor would, I think, any hypothetical Roman reclamation by Byzzies have gone down as easily as Belisarius's takeover of Rome 250 years back. Correct me if I'm wrong, though, I'm not a real historian just a hobbyist.

Bah, there's nothing Roman about Vulgar Latin.

There is. Even back in the classical period and the Republic vulgar was vulgar. You can expect vulgar Latin especially to use simplified grammar and make use of some elements of other local languages. If you compare Caesar's writing to Cicero's (which is a pain to translate if you aren't really fluent), the language is much simpler, closer even to the syntax of modern languages. Real vulgar Latin would have been even simpler than that. Vulgar Latin will be different from place to place, but Rome will have its own version just like any other place. Only perhaps with less non-Roman influence than otherwise.

One could argue that at least the County of Rome and the Duchy of Latium could have "Roman" culture not the same of the "Romans" that conquered Europe but a close descendent of them? Sure... maybe the name could be "Italo - Roman" if one want to be more precise.

What is sure is that the french as we know it only appeared in the last centuries of the last millenia. in the new start date, french did not exist nor in 870 altough in that date the transformation to french was already in the process.

in 769 it is very likely gallo-roman/roman still existed and with frankish contact and the loss of latin education will make the language slowly evolve into french and other romance dialect.

So I'd say if latin even vulgar was still spoken in Italy, and the roman culture was still preserved somehow, they deserve to have the roman culture.

You're just a bad linguist, sorry.

I'm neither Italian, nor Dane, hell, my mother tongue isn't even in the same language group as either, but having learnt French, and a smattering of (Anglophone) Latin, I can still read Italian newspapers and generally get the gist (though sometimes I get nothing) and in the days I could speak Danish, I could also understand Swedish. Certainly not error-free, but I wouldn't have starved in either country, so to, ahem, speak.

Finnish is a class unto itself.

That's quite subjective. For example I can read newspapers in Italian on the basis of Latin and some French, I can handle Iberian languages if I really really need to (which resembles working out bad Latin), but I can't really understand languages related to my own mother language the same way some monolinguals can communicate with other monolinguals where each speaks his own mother language to the other.

As for bad post-classical Latin vs old French, dig up the treaty of Verdun online and decide for yourself. I suppose the assessment is largely subjective. I'm reasonably advanced in Latin and used to be intermediate in French, and it looks more Latin than French to me.

 

[Lord Finnish]

I think the county of Rome should have Roman culture. I'm sure that the city stuck with Latin for longer than other parts of Italy.

 

[Thure]

I think the county of Rome should have Roman culture. I'm sure that the city stuck with Latin for longer than other parts of Italy.

But speaking Latin don't make you Roman culture... The Pope today isn't of Roman culture... Or any other people in the Vatican city

 

[Lord Finnish]

But speaking Latin don't make you Roman culture... The Pope today isn't of Roman culture... Or any other people in the Vatican city

Difference is that modern Popes don't have to speak Latin as their first language - I doubt the current Pope speaks to his aides or fans in Latin. In 8th century however Latin was the universal language of communication, and in the city of Rome I would assume all the monuments and inscriptions and having the Pope and his clergy in town would have kept Romans from "flipping" into Italians by 769. Common Romans probably had to deal a lot with priests and Latin-speaking administrators so they would be talking Latin a lot more than people in, say, the lands that Byzantines lost all the way back in 6th century.

 

[Slavicist]

This is a bit interresting. I'm half Spanish-Half Finn, but grew up and live in Sweden. I understand Italian pretty well though, but can't make sense out of Danish at all. To the point that I actually speak English when in Denmark.

I think that it's because Swedish is my first language, I'm so used to it that Danish becomes harder to understand. I focus more on the differences then the similarities. I lernt Spanish at a later age, so I do focus more on the similarities with (for exampel) italian. I had no problem getting around when I visited Rome and Napoli two years ago, but have a hard time buying a beer in Copenhagen.

Finnish is just strange and I don't understand a word of it, exept the word for Wheelbarrel...

I think it might be because the Swedes are a little out of of the continuum:

Norwegians understand 88% of the spoken Swedish language and 73% of the spoken Danish language

Swedes understand 48% of the spoken Norwegian language and 23% of the spoken Danish language

Danes understand 69% of the spoken Norwegian language and 43% of the spoken Swedish language

So, the Swedes can barely understand the Danes, and can partially the Norwegians, according to the study of mutual relations.

 

[DominusNovus]

Well, in the West, Boethius was one of the last secular authors to write in Latin. I think Roman culture died with him (or Cassiodorus). Latin of course continued with the Church, but even there you get exhortations to use the vernacular, so it's obvious that some people at least couldn't follow. Beyond monasteries, and a few churches, did anyone actually speak Latin? I don't think so, unless you consider all Romance languages to be Latin. I doubt even Boethius used Latin to speak with his children.

Of course he spoke Latin. It may have been a dialect that differed from classical Latin, but he was about as upper crust as you could get; the odds are that his dialect wasn't all that far from classical Latin.

Again, we need to get over the idea that there was one "Latin" language that was around during Roman times. The Latin spoken in Dalmatia, in Africa, in Hispania, and in Gallia were all very different, even at the height of the Empire, but they were all Latin.

 

[Ashagar]

Indeed, early Latin was not the same as the classical Latin of the republic and early empire I studied in high school nor is the classical Latin the same as the vulgar Latin spoke in the late roman empire, the migration period and the early medieval period though the late 8th, early 9th centuries though there were different dialects that started to make it difficult for Latin speakers to understand people from other regions by the late 8th and early 9th century.

 

[Ciccillo Rre]

Ah, but which Vulgar Latin?

Oh, this discussion could go on and on....!

Good point!

I agree with the views above of NewbieOne about what is Latin, what is Roman with connections to the language, the culture etc. I find it weird to believe that one must have a toga, a lorica segmentata and a gladium to be a true Roman, that is a silly, naive and stereotyped view.

I want to add one thing: many people here talk about modern languages as we know them. In order to fully appreciate the sense of Romance continuity, you should know about Romance dialects. I am Italian, I studied Latin in school, I am fluent in Spanish and I can understand texts in French and Portuguese quite well (even understand formal speeches in these two languages) without any study of the languages. I understand something from songs in Catalan and can read texts from the Occitan wikipedia quite well. Sardinian is a different animal; it is very difficult and only direct experience in the island, with locals explaining to you some peculiarities of the languages, can help.

However, that is still a pretty limited view of Romance languages. Many actual languages have been tagged as "dialects" for political reasons during the process of modern nation-state building, especially in France and Italy. I am quite familiar with Italian dialects-languages, especially from the south, but also from the north. If I had not been exposed to them (even thanks to popular music and songs!) I would hardly understand northern italian dialects. They are totally different things. Traveling, exploring the Alps and its surrounding I have found that while someone from Provence and someone from the Italian region of Emilia could talk to each other in the respective languages-dialects while being understood, this is not the case if someone from Emilia talked to an Apulian from Bari in their "dialects".

The bottomline is: all the cultural sub-divisions of the Romance people are quite arbitrary; every area is a shade of the same color. What is more important, these differences and features also existed by the time of the late empire in terms of everyday's speech even if linguistical evolution has of course kept following its path. According to some linguists, the variety of Latin that everyday people spoke in some parts of central-southern Italy was nothing else but a variation of the fundamentally different Osco-Umbrian language from prehistoric times, and some features of it would have been retained in modern Neapolitan!

If you add to that that according to my view a senator with the toga or a legionnaire with the lorica segmentata is as Roman as a Byzantine aristocrat from the XII century is (well, this is perhaps an exaggeration) I see no reason why a "Roman" or "Romance" culture should not be there in 769, especially considering what a big stretch it is from Paradox' side to paint much of the Italian peninsula with that ugly violet color of the Lombard "culture" in that year, which should really not be there.

 

[Federalist girl]

Well, I do agree that "Lombard" shouldn't be there -- unless it means a cultural fusion or something. A lot of the vanilla Italian culture names are of Lombard origin, so if Lombard is its own thing in 769, then they really need to de-Lombardize the Italian cultural names list.

Actually, that raises more problems for the late game. What Italian should be is a "fusion" culture -- a cultural mix of Lombard and Italo-Roman, or even Roman if we absolutely must, in 769. Consider it the reverse of the Norse split -- because vanilla Italian culture in 769 just doesn't fit, but removing the Lombard names from it would mess up the later Italian culture of the rest of the game.

 

[DominusNovus]

Well, I do agree that "Lombard" shouldn't be there -- unless it means a cultural fusion or something. A lot of the vanilla Italian culture names are of Lombard origin, so if Lombard is its own thing in 769, then they really need to de-Lombardize the Italian cultural names list.

Actually, that raises more problems for the late game. What Italian should be is a "fusion" culture -- a cultural mix of Lombard and Italo-Roman, or even Roman if we absolutely must, in 769. Consider it the reverse of the Norse split -- because vanilla Italian culture in 769 just doesn't fit, but removing the Lombard names from it would mess up the later Italian culture of the rest of the game.

I disagree. There shouldn't be an Italian culture that represents a common culture of all of Italy, since that really didn't exist until the 19th century. There was nothing that really united the people living in Italy, other than religion. They spoke different dialects, they had different cultures, they lived under different governments...

The biggest problem is that EU4 does a better job of recognizing this (with Lombard, Umbrian, and Sicilian) than CK2 does, when the divisions were even greater.

 

[Ashagar]

However there was a medieval kingdom of Italy, it was one of the 5 successor kingdoms after the Karlings' empire broke up in 888 for the last time after Charles the fat's death, it also held the imperial title and Otto the Great's marrying of the queen of Italy is what allowed him to be crowned emperor and form the HRE. Its just that by the late medieval/early renaissance period the Italian kingdom was a shadowy existence and almost existed in name only.

 

[Jokolytic]

Bah, there's nothing Roman about Vulgar Latin.

In your view.

It's just laziness to think non-Lombard Italy and Sardinia in 769 would be generic Italian. Especially in Rome, it has to be at least Italo-Roman.

 

[Jokolytic]

I disagree. There shouldn't be an Italian culture that represents a common culture of all of Italy, since that really didn't exist until the 19th century. There was nothing that really united the people living in Italy, other than religion. They spoke different dialects, they had different cultures, they lived under different governments...

The biggest problem is that EU4 does a better job of recognizing this (with Lombard, Umbrian, and Sicilian) than CK2 does, when the divisions were even greater.

Even today, dialect and culture of Italian varies from village to village. That's why some even speak now of regions like Venice rooting for independence.

 

[Federalist girl]

I disagree. There shouldn't be an Italian culture that represents a common culture of all of Italy, since that really didn't exist until the 19th century. There was nothing that really united the people living in Italy, other than religion. They spoke different dialects, they had different cultures, they lived under different governments...

The biggest problem is that EU4 does a better job of recognizing this (with Lombard, Umbrian, and Sicilian) than CK2 does, when the divisions were even greater.

Sure, you can do away with the monolithic Italian culture in games 867-1453, but that's a separate issue. I'm just talking about issues that arise from the Lombard/Italian divide in 769 that they've got going. Should they chose to divide Italian culture for the rest of the game, then my comments wouldn't apply.

 

[LumberKing]

Since we know that there was no centralised Italian culture, what about German? Should they be separate as well or were they actually monolithic back in the good ol' days?

 

[Thure]

Since we know that there was no centralised Italian culture, what about German? Should they be separate as well or were they actually monolithic back in the good ol' days?

I don't think Alemannic and Bavarian would be necessary. We already have Frankish in western Germany and Saxon in Northern Germany. German now is just Upper Germany with the Upper German language.

I wouldn't complain about them, but I don't think they are necessary.