Caizu

[sasasha]

Quick question ‒ does Caizu (the Karazi language still spoken in Caizura in 3480) survive through the modern era? And... Do you have any notes on it / plans to work it out, one day?

I imagine it’s quite a big task ‒ seeing as it would involve working out Coruo as well.

Just curious, really!

[zompist]

Quick question ‒ does Caizu (the Karazi language still spoken in Caizura in 3480) survive through the modern era? And... Do you have any notes on it / plans to work it out, one day?

That's a good question... modernism has a tendency to do what medieval kingdoms could never do: push the nomads out of all agricultural land and make them settle down. There will still be Caizurans in 3678, but probably speaking Verdurian.

But I haven't decided yet.

If I do a modern Karazi language it would probably be one of those in the eastern Barbarian Plain, where they can still maintain their lifestyle (at least as well as, say, the Mongolians do).

[WeepingElf]

I have always wondered whether Caizu is inspired by Czech - it juts into Verdurian-speaking territory in a way very similar to how Czech juts into German-speaking territory in our world.

[sasasha]

Quick question ‒ does Caizu (the Karazi language still spoken in Caizura in 3480) survive through the modern era? And... Do you have any notes on it / plans to work it out, one day?

That's a good question... modernism has a tendency to do what medieval kingdoms could never do: push the nomads out of all agricultural land and make them settle down. There will still be Caizurans in 3678, but probably speaking Verdurian.

But I haven't decided yet.

If I do a modern Karazi language it would probably be one of those in the eastern Barbarian Plain, where they can still maintain their lifestyle (at least as well as, say, the Mongolians do).

Good points. Still, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility it could go the other way linguistically. I don’t know much about the Czech comparison, though I can see WeepingElf’s point there ‒ but Hungary, which I’ve visited a couple of times, is an example of a once-nomadic nation which has maintained its linguistic independence despite ‘settling down’.

You can go to Hungary, hear a Uralic language, listen to distinctive folk music and see traditional horsemanship and art of a very Hungarian type ‒ but also sit in a Viennese style coffee house enjoying some of Europe’s best cakes between an ornate opera house and some of the fanciest churches I’ve ever seen.

I know, Caizura isn’t Hungary. For one thing, it doesn’t have much in the way of an imperial legacy of its own, (unlike Curiya, which however has already lost its Karazi language by 3480). Also, its political status into the modern era does argue toward Verdurianisation ‒ without risking spoilers.

I could believe it either way ‒ but I certainly could believe, if you did take that path, the region of Caizura doubling down on its ‘Caizuranness’... ‘Hungarianness’ survived Habsburg and Soviet cultural/political incursion, after all.

Anyway, a modern Karazi language would be a fun thing to explore, in whatever way!

[BGMan]

FWIW, language loss occurs most readily when the language being lost and the one displacing it are related to each other, making it easier for its speakers to make the switch.

For example, Latin wiped out the other Italic and continental Celtic languages, but left Basque and the Afro-Asiatic languages of North Africa more or less unscathed. But those Afro-Asiatic languages in turn were partially (Berber) or wholly (Egyptian) wiped out by Arabic, which also drove other Semitic languages such as Aramaic into extinction except among non-Muslims, but Arabic didn't replace the Indo-Iranian languages like Persian.

Based on this, I'd expect Caizuran to hold on better than the other Central languages in the Plain.

[Ketsuban]

I feel like that's logic you can follow all the way over a cliff; Latin supplanted Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian etc. to which it's related, sure, but it also supplanted Etruscan and North Picene to which it's not related at all, and I have a hard time believing Oscan is so much more closely related to Latin that it made a difference. It also supplanted the continental Celtic languages for a very different reason (murder bordering on genocide) to the reason it supplanted the other Italic languages (the speakers all gained Roman citizenship after the Social War, so it became very politically useful for their elites to be able to speak Latin so they could enter Roman political life) or the reason it didn't supplant Basque (mountains).

[foxcatdog]

FWIW, language loss occurs most readily when the language being lost and the one displacing it are related to each other, making it easier for its speakers to make the switch.

For example, Latin wiped out the other Italic and continental Celtic languages, but left Basque and the Afro-Asiatic languages of North Africa more or less unscathed. But those Afro-Asiatic languages in turn were partially (Berber) or wholly (Egyptian) wiped out by Arabic, which also drove other Semitic languages such as Aramaic into extinction except among non-Muslims, but Arabic didn't replace the Indo-Iranian languages like Persian.

Based on this, I'd expect Caizuran to hold on better than the other Central languages in the Plain.

African romance was a thing.

[keenir]

For example, Latin wiped out the other Italic and continental Celtic languages,

you mean like Galatian in 1st Century AD Anatolia?

but left Basque and the Afro-Asiatic languages of North Africa more or less unscathed. But those Afro-Asiatic languages in turn were partially (Berber) or wholly (Egyptian) wiped out by Arabic,

the Copts would be shocked to hear that they are speaking a nonexisting language.

[Sol717]

the Copts would be shocked to hear that they are speaking a nonexisting language.

Coptic has not had native-speaker transmission for multiple hundred years now, so while they may technically be speaking it, that statement needs qualification.

[hwhatting]

It also supplanted the continental Celtic languages for a very different reason (murder bordering on genocide)

What is your source for this? There was violent conquest, but systematic extermination*)??? All accounts of e.g. Gaulish I've read speak of a survival of the language at least partially into even post-Empire times, and the reason for change being a replacement top-down due to the local (Gaulish!) elites switching to Latin (> Romance) for prestige reasons, with the bulk of the population following that development.
*) That sometimes happend to individual populations of places or tribes where the Romans wanted to state an example, but I'm not aware of a systematic genocide of Celtic-speakers.

[Ketsuban]

What is your source for this?

This blog post by Bret Devereaux.

Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars are essentially campaign logs, written by Caesar (and Aulus Hirtius for the last book) to the folks back home in order to keep up his political support during his nine years in Gaul. While Gaul (modern France) doesn’t seem exotic to us, you want to keep in mind that this was a region of the world the average Roman knew little about, so Caesar feels he has to do a fair bit of ethnography: who are the people who live here, what are they like, and why is Caesar so intent on killing basically all of them (seriously, Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was extremely violent, even by Roman standards).

(The Romans tended to be more ruthless when it came to the north in general; between that, Caesar and their systematic persecution of druidic practice I think "murder bordering on genocide" is a fair summary.)

[hwhatting]

(The Romans tended to be more ruthless when it came to the north in general; between that, Caesar and their systematic persecution of druidic practice I think "murder bordering on genocide" is a fair summary.)

That's not what I took away from reading BG; as much as I respect Brett Deveraux, "killing them all" was not what Caesar did, and it wouldn't have made sense - the Romans wanted to conquer land and people; while they settled veterans in order to increase control of conquered territories, they generally left the indigenous populace in place. The thing is rather that outside the Hellenist sphere, the "barbarian" peoples, with less centralized states, had a higher ratio of warriors in the population (as a flipside, often armed with worse quality weapons and armor), and being less centralized, couldn't be conquered by just beating a king and his army in a couple of battles; and therefore more people needed to be killed to end resistance. And while the Druids were indeed persecuted, Celtic religion survived and was syncretized with the Graeco-Roman religion. The goal was never to extinguish Celtic peoples, their language and culture, which is what genocide means - the Gaulish aristocracy that cooperated was incorporated into the system of Roman rule, and the peasantry was left in place; the subsequent loss of the Gaulish language and culture was due to the assimilating tendencies over the following centuries, like in the other non-Hellenist parts of the Empire. And what really did it for the non-Roman religions was actually Christianity.