Dealing with Languages

[Berengar]

@callen

I'm not sure how you manage to take mentions of professional disagreements with TSE as such an endorsement of TSE; it sure doesn't follow logically from my statements.

I addressed your endorsement of the take of TSE p.41 on Veneto in:

@callen

Well, first, as I'd noted, I tried to match this up with canon ArM.

@TSE p.41

In the 13th century Veneto is more similar to French and Castilian Spanish than Italian, and is one of the contributors — along with Occitan and Portuguese and to a lesser extent French, Greek, and Arabic — to lingua franca, the pidgin language of trade on the Mediterranean.

Of course, TSE made some big mistakes, such as separating Veneto and Istriot so much, but I did consider this paragraph about Veneto and other languages. My placement is consistent with this, while your placement goes the opposite way.

However, different linguists classify things different ways. So in choosing between the ways, I decided to favor what I got from that canon paragraph plus what ezzelino and Xavi said.

"

This endorsement of yours is quite clear from "My placement is consistent with this, while your placement goes the opposite way." Don't try to wiggle out of it. Actually, though, such issues need to be resolved by checking the 13th century text instances we have: don't make 'placements' unless you have done so.

When treating medieval languages, vernaculars and dialects, you have problems that you address yourself as:

@callen

I've been working on putting together a collection of the languages in and around Europe in roughly 1200 C.E. I'm really no expert in languages, but I think I've done a decent job. I'm closing in and figured I'd share it. Maybe those who know better can help me fill in things or correct things. I figured this would end up being a useful resource for everyone, and I plan on converting it for the forums here once I'm done.

, and as

@callen

As a foreword, my areas of expertise are physics and ballroom dance, followed by physics-related stuff and volleyball. I'm just a linguistics fan. I wanted a more complete set of Mythic European languages that matches Medieval Europe within the ArM5 framework as best I could. Most of what I put together came from ArM5 canon, Wikipedia, following links from within Wikipedia, broader searches when Wikipedia couldn't provide decent answers, and advice here. This is a pet project and has eaten up plenty of time just doing that; I'm not about to try to become a somewhat decent linguist just to put this together.

I don't know which languages besides English you actually can handle, when confronted with a 13th century text. Just tinkering with English wiki articles classifying languages and vernaculars doesn't get you anywhere consistent, if you cannot verify whether a given instance fulfills the classification criteria: especially, as wiki linguistic classification for long-living languages typically addresses the present state. Also, linguistic classifications of Romance languages address their development from Latin, and hence require decent understanding of Latin language and grammar to make sense of.

In your case, you might drop referring to refined linguistics and go back to the - often quite accessible and even translated - 13th century history and sources. Here wikipedia and wikisource are your friends.
You wish to propose game rules for communication after all. With Italian, Dante's partisan fragment De vulgari eloquentia is far more helpful to you than contemporary linguistic classifications: he addresses his own erudite contemporaries, who knew full well the languages and vernaculars around them. And if Snorri Sturluson in the Heimskringla implies, that there is a single Norse language between Iceland and Sweden, you better believe it for the 13th century.
If you can handle just a little German and have 10 EUR to spare, get Joachim Heinzle: Das Mittelalter in Daten, half of which just lists a choice of literature of each given narrow time period (like 1221-1225), sorted by cultures. It doesn't address Byzantine, Arab and Jewish literatures, though.

@callen

@One Shot

You are most welcome to your projects. But please don't fish for comments by referring to them as "all my research". That did mislead me.

I wasn't fishing for comments when I wrote that. Again, something is wrong with your interpretation. As for misleading you, how did reading the following mislead you?

Because your post did not refer to it.

@callen

Please don't take me as an expert, but also please don't blame me for your own misreadings/incomplete readings, and please don't be so dismissive of the work I've put dozens of hours into heavily in hopes it helps this community.

If you want to genuinely help me improve the table, I'd be happy for input in the other thread. I'm still working on many parts of the table, and I still periodically spot things I thought I'd finished that need some correction.

I steer clear of your tables: I myself - despite being able to at least read those languages needed to study history of the middle ages between Scotland and Sicily (Latin, French, English, German and Italian) - would need a lot more than "dozens of hours" to make them worthwhile.

Cheers