Languages - Crusades

[Tanis Frey]

Has anyone created a languages chart for the medievel time frame, 1100 AD.

 

I am running a game set in the Crusades shortly that such a chart would be a great help.

[薔薇語]

I don't know of any such charts in HERO terms but I am sure you can find general charts on Wikipedia. But unless you are going for some hyper-realism in your game, you could probably just use the normal one and be okay.

If you do want to know of some notable differences, though, I can at least mention a few.

In 1100 the English language would have been far closer to Danish, Firisian and the other local Germanic languages. It would have also had far less in common with any of the romance languages.

There would still be populations that spoke various isolated languages like Picish. Even minor languages of today like Basque would have been more popular. There were a larger number of French dialects that were quite distinct. 

I am not sure how many slavic languages would have been around at that time as I think of the Indo-European language tree, the wide variety of Slavic languages didn't appear until later. But I am not 100% sure on that. Likewise, I don't know how distinct some of the Romance langauges were at that time; I don't know if Portuguese and Spanish, for example, were all that distinct yet. 

 

I think Hebrew (as we understand it today) was actually a dead language at the time. It saw a revival in the 18th or 19th century if I recall correctly. In place of it, the various Jewish populations used other distinct languages and dialects of their homeland's dominant language. 

 

There would still be a large variety of Arabic languages all throughout the region. But you would also likely encounter far more varieties of the various Semitic languages, too (not just Arabic). 

 

Some languages would also likely not exist at that time like Hungarian or Finish as they were highly influenced / birthed from the Mongol invasions into Europe in the 13th century. 

 

Off hand I can't think of any other important changes. Obviously the exact languages as we know them today didn't exist then. For example, as a general rule modern English speakers would find it extremely difficult if not impossible to read and understand Old English (1100 and earlier) without training. So, in 900 years you are going to see large changes in Languages. 

 

La Rose. 

[Markdoc]

This is quite a messy area - but an important one. We know, for example, that the religious orders housed and organised their knights by language, because usually they could not understand each other. If we ignore dialects, the major European groupings around 1100 would have been:

 

Latin. The language of the church: any cultured gentleman would have been expected to be at least vaguely competent in it, making it a basic tool of communication: even if that was not very sophisticated communication, most of the time.

 

French (Langue d'Oil) This was a group of quite closely-related languages dominant in Northern France, the English nobility and much of what's now Belgium and western Germany. 

Occitan (Langue d'Oc). This was the Language of Southern France. Just to complicate things, it was actually three not-very-closely related languages - Gascon (from South-western France - influenced by Spanish and Basque), Provencal (from South Western France, related to Italian) and Northern Provencal or Occitan (close to Provencal, but still considered a different language). You could cut it down to two - Gascon and Provencal, if you wanted, I guess.

 

English (this is about the time what we would call middle English was evolving out of old English). By this stage, English had shed most of its scandinavian nature, being increasingly influenced by French and Latin.

 

Low German (also called Franconian or West German) - this is a group of related languages spoken in the Northern and western part of Germany, what's now Holland and parts of Belgium. It was heavily influenced by scandinavian languages, and in turn influenced English.

High German (also called Alemannic or Gothic) - this is a group of related languages spoken in Southern Germany, what's now Austria and Northern Italy, and parts of Switzerland. This was the official language of the Hoy Roman Empire, so most nobles would be expected to be able to speak it.

 

Spanish (Old Castillian) was widely spoken in Iberia. Although you still had local languages (Portugese/Galician, Catalan, Navarrese, Aragonese, etc) from the notes and glosses written in medieval spain, there seemed to be far more in common between these languages then between their northern cousins. They are all derived from Latin and remained relatively close to it.

 

Italian. Like Spanish, heavily influenced by Latin. There were a multitude of different languages in Italy around 1100: Genoese and Venetian were common outside their respective areas, as trading languages, while Northern Italy was also strongly influenced by Occitan. As far as I can tell, though, like modern Spanish and Italian, a speaker of one form of Italian at the time could converse with another italian speaker - albeit with some difficulty.

 

Greek. The language of the Byzantine empire. Latin was also spoken there, but primarily by scholars and courtiers. Greek seems to have been used everywhere, but in the West, people also spoke their local languages - Albanian, Serbian, etc, while in the East, Armenian was also common. I'll skip the northern slavic languages, since people from there played a limited role in the crusades.

 

On the muslim side, Arabic functioned in some ways like latin - it was the language of a shared religion and any cultured person was expected to read and speak it. It was also the administrative language in pretty much all muslim countries. So educated people all spoke and wrote at least some Arabic. It was, however, more widespread than Latin was in the west. But in the Almohravid caliphate, people also spoke berber languages (a family of six related languages common to north Africa, but not really related to any other languages), while in Egypt (the Fatimid caliphate) at the time, coptic was still relatively common (it uses the greek alphabet, but is not Greek). In Anatolia, Ohguz Turkish was the common tongue, while westwards, in the Abbassid caliphate Persian was common. But in both the Turkish and Persian areas, there are other related tongues: Azeri, Kirghiz, etc. We're getting a bit out of my area of expertise here

 

This is a pretty sketchy overview, and plenty of people would disagree with parts of it. I'm sure Catalan or Walloon nationalists would be horrified that I lump Catalan carelessly in with Spanish, or Flemish in with Saxonian, but for game purposes, it's probably close enough.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit: oh, and just to correct a couple of points. Hebrew was by no means a dead language in the middle ages. Anyone who wanted to read Torah (which means basically any well-educated Jew) would have been able to read and speak Hebrew. But in the middle ages, there were no jewish countries. Jews were dispersed in different countries so they spoke of necessity the languages of the people around them and also - internally - a language derived from Hebrew but influenced by the surrounding culture. Yiddish, for example, is hebrew-derived, but also heavily influenced by the German languages of the time.

 

Likewise, both Finnish and Hungarian long predate the mongol invasions. Finnish is related to Sami - they are both Uralic languages - and have been spoken in the area for at least a couple of thousand years. We know from Swedish accounts that Finnish had long been the common language by the early middle ages (because they tried to suppress its use!) Likewise, Hungarian had been use already by the early middle ages: the first surviving documents we have written in Hungarian date from about 1050 - a century or so before Ghenghis Khan's birth.

[Lucius]

We're getting a bit out of my area of expertise here

I doubt that - I think you Megascaled your Area of Expertise!

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary, trying to emulate Markdoc, tries to buy Scholar and Scientist with Area of Effect and Megascale

[Markdoc]

Nice of you to say, but actually it's true. To a European, the European language groups are easy to distinguish: I can usually identify them pretty easily simply by ear, and the written forms are even easier. 

 

I was in Central Asia on holiday recently and crossed  fair bit of ground, so travelled through areas with quite distinct cultures. You can tell that by dress and by food (and to some extent by attitude). But even though I know (for example) that Turkish falls into two major groups (Kipchak and Oghuz) I'm damned if I can tell them apart. They sound similar to me, and since they use a script I can't read, I can't even tell the written forms apart. Likewise Arabic/Persian, which are even more distinct. That shouldn't make a difference - I can still read histories of the area, after all - but somehow it seems to make everything a bit harder to put into place.

 

cheers, Mark

[薔薇語]

Edit: oh, and just to correct a couple of points. Hebrew was by no means a dead language in the middle ages. Anyone who wanted to read Torah (which means basically any well-educated Jew) would have been able to read and speak Hebrew. But in the middle ages, there were no jewish countries. Jews were dispersed in different countries so they spoke of necessity the languages of the people around them and also - internally - a language derived from Hebrew but influenced by the surrounding culture. Yiddish, for example, is hebrew-derived, but also heavily influenced by the German languages of the time.

 

Likewise, both Finnish and Hungarian long predate the mongol invasions. Finnish is related to Sami - they are both Uralic languages - and have been spoken in the area for at least a couple of thousand years. We know from Swedish accounts that Finnish had long been the common language by the early middle ages (because they tried to suppress its use!) Likewise, Hungarian had been use already by the early middle ages: the first surviving documents we have written in Hungarian date from about 1050 - a century or so before Ghenghis Khan's birth.

 

 

While I must admit it has been awhile since I studied these things, I am going to have to stand by accounts. Hebrew went through a period much similar to classical Latin where-in there were few 'native' speakers. That isn't to say that the language didn't survive the period, but that it was not quite a living language and all that such a state entails. Now, being able to read and comprehend a language is not the equivalent of being native in that language nor does the fact that someone can read and understand a language imply that the language is not dead. If that were the case, then any recorded language could be justifiably called 'living'. There were most certainly speakers of various different kinds of Hebrew and I think there was a largely uniform version that most educated individuals could converse in. But again, Hebrew as a widely used language for (Jewish) people in conversation had to go through a major revival. And while I am not sure of the state of Hebrew during the 1100s, I don't think it was the case that it was still a major spoken and living language for people. 

 

 

In regards to Hungarian, on this one I did make a mistake. I was confusing the rise of the Mongols and the rise of the Huns. And by the time such characters as Attila were around there were already proto / early Hungarian speakers in Europe for certain. 

 

La Rose. 

[Tanis Frey]

This disscussion is helping me to include the languages now concidered almost dead but very much alive during the 1100's. 

 

And I was not sure if it would be old or middle english.  Middle english is just comming into being after the norman invasion of 1050 whatever.

[Markdoc]

This disscussion is helping me to include the languages now concidered almost dead but very much alive during the 1100's. 

 

And I was not sure if it would be old or middle english.  Middle english is just comming into being after the norman invasion of 1050 whatever.

 

It's always hard to put a precise timeframe on when linguistic changes happened, because they occur over longish periods: but the generally accepted view is that Old English arose out of the fusion between the language of Northern England (which was heavily influenced by Danish/West scandinavian ) and Southern England (which was heavily influenced by Low German/Franconian). This process had started in the late 800's and the unification of England by military conquest in the 900's both accelerated the process and also put Saxon/Franconian in the driving seat, since that was the language of the ruling dynasty. So Old English is generally thought to date from around that time, and is marked by the decline of purely Scandinavian words and forms. Another conquest (the Normans in 1066) brought another linguistic change - not just a ruling dynasty with a different language, but access to French literature - and through that broader European literature. That had already started before the Normans, but the political change accelerated things. Middle English is therefore thought to have developed though from about 1100 - 1200 as these changes worked their way into common language. 

 

As for the Hebrew question, we can be pretty sure that Hebrew was in common use by medieval Jewish communities, because the communities in question developed their own forms of Hebrew influenced by the local languages - Sephardi, Yiddish, Mizrahi, etc. It would have been pretty weird for them to develop a Hebrew-based language for everyday speech if they were not actually using Hebrew in everyday speech. In many ways, the process was not unlike what happened in Spain, or in Italy, where the languages are very clearly derived from Latin, but over time diverged, while "pure latin" remained as a religious language, which was freely spoken only by an educated minority. Sephardi more or less died out after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as the Sephardic communities that had birthed it fragmented, and it remained a Hebrew variant. Yiddish, however, remained in common use, right up into the 21st century, diverging further and further from its origin over time, and becoming a language in its own right. What might confuse the issue though is that these Hebrew-derived languages were considered degenerate. In the 18th and 19th centuries, with the development of a Jewish/Zionist political consciousness, there was a deliberate effort to purge them in favour of a pure form of Hebrew, which had been retained as a religious language. That change might be what you are thinking of. That had the effect for example that Yiddish nearly died out in Germany and neighbouring countries, where it originated*, so that today we tend to think of it in association with Eastern Europe.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit: *When you get a sentence like this, it's always tempting to blame the Nazis, but we know that the shift happened long before them, in this case: they just gave Yiddish in Germany the final shove.

 

Edit2: With regard to "living language" I guess it also pays to define your definition. Hebrew was clearly more than just a language for religious instruction in medieval times - the high middle ages were considered a golden age for Hebrew literature in Spain and middle Europe, with translations of Arabic texts being made and a great deal of (non-religious) poetry being written. At the same time, translations of texts on engineering and medicine, or books of poetry were clearly aimed at the educated classes, who were obviously assumed to be fluent in the language. It doesn't mean of course that butchers and bricklayers were.

[Markdoc]

To come back to the original post, with regard to a language chart, a very simple (and yet, potentially more realistic) idea might be to simply use a "language map" (for example: http://mapsof.net/uploads/static-maps/europe_map_1100.jpg). The reason I suggest this is that langages were not formalised in 1100 to the extent that they are today. What that means in practice is that (for example) two English speakers of the day from, say, Wessex and Yorkshire, would have had considerable difficulty holding a detailed conversation - while the Wessex man could probably have held a simple conversation with someone from Normandy, who - in theory - spoke French, and the same would be true for a Yorkshireman talking with a Dane.

 

So as a rule of thumb, I'd say

From the same province/general area within a language group: Use language skill as is.

From a neighbouring province/area within a language group: use language skill -1

From a distant province/area (ie: not adjacent) within a language group: use language skill -2

Crossing a national boundary: add an additional -1

Crossing a language group barrier: add an additional -1

 

That should pretty much cover things, I think.

 

cheers, Mark

[drunkonduty]

Markdoc, I really do enjoy reading your posts. Always very educational.

[Tanis Frey]

The language map is vary useful because the Byzantine empire does hire troops from the regions along the old Viking trade routes running through what is now Russia.

[Markdoc]

As an interesting aside, by 1100, the Varangian guard hired by the Byzantines was no longer dominated by Rus but by .... English! After the Norman conquest a large number of English Thanes and Huscarls lost their jobs. Others later had to flee the country after two unsuccessful uprisings against the Norman occupiers. Many of these men found work as mercenaries. They took jobs in Italy, and Spain, but the largest group went to the Byzantine Empire, where the Varangians already used their style of fighting, and shared cultural values (like the Varangians, Huscarls were also elite mercenary warriors who served the ruler as a personal bodyguard). At the same time, the supply of Rus and Scandinavian warriors was drying up, because the various lords of those regions were fighting it out as small independent holding were being absorbed into the growing kingdoms/principalities. That fighting not only disrupted the old trade routes, but also meant that there was plenty of work for fighting men closer to home.

 

In Jarvardar saga, it was recorded that the English and some Danes from the north of England sailed to Constantinople in 350 ships - this is corroborated by a Greek manuscript (Chronicon universale anonymi Laudunensis) which records that the English arrived in 235 ships in 1075, and that nearly 4500 of them took service in the capital. The rest sailed into the Black sea and reconquered some lands from the Turkish invaders and founded a settlement called Nova Anglia. Thse two groups presumably not only provided soldiers for the guard on their arrival, but their sons also apparently enlisted at later dates, so that by the 12th century court chroniclers noted that the language of the Varangian guard was English.

 

It's worth noting that the Byzantines also raised an elite unit of Frankish (mostly Norman) mercenary knights in the 11th century called the Latinikon, who served on similar terms to the Varangians.

 

cheers, Mark

[Tanis Frey]

So as a rule of thumb, I'd say

From the same province/general area within a language group: Use language skill as is.

From a neighbouring province/area within a language group: use language skill -1

From a distant province/area (ie: not adjacent) within a language group: use language skill -2

Crossing a national boundary: add an additional -1

Crossing a language group barrier: add an additional -1

 

That should pretty much cover things, I think.

 

cheers, Mark

I did something like this when I ran a Mystic China campaign with the Hackmaster system.  In that system you have a mastery level of a skill (or language) based on a %.  Every district that separated you and the person you were talking with, your mastery level dropped by one.  Also, every Province of China had its own spoken language and the officials all spoke the Imperial language as well as the local provincial language.  China did only have one written language.

[Lord Liaden]

As an interesting aside, by 1100, the Varangian guard hired by the Byzantines was no longer dominated by Rus but by .... English!

 

[sNIP fascinating historical details]

 

Oh, there has to be an historical novel in there. Medieval English refugee elite warriors taking service in the Byzantine Empire!

[Steve]

I heard somewhere that Aramaic was a common language used in the Middle East during this time and that Hebrew was reserved for use in the synagogues by the Jews.

[Tanis Frey]

I heard somewhere that Aramaic was a common language used in the Middle East during this time and that Hebrew was reserved for use in the synagogues by the Jews.

Aramaic was common during the time of Jesus, I think it died out and was replaced by Arabic before the 1100's.

[Markdoc]

By 1100, Aramaic languages (Aramaic is a group of related languages, not one language) were long past their heyday. During the height of the Byzantine and Persian empires, when they ruled much of what is now the middle east and Iran, Aramaic languages were common and we know they were used by traders in the region alongside Greek. But with the Arab conquest and the gradual islamisation of the region, both Greek and Aramaic started to die out. By around 1200, they were largely confined to smaller or isolated communities. Aramaic never entirely vanished though - the liturgical language of the Syriac church is Aramaic, much the same way that latin survived in catholic liturgy. And there are still a few hundred thousand aramaic speakers of various types around.

 

In Europe, Aramaic persisted alongside Hebrew for a long time - medieval hebrew documents (especially from Iberia) are found in both languages and there is a great degree of overlap. But for those communities, their common use language would have been what the people around them spoke.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Oh, there has to be an historical novel in there. Medieval English refugee elite warriors taking service in the Byzantine Empire!

It gets better - the English Varangians fought the Normans - the people who had forced them to flee - in Italy, Sicily and the Balkans for the Byzantines.

 

Still if you want medieval novel stuff, read the history of Harold Hardraade - a Varangian guardsman who became king of Norway and died trying to take the throne of England as well.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Tanis Frey]

Is Aramaic close to any other language group.

[L. Marcus]

It's a Semitic language.

[assault]

An interesting case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

[Ximenez]

The catch with a "language map" is that national languages only became possible when printing, schools, and national governments imposed a standard form of a language on a whole region. In the Middle Ages, language functioned more as "dialect continuums" where speech patterns changed gradually. For example, modern German is based substantially on the language spoken around Berlin, while modern Dutch is based substantially on the dialect spoken around Amsterdam. Each "language" has been imposed as a national standard, with a clear boundary between the two. Historically, the way people spoke changed gradually over distance. A person in what is today northwest Germany, near the Dutch border, would have had an easier time understanding "Dutch" from Amsterdam than "German" from Berlin. However, languages changed more rapidly (because people moved less) and so a person might have been hearing a "foreign" language if they moved just 50 or 60 miles away from home.

 

The best way to simulate this with a HERO language map would be to have a whole lot of closely related languages. In my campaign, I balanced out the large number of languages by making all languages cost two points. With the Linguist bonus, characters can speak large numbers of languages without spending a ridiculous amount of points.

[Markdoc]

That's why I suggested a language map based on proximity, so that a "German" speaker from the Rhineland, would be able to speak with a "French" speaker from just over the border as easily as with a "German" speaker from - say - Swabia. In reality, there were lots of factors that could alter language apart from distance - culture, religion, etc. In Copenhagen, I live in a district called Amager, settled by Dutch immigrants about 400 years ago. Even though literally located right next to the heart of Danish affairs and the location that formed modern Danish, they maintained a distinct dialect filled with Dutch for nearly 300 years. But while the GM can add that kind of thing in when they want to, it is hard to adjudicate on the fly - so distance makes a reasonable proxy.

 

cheers, Mark