What languages were most influential in the middle ages?

Alessandro   Thu May 01, 2008 8:58 am GMT
oops... didn't know
PARISIEN   Thu May 01, 2008 9:48 am GMT
<< If the question is "What languages were most influential in the middle ages?
", then the answer is clearly GERMANIC DIALECTS (Frankish (in France), Burgundian (in Switzerland and Burgundia, Lombardic (Northern Italy), Gothic (Spain), Swebeish (Portugal) etc. )!
Germanic influence on Western Romance is obvious in vocabulary, morphology, grammar, syntax etc. >>

-- Wrong.
No way different Germanic peoples (Franks, Lombards, Wisigiths, Swabians) could have simultaneously parallel influences on French, Italian, Spanish, Occitan etc. and lend them similar sets of words.

Just an example. Standard Dutch is an exception among Germanic languages with its low aspiration of unvoiced plosives. Standard French is an exception among Romance languages with its slight aspiration of those consonants. Both languages share a lot of very distinctive phonemes (e.g. Fr. "l'oeil' = Du. "lui")
Does that mean that French influenced Dutch, or the other way around?
Neither the one nor the other.
The answer is: "Sprachbund", language convergence.
Guest   Thu May 01, 2008 10:06 am GMT
"
-- Wrong.
No way different Germanic peoples (Franks, Lombards, Wisigiths, Swabians) could have simultaneously parallel influences on French, Italian, Spanish, Occitan etc. and lend them similar sets of words.
"

Why not, since Germanic invasions and migrations happened at the same time and Germanic dialects were very similar in their basic structure and vocabulary?
greg   Fri May 02, 2008 10:31 am GMT
Skippy : « [...] those from France, naturally, spoke Middle French. »

Ça ne risque pas. Le moyen français est postérieur aux croisades. Les croisés parlaient l'ancien français.




Ouest : « But French ((= a Pseudo-Latin Germano-Roman Dialect issued of Northern and Eastern France (Neustria and Lotharingia) dialects)) has been the object of the two most influential languages during the middle ages, Roman-Latin and Germanic. French itself was influencial only in the late middle ages (crusades) and the early and high modern times. »

Tiens ! le retour d'un fantôme... Dommage que tu n'aies pas mis ton absence sur Antimoon à profit pour réviser le B-A-BA de la langue française et de sa littérature : ça t'aurait épargné de replonger dans la sottise sitôt revenu. Mais bon, les chiens ne font pas des chats.
Grubilde   Fri May 02, 2008 2:33 pm GMT
I don't like Germans, frankly I've never heard many persons keen on this ethnic people
Guest   Fri May 02, 2008 2:46 pm GMT
Maybe because the persons who didn't like them were burnt
Blonda Svenska Vikingar   Fri May 02, 2008 2:56 pm GMT
May the hammer of Thor crush your heads!
Guest   Fri May 02, 2008 3:19 pm GMT
Thor already crashed yours since a long time!
Guest   Sun May 04, 2008 10:55 am GMT
What languages were most influential in the middle ages?

Classical (Church) Latin and Old German (Frankish, Gothic, Lombard etc.)
Guest   Sun May 04, 2008 11:15 am GMT
<<Classical (Church) Latin and Old German (Frankish, Gothic, Lombard etc.)>>

Latin - YES
Old German - NO

Gothic ?! Lombard ?! are you kidding ? Show me A TEXT in that Lombard!

If we measure influence by the extent of the land in which a language was spoken then clearly Old Turkic beats all followed by Arabic and Chinese.

If we measure influence by the number of speakers then it will be Chinese.

If we measure influence by cultural expansion: Arabic, Latin, Chinese

By the way, Sanskrit was far more influential than all the "Old German" languages put together.

Also, don't forget Church Slavonic and Greek - any of them was more influential than yours "Frankish, Gothic, Lombard etc."
Ouest   Mon May 05, 2008 7:53 am GMT
-------------------
<<Classical (Church) Latin and Old German (Frankish, Gothic, Lombard etc.)>>

Latin - YES
Old German - NO

Gothic ?! Lombard ?! are you kidding ? Show me A TEXT in that Lombard!
----------------------


Italian Humanist Pietro Bembo, living in the early 16th century, knew very well that the Romanic languages (here Italian) came from barbarian conquerors, i. e. Goths, Lombards and Franks:

A mediator was humanist Pietro Bembo, - he belonged at that time with his treatise "Prose volgar della lingua" (1525) to the defenders against the critics of the two vernacular Italian poets of the Trecento, Dante (+1321) and Francesco Petrarca (+1374); Bembos dialogue argument is also worth considering because of its historical perspective :
"
While the origin of the Tuscan language was barbaric, "don´t you believe that in the period of four or five hundred years barbaric Tuscan has become Italian citizen? Sure! Otherwise, even the Romans were barbarians, which, expelled by the Phrygiern, settled in Italy. The Roman people, its customs and its language, would be barbaric. " It would obviously be better to speak Latin, "but even better would it be if the barbarians never had conquered and destroyed Italy , and if the Roman Empire would have existed eternally. However, as things are different, we want ... (hence) to remain silent and not talk any more about Cicero and Virgil to be reborn..."
"

Viva Garibaldi (whose grand-grand-grand...father was a Lombard named Garibald)
PARISIEN   Mon May 05, 2008 8:42 am GMT
<< the Romanic languages (here Italian) came from barbarian conquerors, i. e. Goths, Lombards and Franks >>

Idiot et faux.
La présence germanique a été un temps sans doute majoritaire dans certaines zones de Wallonie et du Nord-Est français, faible ou très faible ailleurs, nulle dans certains endroits, mais les formes les plus anciennement attestées des dialectes romans y parlés ne montrent pas entre elles de différence structurelle significative.

La question des convergences entre langues européennes n'est pas reconductible à des questions de substrat et/ou de superstrat.
Gregophile   Mon May 05, 2008 12:10 pm GMT
Romance languages derive from proto Italian. Now everything makes sense. Thank you Greg for your wisdom.
Xie   Mon May 05, 2008 12:38 pm GMT
Well, people say old China had been the biggest economy in the world for _many_ centuries. I'd say China sucked multiple times in military history, but its cultural power was strong enough to conquer most of those who tried to conquer/conquered it by force. For this reason, I'm not even sure if some of my ancestors were from Central Asia, and I think middle Chinese had been very important in middle-age history.
Marco   Mon May 05, 2008 12:47 pm GMT
"
and I think middle Chinese had been very important in middle-age history.
"


Does the term "middle-age" (antiquity, modern times etc.) make any sense in Asian History?