A Digital Atlas of the Imperium Romanum
AKA a beautiful and detailed map of the Roman world.
A neat thing someone sent me.
by CJ | Feb 2, 2014 | Journal | 47 comments
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that’s amazing !
That’s quite wonderful.
I had fun locating Aquae Sulis (Bath) in Britain. Naples was a little harder, although I found Capri easily enough. I just wish I could make out Caesar’s famous “Omnia Gallia divisa est in tres partes”…
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. Gallos ab Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana dividit. Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important, proximique sunt Germanis, qui trans Rhenum incolunt, quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt. Qua de causa Helvetii quoque reliquos Gallos virtute praecedunt, quod fere cotidianis proeliis cum Germanis contendunt, cum aut suis finibus eos prohibent aut ipsi in eorum finibus bellum gerunt. Eorum una, pars, quam Gallos obtinere dictum est, initium capit a flumine Rhodano, continetur Garumna flumine, Oceano, finibus Belgarum, attingit etiam ab Sequanis et Helvetiis flumen Rhenum, vergit ad septentriones. Belgae ab extremis Galliae finibus oriuntur, pertinent ad inferiorem partem fluminis Rheni, spectant in septentrionem et orientem solem. Aquitania a Garumna flumine ad Pyrenaeos montes et eam partem Oceani quae est ad Hispaniam pertinet; spectat inter occasum solis et septentriones.
Now that I look at it in the original text, when I spouted it off at ShejiCon3, I see how many errors I made. Excuse alert: it had been 33 years since I had had to memorize it.
Same here, operating from high school Latin. Either my memory ain’t what it should be (probable), or we got a really wacky copy in our textbook.
I’m very surprised. I’m still fairly fluent in French and Spanish, and I’m good with languages. Now, I know I’m not getting all the shades of meaning, and I’m sure some things would elude me entirely — but I can “squint” at that and get a lot more than I would’ve expected to be able to read (or make an educated guess at). Then again, there are probably some false cognates there.
I’m going to copy that, attempt a very rough translation without anything but what’s in between my ears, and see what I get.
I’ll post the results later, and it will probably be a mix of spot-on and completely-missed-the-boat. 😀 But it should be fun to try, even so.
More to the point, it may show how someone with a running start at it can still be hit-or-miss for translating something that is bound to be gibberish to English-only speakers. It may also show that the same text can be translated more than one way and be reasonably correct; while on the other hand, translation is not simply plug-and-chug of word-for-word equivalencies. It’s actually more like choosing the best options from closely related terms, and doing your best to get the most optimum result, the closest to the spirit of the speaker’s or writer’s intent.
I bogged down in the fourth sentence, but intend to pick it up again tomorrow. Most of it looks like I can guess at it. I’ve been sitting here having great fun with it! The fourth sentence, I know I wasn’t getting something, and I went into word-for-word analysis rather than staying with an overview or Gestalt. So of course I wandered around with that a while. But the rest looks easier, mostly. I get the feeling I should be able to tackle it again and get more sense out of it.
I’m curious to see how far I get and how intelligible it looks, without outside clues.
What I wrote down is so long, I’m likely to email it for CJ’s amusement, rather than inflict so long a reply on the thread. 😀
I’m curious whether I can get more than about halfway near the translation without knowing Latin, based on English, Spanish, French, and pieces here and there, with raw language talent. If I manage the gist of it, that’ll be surprising. If I get any closer, that would be really something. Even making educated guesses, I wouldn’t expect much more than about half.
It makes me wonder how others would fare given a similar test, and if it would show linguistic aptitude or other pattern-recognition abilities.
“Algol is divided into three parts”, so began the one-time UCLA Computer Club’s class on Algol, the “International Algorithmic Language”. We computer people are a strange lot, with a sometimes abstruse sense of humor.
Which says in the first two lines—Gaul is as a whole divided into three parts, in one of which dwell the Belgae, in another the Aquitani, and in the third, the people who call themselves Celts. We call them Galli [Gauls]. He ignores Cisalpine Gaul, which is the Italian side of the Alps. Flumen means river: garumna flumen = Garumna River…aka the Garonne. Matrona = Marne; Sequana = Seine. It’s a geographical where-is-it for people who didn’t have ready illos in their books.
At the 200 km/mile zoom level (key to lower left, zoom level 5 if you click on the globe), the only labels in modern France are Belgica, Lugdunensis (toward Brittany), and Aquitania. Nice map!
If you look at the map, north of Micenum on a small promontory on the north side of that little gulf, you’ll see the village of Caieta, which is modern day Gaeta, and I spent 2 years in that little village. During the winter, it’s a very quiet place, in summer, the tourists from the north come invading like Visigoths and Vandals, and take over the beach (called Serapo), the apartments, and hotels. Our landlord would toss us out in May and put us up somewhere else until September, because he could get more money in rent from the tourists in 4 months than he could from us in 12 months in the same apartment. It worked out well, our alternate apartment was nice, just further from the beach. But the buses ran almost on time and were something like 11 cents to ride.
That map is cool.
Very nice! One of my favorite maps is a paper, Ordinance Survey one of “Dark Age Britain,” with names in Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Interestingly, my Intro Geography students find it fascinating when we do Maps and can spend almost as much time as me gazing at it, and they have no background knowledge of the time or the place.
Speaking of Caesar, CJ: do you know if at any place he comments that the Gauls, or more likely the Britannii, have no word for Cheese? I thought I spotted that when I was skimming through a book on Cheese & Culture a bit ago, but didn’t note the place and can’t find it now. The Irish and Welsh words for “cheese” turn out to derive from Latin and I am now hypothesizing that they did not make hard (and perhaps also soft) cheeses until after the Romans arrived on the scene, despite being a strong, dairying culture. I’m thinking of submitting a paper proposal titled “Say Cheese” for the Harvard Celtic conference this fall and starting to rootle around for key factoids.
Several years ago I had a major intellectual crise du coeur when I checked out the etymology for the Gaelic words for cheese (also the German) and found them deriving from the Latin. I’ve done two theses on dairying in Old Irish and Scottish Highland culture and felt dreadfully betrayed by them for not starting off with native words. Such are the traumas of academia!
Raesean, what about the term(s) for something like cottage cheese, or curds and whey, soft cheeses? Is there a native term (or terms) for those? Or alternatively, is there evidence that the imported Latinate terms later eclipsed the native words?
As a couple of examples, cottage cheese translates into French as “fromage blanc,” literally, “white cheese;” while most English speakers would probably not think of “curds and whey” immediately, if they were to explain (and translate) “cheese.” Hmm, or “clabbered” as in clabbered milk.
I recall reading things like cottage cheese predated hard cheeses, possibly from milk carried around in skins (cf. wineskins).
As an example where an imported word ends up replacing a native word, that happened extensively from Anglo-Saxon Old English into Anglo-Norman Middle English, where Germanic words and French and Latin words elbowed each other in all speech levels.
For a surprising simple example: The (Middle and Modern) English pronouns, they, them, their, theirs, aren’t from Old English. They were imported from Vikings / Danes who invaded and settled and intermarried, and the pronouns spread and merged with the native versions until the native versions were subsumed or replaced. English ’em for them is supposed to be from Middle English hem, a holdover / survival from the old native forms, as well as a shortened or softened contraction of the full word.
So, is there evidence of other words for cheese-like things in Celtic, Gaelic, Old Irish, and related descendant languages from the British Isles and what became modern France, esp. Brittany, Bretagne?
They had plenty of livestock, sheep, cows, goats, they must’ve had some forms of cheese, even early on, even if they hadn’t yet worked out some of the methods.
Perhaps curd is the word? Cheddar? Wensleydale?
Scots Gaelic for cheese is “caise.” It and the the German “kase” (sp), as well as the English “cheese” all come from Latin “caseus” which means cheese, according to highly eminent etymologists (like the OED and Harvard’s top etymologist -alas just recently deceased- Cal Watkins). Why, oh why, my overly academic heart cries, did my favorite Celts borrow a word rather than use one of their own when they formed much of their Irish/Scottish Highland culture around dairy cows?
The Celts have a nice and distinctly different word for curd, “gruth” which is related to but not apparently derived from the English “curd.” Both words, according to Watkins, share a common Indo-European ancestor, “greut,” meaning to “compress,” as in the stuff you squeeze the whey out of. The Scots fresh curd cheese, crowdie, by the way, comes from “curd.”
Hmmm… so my Celts must at least have been making some type of curds, perhaps just using them in fresh, unaged cheeses and maybe adopted the Latin word, caseus, for some sort of cheese that eventually won out and became the ubiquitous word for all cheese.
I grew up around Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I remember a soft white cheese being called ‘smearkase’, probably from German. I don’t remember if it was closer to cottage cheese or cream.
Soft vs. hard cheese: mightn’t that depend on what type of bacillus you have access to? If you only have the bacteria to make soft cheeses, hard might be beyond your reach until you luck out and get the right strain, along with enough time for it to develop. Very chancy.
You can get clabber, or curds and whey just by letting the milk sit til it curdles. Making what we think of as cheese involves cooking then straining almost all of the whey out. Then the result must be shaped, and then aged for at least months. The Celtic type of dwellings didn’t lend themselves to places suitable to aging cheese, and the geology of the British Isles isn’t very cave-y. Even though you can rig a round house to have wooden floors with under-floor storage, it’s not cool enough there to age cheese. It’s probable the Celts never took the process beyond the curds and whey stage. If the Celts borrowed the word, that argues that they borrowed the process as well, and learned hard cheese making from the Romans. If you learn to do something by coming in contact with a culture that does it, you tend to borrow their words for it as well.
Oh, now I have a hankering to re-read Cyteen and the spacer’s “cheese” – keis was it?
I was serious about curds, which seems like cheese version zero point one, so to speak. Curds (I think) can be made without bacteria, unlike yogurt–especially without the specific bacteria cheeses need. It may be that cheese was the word for true, hard cheese, and it displaced curds both gastronomically and linguistically. A thought.
See: http://www.nature.com/news/art-of-cheese-making-is-7-500-years-old-1.12020
This area is approximately the eastern limit of Celts. I’m unsure of timing.
I need to figure out where I stashed my (very) old Masters thesis on Dairying in Old Irish Literature (which my father claimed must have been the most obscure research in the world) to see what words/descriptors for cheese are used in it, but in modern Scots Gaelic the primary (rather than secondary, descriptive) words are just “caise”=cheese and “gruth”=curds. The early Irish were definitely making soft cheeses and, from another book on Early Irish Farming I just pulled off the bookcase that used the same sources I did years ago, at least one hard cheese… hmmm… but no mention of a term for “rennet.” Did those darned British/Irish Celts simply adopt the Latin word for “cheese” because they suddenly realized they were tired of calling everything “that curd stuff”? If the Eskimo can have so many words for snow (although they don’t, I read somewhere), then so should the Gaels for cheese!
The Samburu, a tribe I do advocacy work with in Northern Kenya who are cousins to the Masai, traditionally subsist on an even more dairy-based diet than the Highlanders did, but only have butter and yogurt for secondary milk products, not cheese (one young child was
amazed last summer when my friend who lives with them when she researches lions offered him icecream: the concept of sweet, cold, solid milk was novel and very tasty!).
IIRC, Dr. Watkins was the author of the article in the American Heritage Dictionary on the Indo-Europeans and how English and other European languages developed from the Indo-Europeans. That dictionary and the articles, the table of sound correspondences, and the short dictionary of I-E roots, was a gift to me from my parents in junior high, during the same time as I had my first foreign language classes. That helped fuel my interest in languages and cultures, along with my classes. It was also appealing as a mysterious, historically ancient, exotic, somewhat alien thing. 😉 So I owe a fair chunk of my interests to him, as well as to three foreign language teachers (besides CJ’s books later).
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Celts and cheese culture — So if we have gruth or greuth and crowdie as words related to cheese-making, what else? Let’s see: Scots and Irish Gaelic, Bretons, Welsh, Cornish, Gauls…. The Latinization of Gaul later in the Imperial era…. Contact between Roman and Gallic and British cultures from the entire Common Era forward. (And I think a few hundred years prior; my knowledge of Ancient / Classical history isn’t what I’d like it to be.)
When did the Celts, Latins, and Greeks, and Gothic and Germanic peoples discover cheese making, its most primitive forms and later more refined forms? Would some of that have predated them, back to the Western Indo-Europeans? Or would some later developments have come into Celtic cultures from people they traded with further east and south?
What I’m getting at is, would there have been a good reason that a new method or invention, a new type of cheese, would make such a hit that the Latin word would displace native words? Or fill a void where there were no native words? Sometimes a word gains ascendancy because it’s new and different, popular, shorter to say, more specific, or “cooler.” Caseus might be easier than “that thing that you do, churning milk all day, boiling it, hiding it in a cave for months,” (or the like). :grins:
There should be linguistic evidence of older words, too, in compound words or as leftovers with more specialized meanings. Or the word might change meaning, such as “corn” originally meaning “any kind of grain,” but becoming a specific thing, maize, in American English.
At least one portion of my ancestry would’ve been in ancient Scotland, painting themselves blue, so the answer’s of some interest, besides being an interesting topic. (And tasty!)
Yes, Cal’s little book on Indo-European roots of words is great! I have it too and use it a lot. I took Old Irish poetry from him when I was at Harvard, although I have to confess I was very disappointed that he only used the material to figure out earlier, Indo European and other historical linguistic concepts and never touched the poetry as really lovely literature.
Celts in Europe in Roman times made cheeses, as a book I just finished reading called “Cheese and Culture” that nicely goes back to biblical times, points out (that’s the one where I thought I spotted him saying Caesar mentions the Britains didn’t have a word for cheese, but it has a rotten index). His book, though recent, came out just before your lovely reference, Walt, or else he would have incorporated it in the pretty in-depth archaeological citations he pulls in, some of them much more speculative and obscure than the solid evidence for dairy fat in pottery (butter or curd making) from the Neolithic period.
If you follow the various links from the popular Nature article, some of the technical articles hint that the 7000-8000 ya cheese- or yogortcurd-
Ack! Miskeyed.
If you follow the various links from the popular Nature article, some of the technical articles hint that the 7000-8000 years ago cheese- or yogurt- or curd-making might have been lactose-reduced, which would imply the population still had a good proportion of lactose-intolerance, and lactose-intolerance hadn’t been almost eliminated from the gene-pool.
Lactose aside, a soft curd is very different from a firm or hard cheese. Cheese has quite a few advantages, especially the very hard cheeses. Distinct words for the two foods seems reasonable; we distinguish yogurt, which is closer to cheese than curds, as I understand it. (Not my area of expertise by any means!)
The cheese-making discussion has pointed out something else. Most of us are going at this with little or no knowledge of how cheese (or other dairy products) are made. What if we had to reinvent it, or find it in scattered books and folk wisdom and anyone who’d actually done it? That doesn’t take anything more disatrous than a severe hurricane, say. The other point would be that cross-discipline learning of a skill would inform the process. …Oh my, I think my academic bent is showing. 😉
(I’m thoroughly enjoying this whole thread.)
Walt, you can make yogurt that has virtually no lactose left in it. (My father worked with a guy who was seriously lactose-intolerant: he couldn’t eat commercial yogurt, but home-made was okay, where the reaction had, so to speak, run to completion. (I suspect that most cheeses have lost a lot of the lactose to the microbiology involved.)
I just finished reading Michael Pollen’s Cooked which had a long discussion of cheese-making in his section on fermentation. Not enough in the book to start yourself up, but he has copious notes in the back which might (I didn’t read them all). It is a fascinating book, dealing with fire (roasting), water (soups, boiling), air (baking), and earth (fermentation, rotting). Fermentation deals with sauerkraut, kim chi, wines, beer, and cheese-making. He goes around to all sorts of artisanal makers to take lessons. Tough job, but…
CJ, i have a Latin question for you. My 14 year old is not a good student (although very bright. She can’t find her stride for school, but she has great capability). But she told me last week she wanted to learn Latin. It is no longer taught at her high school, but her tutor had four years of Latin in high school and has told her how incredibly useful it was to her both i n preparing for the SATs and in her BIO major in college (and, i think, in life, but she’s not trying to push that button) So i am trying to figure out how to help her acquire this wonderful language (i had a year in highschool myself, and two of greek in college and they help me feel that i was in fact educated).
Do you think a 14 year old could effectively study Latin using something like Rosetta Stone (they have a Latin program with homeschooling components) with the support of an excellent and loving tutor who knows Latin? or do you have other ideas about resources? i know your own website is an excellent resource but am not sure a 14 year old can navigate her way through it to accomplishment.
I first took Latin in college. We used Wheelock’s excellent and now much expanded grammar and a series of books called Lingua Latina, which were stories only in Latin that start so simple you can work out what the words & grammar mean immediately and then slowly adds in stuff. Esp if your daughter knows some French or Spanish, she can at least work those introductory sentences out from there: Roma in Europa est. Roma non in Graeca est….(Rome is in Europe . Rome is not in Greece….)
I recommend learning Latin or any new language in a group. My spouse, some friends and I did that with Ancient Greek, although I have to say I never focused on it hard enough and so am not good but my spouse is brilliant and went on to do Masters work in the language at Harvard Extension School. Does your daughter have any peers who are also interested in learning the language? Would the school support a study group in it?
If you can get hold of The Cambridge Latin Course, I’d recommend it. It had very engaging stories following the lives of Roman citizens (Caecilius, his wife and son, the twin slaveboys Loquax and Antiloquax 🙂 and others), which fostered a desire to study so I could find out what happened next. 🙂
It came in Units, roughly corresponding to a year of study, with a number of thin volumes per unit.
I have no idea if they still sell it, but you might be able to track down copies in second hand bookshops.
Yes. But I don’t know how good their pronunciation is. The ACTUAL pronunciation is best approached with an Italian accent.
And this is a language where having SOME tables and organizations of forms is helpful, because it’s far from random and very organized.
So a combo of Rosetta; and a good Latin I text (used) and the like would be good. To get max good, combine that regimen with looking up in the Oxford English Dictionary 3 derivatives or cognates of the new vocabulary word, writing them with their definition…A little monetary reward for the completion of, say 30 words, might sweeten the deal. It’s very beneficial. I applaud her. If she has any real posers, like getting confused about gendered nouns or how to navigate the pesky third declension or understand ‘defective’ verbs or ablative absolutes, tell her to come online here and ask me.
When I took Latin in high school, we used the Vulgate, which is what was used in Catholic Masses up until the 60s-70s. The pronunciation of single vowels was common to what we think they used, a – “ah”, e – “ay” (like “hay”), i – “ee”, o – “oh”, and u – “oo” (like “boo”). Diphthongs such as ae – were pronounced like the “e”, ai – was “aye” (yes, in sailorese). Consonants like C, G, and V were pronounced as we do in English. That was a matter of choice by the class, not the teacher, because Mr. Ratermann asked us at the beginning of Latin I. When I took Latin in college, we used the Classical pronunciation, so all of those vowels sounded the same, but it was the diphthongs that changed, ae – “aye”, for example. C was still the same, but G was pronounced like C, and V was pronounced like W. There are more, but those are the prominently remembered differences. Of course, for every rule of grammar, declension, case, gender, or voice, there were always exceptions. Deponent verbs, semi-deponent verbs, the 3rd-IO conjugation which looked like the 4th conjugation but wasn’t….I thought Latin was hard, then we did Greek……
I would take a look at the Ecce Romani series of books. They start with simple stories in Latin, structured so that you can almost guess at the meaning and read with comprehension from the start, then gradually increasing in complexity. It’s more of a natural language approach, but there is a solid grounding in grammar along with it.
This approach also has the advantage that the teacher doesn’t have to be an expert. A recent survey showed that are widely used in high school Latin classes.
Amazon US doesn’t have ‘Look Inside’ for some reason, but Amazon UK does, so you can read the first lesson, and get an idea of how it works. Click on ‘surprise me’ a few times as well, to look at random lessons further on. (When included the link, my comment got sent to spam.)
It’s a very much better approach to learning Latin than the way traditional way I was taught, and far more enjoyable. I only wish I had learned this way.
CJ, I tried to reply to this, but my comment got sent to spam. I tried again with the link, but the comment still disappeared.
I had a very interesting time of it last night, looking at that Latin passage and guessing at the translation. I’m going to spend some more time on it today or this evening. I found myself pulling apart a few words to their deep-down prefixes, roots, and suffixes to look for how the Latins would’ve thought of the words. I’d really prefer to look at it from a higher level as an overview, the passage as a whole, a Gestalt, I guess would be the best way to put it, to make sure I wasn’t getting bogged down in minutiae.
But what it showed me was how it must be for someone trying to decipher a partially unknown or completely unknown language with limited comparision resources. Very instructive, fascinating.
The Latin endings are just familiar enough that I can usually get an idea what’s going on, even if I’m not sure which case form or conjugal form it actually is. In other words, is that dative, accusative, or some other form that didn’t get passed down, since Spanish and French lost nearly all noun markers, and likewise for verb endings, modifiers (adj./adv.), pronouns, and so on. … Sorry, babbling again. 😀 Really liking it.
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Kokipy, I think it’s great that your daughter’s inspired enough to try Latin. Wonderful if she develops a love of languages, words, literature from that, and if she has marked language skill, then this will help show that. Good going. — My first language course was in 7th grade, and it was an instant hit. — She’s facing a challenge, but it’s a key to a whole culture, and everything that was influenced by it; pretty much the whole of European and American civilization.
Some time back, I’d bought Wheelock’s Latin in ebook form, thanks to curiosity here. I think it’s time to get more serious about resuming my study habits in general.
Hmmm.Wyvern,I couldn’t find your comment in the spam bucket. Something quite strange happened. I’m sorry. It’s not there at all. I did find a comment from yesterday over in the Linguistics column. I wonder if you might have been in that sequence when you commented.
I just posted it again, but it just disappeared again. It was about the Ecce Romani series, which I recommend.
I would take a look at the Ecce Romani series of books for Latin learning. They start with simple stories in Latin, structured so that you can almost guess at the meaning and read with comprehension from the start, then gradually increasing in complexity. It’s more of a natural language approach, but there is a solid grounding in grammar along with it.
This approach also has the advantage that the teacher doesn’t have to be an expert. A recent survey showed that are widely used in high school Latin classes.
Amazon US doesn’t have ‘Look Inside’ for some reason, but Amazon UK does, so you can read the first lesson, and get an idea of how it works. Click on ‘surprise me’ a few times as well, to look at random lessons further on.
It’s a very much better approach to learning Latin than the way traditional way I was taught, and far more enjoyable. I only wish I had learned this way.
I got it!
I made another laughably iffy pass at the rest of the Latin passage. I think I got close in spots, but oh, it’s not close yet. CJ, I think if I squint at it a bit more, I should be able to get some more sense out of it.
Once I get another pass at it, I think I’ll have it ready to show — for your (or someone’s) amusement.
It’s very odd. I think I’ve guessed at how the place-names changed, without knowing, and I have a sense of how things are going, and some idea of the endings, but the specifics are eluding me. If I can guess at the place-names, meanings of other nouns and verbs and modifiers, I should be able to get closer than I have so far. So I’m irritated at myself, but not yet ready to throw in the toga. (Hmm, which would, uh, be rather embarrassing on more than one level! LOL!) (When in Rome…?)
Ah, off-track humor for an off-track translation?
What I have looks a great deal like the Pride’s com translator output when trying to make sense of non-hani language. … At least it hasn’t gone into matrix-speech for t’ca!
I checked Amazon and found by Dr. Calvert Watkins:
* The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 3rd Edition. — PB, about $16.
* How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. — PB, about $36.
The latter will be a future purchase. The former, I don’t have more recent than the 1970’s or 1980’s, so I’m getting it.
“Ecce Romani” ? — Thanks, GreenWyvern, I’ll look that up.
@ Raesean, I’d be interested in a beginner’s text on the Celts/Gaels and Old Irish/Scots/Gauls, if you have a recommendation. It would go on my teetering To Read pile, but hey, one has to have goals to which to aspire.
Hmm, I wonder where my DVD set for “Roar!” went to. (TV fantasy series set in ancient Roman Britain.)
Soft, fresh cheese is easy to make. You can do it at home, and you get something close to Boursin.
This is what I love about your blog, CJ. There’s always such interesting discussions on really abstruse subjects.