Читать книгу The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe - Leon Dominian - Страница 11

A parent language for Celtic and Italic may have flourished at a yet undetermined point in the Western Alps. Meillet[46] points to the possibility of a period of common development of their dialects in view of similarities in the highly ancient forms of the two groups. In that case, westerly and southerly divergences eventually led to modern French and Italian. Of the two branches in which Italic dialects are represented at the dawn of history, namely, Latin-Faliscan and Oscan-Umbrian, the former alone survived in noteworthy degree, under the guise of Latin. Oscan-Umbrian dialects, known by inscriptional remains, gave way before Latin at the beginning of the Christian era.

Celtic, at that period, had been supplanted by two important derived languages: Gaelic and Breton, which prevailed for many centuries. Gaulish, the gaulois language of French writers, was disappearing fast. The case of Breton deserves particular mention in the study of the migrations of languages. This form of Celtic belongs to the British subdivision of its linguistic family. Its persistence in Armorica is due to immigration from British soil which intensified the preëxisting Celtic character of the mountain speech. The inflow of emigrants to France was particularly strong during the period of Saxon invasions.

Celtic, the earliest language of Gaul, was spoken by the Celts, whose original home was in northwestern Europe. The British Isles and continental Europe from Hanover southward to the Pyrenees and the basin of the Po were colonization areas of the Celts. The fact that Celtic stands linguistically in the closest relation with Italic and Germanic may be taken as a proof of its intermediate geographical position between the two. In the middle of the first pre-Christian millennium the Teutons’ nearest neighbors to the south were the Celts. In 400 B.C. Bohemia was probably occupied by a Celtic people. This country is the easternmost colony of this group. In these early periods the Elbe marked the boundary between Teutons and Celts. About 200 B.C. Teutonic speech first attained the Rhine, having reached the river from the northeast.

Celtic became Romanized after the Roman conquest in the first century of our era. The lingua vulgaris used by the soldiers and traders sent to colonize the country gradually displaced native vernaculars. By the end of the fourth century Celtic as a language had practically disappeared from the entire country. The new Romance language had taken such strong root in the land that successful invaders of French soil were henceforth to adopt it and abandon their native tongue. Thus Visigoths, Burgundians and Franks who invaded Gaul in the fifth century forsook their own language and employed the speech of the people they had conquered. This was a result of the superior intellectual qualities of the conquered race. The Franks in particular, a Teutonic people, established themselves firmly enough in northern Gallo-Roman territory to confer the name of France to the whole region, although their endeavors to settle in southern France had been unsuccessful. It required fully six centuries for the language of the Roman colony of Gaul to become definitely differentiated from Latin. By the seventh century the idiom spoken in France was known as Romance or Romanic.

TABLE I

Distribution of Languages in Switzerland According to the Census of 1910

Canton	German	French	Italian	Romansh	Others
Aargau	222,571	1,532	6,197	72	389
Appenzell A/R	56,505	134	1,285	27	68
Appenzell I/R	14,469	32	97	4	6
Basel City	127,491	3,601	4,021	138	1,062
Basel	72,809	1,124	2,548	27	114
Berne	528,554	104,412	12,247	172	2,198
Fribourg	42,634	94,378	1,911	42	586
Geneva	17,456	120,413	12,641	196	5,058
Glarus	31,733	66	1,306	69	120
Graubünden	58,465	838	20,963	37,147	2,441
Lucerne	161,083	1,316	4,808	126	365
Neuchâtel	17,305	111,597	3,747	50	816
Nidwalden	13,329	31	319	5	6
Obwalden	16,738	66	330	28	23
St. Gall	282,722	1,099	17,584	456	967
Schaffhausen	43,795	379	1,712	18	193
Schwyz	56,311	258	1,612	64	60
Soleurne	111,373	2,818	2,570	21	179
Tessin	5,829	1,008	147,790	131	457
Thurgau	125,876	593	8,328	89	291
Uri	20,937	80	1,053	56	15
Valais	37,351	80,316	10,412	16	165
Vaud	34,422	264,222	16,694	220	8,194
Zug	26,406	217	1,454	26	71
Zürich	472,990	5,714	19,696	634	4,601
	————	———	———	———	———
Switzerland	2,599,154	796,244	301,325	39,834	28,445

TABLE II

Percentage of Languages Spoken in Swiss Cantons[47]

Canton	French	German	Italian	Romansh	Others
Aargau	0.7	96.4	2.7	0.2
Appenzell A/R	0.2	97.4	2.2	0.1	0.1
Appenzell I/R	0.2	99.0	0.7	0.1
Basel City	2.6	93.5	3.0	0.1	0.8
Basel	1.5	95.0	3.3	0.2
Berne	16.1	81.6	1.9	0.4
Fribourg	67.6	30.6	1.4	0.4
Geneva	77.3	11.2	8.1	0.1	3.3
Glarus	0.2	95.3	3.9	0.2	0.4
Graubünden	0.7	48.8	17.5	31.0	2.0
Lucerne	0.8	96.0	2.9	0.1	0.2
Neuchâtel	83.6	13.0	2.8	0.6
Nidwalden	0.2	97.3	2.3	0.1	0.1
Obwalden	0.4	97.4	1.9	0.2	0.1
St. Gall	0.4	93.3	5.8	0.2	0.3
Schaffhausen	0.8	95.0	3.7	0.1	0.4
Schwyz	0.4	96.6	2.8	0.1	0.1
Soleurne	2.4	95.2	2.2	0.2
Tessin	0.6	3.8	95.2	0.1	0.3
Thurgau	0.4	93.1	6.2	0.1	0.2
Uri	0.4	94.6	4.7	0.2	0.1
Valais	62.6	29.1	8.1	0.2
Vaud	81.6	10.6	0.1	0.1	2.5
Zug	0.8	93.7	5.2	0.1	0.2
Zürich	1.2	93.9	3.9	0.1	0.9
Switzerland	21.1	69.0	8.0	1.1	0.8