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Scroll.in
27-05-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
A new book sets out to trace the roots of modern languages back to one ancient tongue
When Germanic was first caught in the candle flame of writing, in the second century CE, there was only one runic script and one Germanic language. That language was spoken in a relatively compact area centred on the Jutland peninsula, extending southwards towards the Alps, and it had yet to fragment. Linguists consider that it was still very close to Proto-Germanic. They disagree as to when Proto-Germanic was born (most say 500 BCE, a few put it as early as 2000 BCE), but the prevailing view is that it developed out of dialects that arrived in the region with the first Corded Ware warbands. Italic and Celtic looked quite different at the moment they were first written down. The Italic languages had already diverged into Latin, Oscan, Umbrian and possibly Venetic – a language which, as its name suggests, was spoken in the north-eastern corner of the modern country, around Venice. Since no early Italic inscriptions have been found outside that country, the parent language, Proto-Italic, is thought to have been born in or close to it. Its date of birth is usually fixed, rather loosely, at sometime before 1000 BCE. Celtic was also mature by the time it was etched into stone, but it was spoken across a much larger swathe of the continent. Early Celtic inscriptions record three distinct languages: Gaulish in Gaul, Lepontic in northern Italy, Celtiberian in present-day Spain and Portugal. Celtic is presumed to have been spoken further east as well, in part because the Greeks and Romans – Europe's first historians – said it was. Linguists consider that the common ancestor of all the Celtic languages was spoken at roughly the same time as Proto-Italic, but where it was spoken is a more difficult question to answer, because of the huge territory that Celtic-speakers filled when their languages hove into view. Proto-Celtic has been pinned on the Atlantic seawall in the west, in the Austrian Alps in the east, and on the border of modern France and Germany in between. The last theory is the leading one today, in part because the French–German borderlands boast the highest density of Celtic place and river names. On the grounds that such names resist change because they serve a valuable function as signposts, some linguists consider them useful indicators of where ancient languages were spoken. The Rivers Main and Meuse were both named for Celtic deities, while the Neckar prob- ably took its name from a Celtic root nik, meaning 'wild water'. Another reason to place Proto-Celtic there, and not closer to the sea, is that its reconstructed vocabulary contains very few words related to maritime technology. Linguist David Stifter reports that Proto-Celtic had to borrow words for 'ship' and 'sail', suggesting that its speakers were landlubbers. Germanic, Celtic and Italic are related by common descent. This is evident from their grammar, their pronunciation and their core vocabulary (English father – mother – brother; Old Irish athir – máthir – bráthir; Latin pater – māter – frāter). But the relationships between them aren't equal. Celtic and Italic are generally considered to be closer to each other than either is to Germanic, like twins with a third sibling. The first two form superlatives in the same way, while Germanic does it differently. Germanic also has a whole class of verbs, the so-called modal verbs, that the other two lack. These are verbs that get placed before another verb, in its infinitive form, to express possibility, intent, ability or necessity (English examples are 'must', 'shall' and 'could'). Some linguists suspect that Italic and Celtic arose as a single, possibly short-lived language, Italo-Celtic, while Germanic arose separately. And they think that all three split from Proto-Indo-European early on, before the centum–satem (hard k to soft s before certain vowels) switch. Loanwords help to place these prehistoric languages in time and space too. These fall into three categories: loans that Italic, Celtic and Germanic made to each other; loans that they received from sister branches that expired before they could be written down; and loans from the non-Indo-European languages that dominated the continent when the first Indo-European-speakers arrived. Of the loans that the three surviving branches made to each other, the borrowings are more obvious between Germanic and Celtic than they are between Germanic and Italic, as if the first two had been closer in space. Relatively early on, for instance, Celtic donated its 'king' word, rīg-, to Germanic, where it became rīk- (the root of German Reich and Dutch rijk, meaning 'empire'). We know this word came from Celtic because, of the three branches, only Celtic converted the ē in Proto-Indo-European h3rēg's to an ī (the Italic branch kept the ē, as in Latin rēx). Think of Vercingeto rix, the Gaulish king or 'supreme king', to translate his name literally, who led an unsuccessful revolt against Julius Caesar in 52 BCE. The dead Indo-European sister languages left their ghostly mark, curiously, in a clutch of words for animals with big feet: Dutch pad (toad), Irish pata (hare), Welsh pathew (dormouse). These loans also hint at the early proximity of Germanic and Celtic, which must have been close enough to borrow from the same lost language. Then there are the loans that came from the Neolithic farmers of Europe. From these natives, most likely from the women they abducted or took as wives, the Indo-Europeans absorbed a host of words for plants and animals that were rare if not absent on the steppe. They included 'lark', 'blackbird', 'turnip' and possibly a word meaning 'bull' (tauro-, the root of Minotaur and toreador). The vocabulary tracked the distribution of the flora and fauna it described. In the balmy south of Europe, the immigrants took up words that would become cupressus (cyprus), ficus (fig), lilium (lily) and rosa (rose) in Latin. From the foragers who haunted the wind-blown dunes of the north Jutland coast they acquired a word that became Proto-Germanic selhaz, and eventually English 'seal'. These loans, which are still in use today, are older than the Indo-European languages they enrich, since the farmers brought them to Europe thousands of years earlier, from the Near East (many may have been Hattian in origin). A few may be older still, if the farmers borrowed them in turn from the hunter-gatherers who inhabited Europe when they arrived. And along with the words came knowledge. Now, at long last, the Indo-Europeans acquired a word for 'bee' (bhi-), probably because their indigenous wives taught their children the art of sylvestrian beekeeping – how to lure a swarm to a hollow tree or other crevice and periodically harvest honey from it. Bringing the linguistic clues together with the archaeological and genetic evidence, some linguists propose that the immediate ancestor of all three branches – Italic, Celtic and Germanic – was spoken during the mining boom that launched Europe's Bronze Age. On the modern Czech–German border, which might have roughly coincided with the frontier between the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker worlds, stand the Erzgebirge or 'Ore Mountains' – the only place in continental Europe where copper and tin occur together. From 2000 BCE, this region was home to a number of towns that doubled as important centres of metal production and ritual. They would have attracted people from both worlds, who brought a kaleidoscope of still mutually intelligible dialects. (A famous relic of those prehistoric towns is the Nebra sky disc, a bronze disc with a blue-green patina, inlaid with gold symbols, that depicts a solar boat sailing across the celestial ocean. A replica of it floats high above our heads on the International Space Station.) Around 1600 BCE, boom turned to bust in the Ore Mountains, and people left the region in search of better prospects. This could have been the moment of schism between Germanic dialects, which stayed in the north, and Italo-Celtic ones, which moved away to the south-east. Some of the émigrés settled on the Hungarian Plain, along the old trade routes connecting the Baltic to the Aegean (the roads along which amber and bronze were carted, and much else besides). There they built a series of large and well-defended settlements lining a corridor formed by the Rivers Tisza and Danube. Like their Bell Beaker ancestors, these 'Hungarians' worshipped the sun, but unlike the people of Nebra, who had buried their dead, they cremated theirs, packing the ashes into urns which they then buried in fields. This distinctive death rite now began to spread in two directions – north-west across Austria, and south-west towards Slovenia and Italy. If an Italo-Celtic language spread with it, the thinking goes, then where the path forked, the nascent Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic languages parted ways. It's just one theory, but the enigmatic and long-extinct Venetic language lends some support to it. Around four hundred Venetic inscriptions are known, and some linguists conclude from these that Venetic was not Italic, but something older – a relic of the ephemeral Italo-Celtic tongue (meaning that if you heard it spoken, you'd have an inkling of what the languages of the Roman emperor Nero and his nemesis, the Celtic queen Boudica, sounded like when they were one). Some Venetic inscriptions were found in Austria and Slovenia, exactly where Italic and Celtic might have taken leave of each other. At about the same time that the Hungarian settlements came to be, very similar towns developed in northern Italy. Archaeologists see enough similarities between the two – notably the 'Urnfield' cremation style – to convince them that they were connected by trade and human traffic. Steppe ancestry had already reached northern Italy by 2000 BCE (from where it diffused gradually southwards, towards the future city of Rome), but if the people who first brought that ancestry spoke an Indo-European language, it was probably one of the lost ones. Linguists suspect that the forerunner of Latin arrived later, with the migrants from Hungary. By 1600 BCE, those migrants were settling in the Po Plain, close to the modern city of Parma, and from that time on the population of the region grew. The people who frequented its thriving markets, who also carried steppe ancestry, might have bartered in Proto-Italic. The markets thrived until 1200 BCE – the ominous date that sounded the death knell for so many Mediterranean civilisations, including the Hittites and Homer's Greeks – but then both the northern Italian and the Hungarian civilisations vanished from the archaeological record. They might have suffered from the wider economic downturn, or perhaps a new pulse of migration out of Hungary triggered a crisis in Italy. Tens of thousands of people fled the Po Valley, scattering with their pottery and dialects to other parts of the Italian peninsula. As they went, linguists think that Proto-Italic split into Latin, Oscan and Umbrian. All three languages lived long enough to be written down. Oscan graffiti on the walls at Pompeii guided its inhabitants towards mustering points in times of siege. The second stream of migrants from Hungary headed north-west across Austria, plausibly carrying the dialects that would become Proto-Celtic and lending a 'king' word to the early Germanic-speakers into whose orbit they now strayed. From its Rhine cradle, Proto-Celtic then expanded, fragmenting as it went into Gaulish, Lepontic and Celtiberian in the west and undocumented sister languages in the east. For every scenario I've sketched here, at least one alternative exists. As with all the early branchings of the Indo-European family, uncertainty reigns – even if that is less true than it was in Marija Gimbutas' day. But perhaps the greatest outstanding mystery regarding Celtic is when it reached Britain and Ireland – the only places where, besides Britanny in France, it is still spoken today. After the Beaker people came to Britain around 2450 BCE, their DNA replaced around ninety per cent of the local gene pool, and all of the Y chromosomes. The turnover was similarly dramatic in Ireland when they crossed the Irish Sea around two hundred years later. Such a dramatic genetic rupture was almost certainly accompanied by a linguistic one, and linguists are pretty sure that the Beakers introduced an Indo-European language to those islands, but they don't think that language was Celtic. The dates don't add up. The Beakers were gone from Britain and Ireland by 1800 BCE (though their genetic legacy lived on), and Proto-Celtic was born no earlier than 1500 BCE. Somebody else brought Celtic in, at which point the language of the Beakers atrophied and died. One suggestion is that it was farmers from what is now France who crossed the Channel in large numbers around 1200 BCE, but some linguists think that date is still too early. They suspect that a later group of immigrants brought Celtic in, whom geneticists have yet to detect.
New European
20-05-2025
- General
- New European
Who makes the Vatican's bells?
Since the middle ages, this village has been making church bells for the Vatican and other Catholic parishes around the world. 'It's a place few Italians have ever heard of,' said Maria, an old lady I met while strolling along the winding alleys. 'Most people don't know we have played a key role in the history of the Holy See. Our village is special,' she said. 'I remember when Pope John Paul II came to visit Agnone one day back in 1995. It was party time and we were honoured to have him,' Maria recalled. Her eyes were shining as she spoke. There's a tiny village in southern Italy that harbours a secret. Welcome to Agnone, deep in the region of Molise, surrounded by lush fields full of grazing sheep and archaeological ruins dating back to the pre-Roman era of an Italic tribe, the Samnites. But this wasn't the secret. Located in the old district of picturesque homes with red tile roofs, I found the official pontifical bell foundry. It is run by the Marinelli family, who have the privilege of creating these unique pieces of bronze with the papal emblem on each bell. The foundry has been owned by the Marinellis for over 700 years, which makes it the most ancient artisan workshop in Italy. The old craftsmanship and art of creating church bells for the Vatican has been handed down across 27 generations. It struck me how one single family, in such a remote spot in wild Italy, could still have the exclusive job of making these holy bells. According to Maria, who is 97, the Marinellis are the only 'survivors' among various families of bell-makers who used to live in Agnone. 'The Marinellis are like a dynasty – a bell dynasty,' she said. Special bells were made for this year's Jubilee celebrations in the Catholic church. The foundry also makes bespoke, gigantic bells for commemorative events, and repairs old bells and church towers. I tried finding a Marinelli family member to talk to that day but failed, so instead I wandered into the bell museum, which is part of the foundry. The museum is huge. There were bells of all sizes, shapes and designs, but the one that caught my attention most was a rare model of a Gothic bell manufactured more than 1,000 years ago in Agnone. This would be a mecca for bell collectors! After the museum tour I stopped at a little pastry shop near the main piazza to grab something sweet – and there I made another surprising discovery. Agnone pastry chefs and housewives make a unique, weird kind of cake that in many ways sounds and looks ungodly. It is called ostia ripiena (meaning 'stuffed host' in Italian) and it is made with what look like two round, Catholic sacramental pieces of bread sandwiched together with a dense sticky mixture of honey, nuts and almonds. Even though the hosts aren't consecrated like those offered during Sunday mass, it is still a rather peculiar sweet treat for any pious Catholic. It made a crunchy sound as I took a bite. The delicate taste of the pearl-white communion wafer was a sharp contrast to the rich, dark sugary filling. I felt a bit embarrassed as I ate – as if I were committing a sin. 'Oh, but there's nothing immoral about ostia ripiena. It's been our religious culinary trademark for centuries, just like the bell tradition,' said Maria, who makes them at home every weekend. As I bought two more ostie ripiene to take home, I couldn't help but ponder on how faith can have so many sides to it – even a gourmet one. Silvia Marchetti is a freelance reporter living in Rome
Euronews
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
This ancient amphitheatre near Rome doesn't know if it's a football pitch or a tourist attraction
The Rome Colosseum, Verona's impressive arena – everyone knows Italy's beloved ancient Roman amphitheatres, synonymous with drama and pomp: gladiator conflicts, bloody spectacles and, still to this day, the backdrop to larger-than-life pop concerts and opera performances. Not all of them, however, get quite the same attention. Some lie forgotten or even repurposed in the most unusual of ways – including as sports grounds. In Monteleone Sabino – a small village of barely 1,000 inhabitants a stone's throw from Rome – a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre is nestled away behind bushes and woodland and has turned into the backdrop of the local team's football matches. Public money has been insufficient to bring the site to the public's attention, and local interest appears relatively scant. But two young volunteers are trying to bring their village's heritage to light – and hope that tourists will also make an effort to discover its hidden gem. Trebula Mutuesca: the forgotten ancient Roman town A mere 45 kilometres northeast of Rome and just a 70-minute drive away, Monteleone Sabino looks much like any nondescript, sleepy central Italian town – peppered with terracotta-hued brick bungalows and houses, all clustered around a medieval church and piazza, lined with unassuming cafes, post offices, and the obligatory 'tabacchi' (tobacconist). Among its most distinctive features is the sanctuary of Saint Victoria, a beautiful Romanesque church overlooking the region's rolling hills, which closed after an earthquake in 2016 left it in a precarious condition. But like many other places in the ' Bel Paese ' (beautiful country), Monteleone conceals a unique history – one its own residents were hardly privy to until the end of the last century. Once home to the Sabines – one of the local Italic tribes conquered by the Romans, which gave the village its name – Monteleone stands on what used to be a prosperous 4th-century BC settlement, Trebula Mutuesca. This ancient town boasted its own temple, baths, forum and amphitheatre. It even garnered mentions by ancient Rome's leading literary giants, Virgil and Pliny the Elder. Despite the ancient town's illustrious past and aristocratic population, it eventually fell into disrepair over the centuries, as it was overtaken by vegetation and eventually gave way to the current hilltop village, roughly 1.5 kilometres away from Trebula Mutuesca's centre. While local awareness of an ancient Roman settlement persisted throughout the generations, Trebula Mutuesca fell into oblivion, becoming little more than a faint memory. It was a spell of particularly intense rainfall in the 1950s that ultimately revealed what had been hidden for millennia: the ruins of the amphitheatre complex. A team of archaeologists spent decades trying to uncover the artefacts and remains, taking almost half a century due to a series of delays and interruptions, and only seeing its completion in the 2000s. A historic Roman amphitheatre turned modern-day football pitch? While discovering an entire ancient Roman town may have been any small village's claim to fame (and fortune), in a region oversaturated with historical artefacts, locals merely embedded the uncovered ruins into their village life – reflecting a broader Italian tendency to downplay or neglect the significance of its past. Indeed, prior to the arrival of Northern European archaeologists and historians in the 18th and 19th centuries, Rome's very own ancient ruins were hardly the source of cultural appreciation: the Imperial Forum itself was a makeshift market, while stone from its buildings was used to build many of the city's most iconic monuments. In Monteleone, the grassy site near the amphitheatre was quickly turned into a football pitch, used by the local team, ASD Real Monteleone Sabino, for matches with neighbouring towns. Tucked away behind the village in a bucolic setting encroached by olive groves and overgrown vegetation, blink and you'll miss the entrance to the ancient Roman site, which includes a vast open expanse dotted with walls and arches – once the amphitheatre and its stands – as well as the tunnels underneath the arena that once held ancient gladiator fights and shows. The Romanesque sanctuary of Saint Victoria, located near Monteleone Sabino's amphitheatre, and closed since a 2016 earthquake. Visitors can also see some of the busts and other artefacts found at Trebula Mutuesca in Monteleone's small archaeological museum, open Friday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm for €5 (€3 for young and senior individuals). There have been local efforts to preserve and promote the historical and archaeological significance of the site, including small concerts and exhibits. But insufficient public funds, lukewarm local interest, as well as regional competitiveness – the so-called campanilismo or 'church bell-ism': the distinctly Italian phenomenon of rivalries between parishes – has resulted in Trebula Mutuesca remaining largely underappreciated. 'We want to share our heritage with future generations' For two young Monteleonesi, the ruins of Trebula Mutuesca are more than just a part of their local heritage – it's a passion project and a driving force in their lives. Sara, 25, and Tommaso, 17, discovered their love for archaeology after becoming volunteers for an archaeological conservation project (G.A.T.C) four years ago. 'Archaeological sites are important because, if preserved well, they can have a significant positive impact on the local economy through cultural tourism,' Sara tells Euronews Travel. 'But more than that, they help us understand how people lived, their traditions, and their technologies. Without these treasures, we would lose so much of our history.' The two young conservationists have since channelled their enthusiasm locally and now hold the keys to Trebula Mutuesca's site, giving small tours of the amphitheatre for free every weekend. 'We are the guardians of a millennia-old history, proud to represent the greatness of our ancient city and the Roman legacy that defines our identity,' Tommaso adds. But Sara and Tommaso's efforts have not been entirely rewarded: while they claim to have a positive rapport with the local council, they bemoan what they consider to be the region's lack of willingness to raise awareness and publicise the archaeological site. 'It would be helpful to create some tourist centres, but we understand that the regional financial situation is challenging,' Sara notes. 'It takes a lot of time.' For the few visitors who have already made the journey to the ruins of Trebula Mutuesca, the apparent lack of care and resources in maintaining the ancient ruins has not been lost on them. 'Poorly looked after and appreciated,' one Tripadvisor comment from August 2024 states. '[A]s often happens in Italy.' For the foreseeable future, it seems Monteleone Sabino's ruins will remain off the beaten track, while its football pitch is not going anywhere any time soon. Some may see this all as a sign of Italy's longstanding struggle to fully appreciate its artistic heritage. Or you could say that it shows how life can still be breathed into thousands of years of history – as a sign of continuity with the town's past. Regardless, Sara and Tommaso remain steadfast in their fight to obtain greater recognition of their town's nugget of ancient history. 'Trebula's light still shines in what we do,' Tommaso explains. 'Being heirs of Trebula means carrying on a tradition that continues to inspire and shape us… it gives us our strength and an unbreakable bond with the ancient Roman roots that guide our future.'
