ancient frontier is again best studied without too much
concentration on the modern states, though language and state do
correlate fairly closely.
In the Iberian peninsula, Basque spoken on either side of the
western end of the Pyrenees, but over a larger area on their
southern side, gives its name to a people physically not very
different from their Spanish neighbours, save that probably there
are among them more survivors of ancient (Aurignacian) types,
especially, it is said, of the Cro-Magnon, than among the majority
of the Spaniards. Economically they have a certain amount of
distinctness as mountain dwellers on the one hand, and as sailors
on the other. Historically, too, they have a certain distinctness;
their connexion with the Carthaginians and the Romans, with
the kingdom of the Wisigoths and later with the Arab Emirates,
was much less close and continuous than that of regions immediately
to the south. The people of the little Pyrenean republic
of Andorra speak not Basque but Catalan, and are one of a number
of instances (San Marino, the four original cantons of Switzerland,
Lichtenstein, Montenegro) of the apartness of little mountain
groups; there was a number of such groups a few centuries
ago.
The main part of the peninsula uses languages that have arisen
from Latin, one on the west coast which is known in the two
forms of Portuguese and Galician, one along the northern portion
of the east coast which is called Catalan, and is more nearly
related to the _langue d'oc_ than to Spanish, which is the language
{31}
of the great plateau of the peninsula, and has become also the
language of Andalusia and of the non-Catalan east coast.
In the early part of the eighth century, Islam, at first
represented by Berbers and later by Saracens, occupied roughly what
had once been Carthaginian Spain, only temporarily holding the
north-western quadrant which became a centre of Christian
resistance; it had previously remained, for a time at least, apart
from the Wisigothic kingdom. The hold of Islam on the east
coast north of Tarragona was also only temporary, but as a result
of this the Barcelona region during the formative period of
language was more in touch with South France than with the
north-western and Christian part of Spain, whence its language
came to have the kinship with the _langue d'oc_ already noted. In
the centuries of Iberian weakness in face of Islam the west coastal
plain diverged in speech from the upper Douro basin. As Islam
weakened in Spain the west coast language spread southward,
while the plateau language (Spanish) spread south especially
via Toledo, the Guadiana region being largely waste land for the
time. As Spanish, the language of the defenders of Christianity,
became the replacer of Islamic languages, it, rather than Catalan,
spread over the parts of the east coast south of the Ebro as they
were recovered for Christianity. When the north-west was the
basis of resistance to Islam, the age-long sanctity of Compostella
came into prominence, and the great shrine of St. James (Santiago
da Compostella) became world famous, and later on, a centre of
pilgrimages. Thus in spite of the kinship of Galician with
Portuguese, Galicia became part of the kingdom of Spain, though its
seafarers had much in common with the coast-dwellers of northern
Portugal. One should note also that, whereas in Portugal the
coastal plain has the severe barrier of the plateau edge to divide
it from Spain, in Galicia the lines of hill spurs grade down to the
sunken coast-line without any marked change.
Though Berber and Saracen elements have been suppressed,
{32}
a good deal remains to attest their influence not only in cities
and their buildings but in the cultivation of the south, and
especially in the irrigated gardens (_buertas_) of the east coast
and in many features of the people's life, even in some details of
dialect. Arabic is now studied a good deal as a 'classical' language
in these regions.
There are sharp contrasts in physical geography between the
indented coast of Galicia, the narrow coastal strip of North Spain,
the plateau-basin of the historic Léon and Castile, the lower
lying dry eastern basin of Aragon, the Catalonian coastal plain
with hills between it and Aragon, the barren plateau of New
Castile, the southern trough of Andalusia, the east coastal regions
of Murcia and Valencia. These contrasts have hindered the growth
of intercommunication and of unity, and it is said that recently
there were one thousand villages in Spain still lacking effective
connexions with the road system. The distinctness of the people
of the different regions is therefore a marked feature so far as
custom and social inheritance is concerned, and the commercial
Catalans have often thought of separating themselves from the
old-fashioned agriculturists of Spain. The long duration of the
struggle with Islam kept the Spaniards a people of leaders and
common soldiers with, for a time, a Jewish middle class
(Sephardim). But religious zeal led to expulsion of the Sephardim,
though not a little of their blood remains, and they have taken
a good deal of Spanish blood with them to their later homes in
Salonika and elsewhere. Spain's development of a middle class
thus lagged far behind that development among the other west
European peoples in the Middle Ages, and the weakness of that
class has been a factor of Spain's difficulties ever since, of her
troubles in America, of her political weakness at home, of the
subjection of her mining wealth to English exploiters, and of
her long-continued financial troubles. The railway has improved
matters to some extent by promoting communication, but such
{33}
was the fear of France that the Spanish gauge is different from
that of the rest of western Europe. The stoppage of the blood-drain
of soldiers and governors formerly sent to maintain her old
empire seems to have helped Spain greatly, and the importance
of her products in the recent war made her prosper, and her
peseta went up far above its old par value, which was 25-22½ pesetas
= £1 expressed in English terms. Since the war, difficulties in
Morocco, internal strains, resumption of imports, and payments
for transport services have sent the peseta down again. It is now
28.50 = £1, but that is still nearly twice the value of its former
French, three and a half times the value of its former Greek, and
more than three times the value of its former Italian equivalent.
The general spread of irritability and of the war spirit, however,
seems to have increased the political difficulties between Spaniards
and Catalans, as it has those between English and Irish, in both
cases partly because the Continent has, elsewhere, so largely been
settled on the principle of nationality based upon language, or
tradition, or both.
The Portuguese of the north are rather distinct from those of
the south, in part because among the latter there is a good deal
of African blood derived from intermixture with slaves from the
seventeenth century, an intermixture which does not appear to
have had good effects. The steep edge of the Spanish plateau
behind the Portuguese coastal plain, so sharp that its river-breaches
are mostly deep and narrow, helps to keep Portuguese and Spanish
distinct.
The old-fashioned agricultural life of the people, based upon
corn and sheep in Castile and Aragon, and vines, oranges, and
olives in Andalusia and in suitable parts of both east and west
coasts; the paucity of harbours, save in Galicia; the ecclesiastical
zeal derived from the long fight with Islam and the struggle
with the schismatic Low Countries, have all helped the lack of
communications to keep Spain old fashioned. The
{34}
Counter-Reformation, arising out of the struggle with the Protestants of
the Low Countries, has been anti-national everywhere, and has
contributed its part in hindering the growth of modern nationalism
in Spain. Further, owing to her weak middle-class life and her
lack of coal, Spain has not utilized even the opportunities she had
of industrial development, so she stands apart, in this way as well,
from the life of modern Europe. Perhaps the modern development
of hydro-electric power may alter this to some extent, and
in any case the non-industrialization of the country in the coal
age may prove an advantage to the country in the end. Memories
of old unhappy far-off things are too apt to make Englishmen
emphasize the religious persecutions by Catholics in Spain,
forgetting too easily the religious and political persecutions
barely extinct in the British Isles. We should remember, on
the other side, the traditions of Salamanca University with its
blending of Christian and Arab thought at the northern outlet
of a mountain pass from Arab Spain, the glories of Santiago, and
the part its pilgrimages played in the development of European
literature, the galaxy of great names, among which Lull, Cervantes,
Vives, and Velasquez are but the best known of many, and last,
but not least, the influence of the early phases of Saracen
civilization in the south on the then semi-barbaric peoples of Western
Europe. We should also remember that Spanish remains one of
the great world languages, current not only in the mother country,
but also in the greater part of Latin America, with a fine tradition
in literature and oratory, as well as in other forms of art. It is
interesting that under the newly revised scheme (1921) Spain
is added to the four nations (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan)
which provide permanent members of the Council of the League
of Nations.
South of the great curve of the western Alps the varying
dialects have ultimately fused into the beautiful Italian language,
the most direct descendant of Latin. Since Roman times there
{35}
have been notable intrusions from without, such as that of the
Longobards or Lombards into the Po basin in the sixth century,
and those of Islam and of the Normans into the south, but the
Latin element has assimilated all these, though in the Alps
themselves the tendency is towards French on the west and German
on the north, with the curious survival of Romansch and Ladin,
already noted in the north-east. A small area of Italian speech
near the coast (Mentone) has been included in France. In
Calabria there are a few small Greek patches, and there are
Albanian ones in various parts, while Slavonic (Slovene) is spoken
in various parts of eastern Venetia and Istria.
The home tradition of Rome was that of the city-state, and
it resurged during the period of mediaeval trade and operated
against the growth of national consciousness. The influence of
the other city-states, notably Venice, operated in the same way
in the Middle Ages. This was further held back by the struggles
of Germanic peoples to gain Rome and revive the Imperial
tradition, and still more by the influence of the Church,
particularly since the advent of the Counter-Reformation and the
Jesuit power. But the railway made the old localism impossible,
and the widespread nationalist movement of the nineteenth
century had its effect in Italy as well as elsewhere. The struggle
for the unification of Italy and the redemption of Italian lands
from foreign dominion by Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi is one
of the romances of humanity, and from it has arisen the modern
Italian kingdom (1870 onwards) with its promise of magnificent
development.
The difficulties in the way include three large ones. Industrial
power was lacking until hydro-electric schemes became practicable;
they are remedying the position to some extent in the north,
and the cleanliness of these schemes encourages high-grade
industries. The deep social and even racial contrasts between
the Po basin and the south of the peninsula are another difficulty.
{36}
A third is that of the large and often neglected estates (_latifundia_)
of the south. There neglected drainage has allowed accumulation
of stagnant water, and the swamps are infested with malaria,
which not only kills many children, but also weakens those who
survive its pernicious attentions.
The Italians are among the best engineers of the world, and
are minded to remove this difficulty by drainage works, as well
as by social reorganization now proceeding actively and
contributing an element of unrest that makes Italy's recovery from
war sacrifices a complex problem. It is, however, a problem that
cannot but be solved, and with the redevelopment of Mediterranean
trade following the opening of the Suez Canal and the
retreat of the Turk from non-Turkish lands, the future of the
centrally placed kingdom of Italy should be a bright one.
Hydro-electric schemes during the past twenty years have
drawn North Italy (Milan) and Switzerland, and to some extent
South Germany, together, and Milan has grown in wealth and
importance as one of the first-rank cities of Europe with her
high-grade industries in the city, thanks to the transmissibility of
power by cable. The city's long and powerful artistic tradition
is an important factor of her industrial future. Of late these
tendencies have been encouraged by the policy of the Western
Powers, for it now pays Italy to import from Germany rather
than from England, and this redevelopment of mid-European
economic relations will help to rehabilitate the value of Italian
money if internal social politics permit.
The fame of Italian workmen for road and bridge building as
well as for cultivation is world wide, and they have spread in
considerable numbers both to other European countries and to
America. In every case, however, they have found the lands
of immigration developed already beyond possibilities of language
change, and so the Italian emigrant tends, in the long run, to
change his heritage; but in the meantime he sends surplus earnings
{37}
back home, and these remittances and the money brought in by
emigrants returning are an important resource for Italy. It is
interesting to contrast French and Italians in this respect; the
Frenchman emigrates with the greatest reluctance, but has
planted his language very firmly in such places as the St. Lawrence
estuary and Mauritius, though political organization there has
passed out of his hands. Those emigrations were made when the
lands in question were not yet occupied at all by Europeans, and
therein lies the difference. The French, Spanish, and Italian
peoples of late years have been working to revive the idea of the
Mediterranean as a Roman, or rather now a Romance, lake, and
have spread their influence along the North African coast, Spain
on the Moroccan coast. France into Morocco and Algeria, both
France and Italy into Tunisia, and Italy into Tripoli and the
Cyrenaica. These are fields of linguistic and cultural as well as
administrative expansion, as the French and Italians, at least,
appear likely to organize closer settlement and an economic life
very different from that which they found.
The French-speaking and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland
can best be treated with Switzerland as a whole, and of the other
outlying Romance groups only a few words need be said. In
the Channel Isles, the pre-Norman basis was Celtic-speaking,
and there are abundant indications of links with Brittany. Norsemen
came in and Norse place-names are well in evidence, but the
islands under this influence became merely an outlying fragment
of Normandy, and Norman French became the language. The
islands, in spite of very close settlement, have doggedly retained
distinctive dialectical peculiarities. There are many other
examples of this non-fusion in islands such as Ireland, Crete,
Ceylon, and Java.
Guernsey has at least three varieties, for example. The importance
of the roadstead of St. Peter Port in Guernsey for British
commerce with Bordeaux in the Middle Ages was a powerful
{38}
factor in the dissociation of the Channel Isles from Normandy
and their retention by the kings of England, and their strong
anti-French prejudices were long a feature. The growth of
commerce with England and the fact that the local dialects have
no literature make the islands one of the comparatively rare cases
of modern language change long after the organization of close
settlement. Of the islands of the western Mediterranean it may
be said that in the Balearics a variant of Catalan is spoken, while
the other islands, including Corsica, use Italian dialects, save
that the Alghero district in Sardinia uses the same dialect as the
Balearic Islands.
4
_The Peoples of German Speech_
Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the
early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the
almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without
trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated
that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family
of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the
European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt
with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards
the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but
its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed.
It is most probable that the people who used these languages
were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet
marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In
many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to
a large extent.
The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the
Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the
Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and
{39}
Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic
speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with
Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so
became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.
In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic
of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire,
and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards.
The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently
in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the
hill people were moving down and making the population more
Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the
Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across
the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming
cities of the Roman Church in most cases. The wave of Roman
civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus
resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth
of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast
between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between
hills and plains and between High German and Low German,
but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic
south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though
the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.
Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond
the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic
Celtic language. But farther east the languages of the hill people
had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt
was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern
flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the
Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech (p. 61). The
downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill
lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east
of the Elbe old languages (probably of Lettic kinship, see p. 18)
gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became the
{40}
frontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old
frontier territory) to the west of it.
The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark,
between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards
but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning
that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the
Elbe frontier. Probably German was already in use here and
there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved
agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed
the character of the country. It was done under German leadership,
and brought in German settlers. In the early Middle Ages
there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now
only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains. This
is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread
down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia.
The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and
especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but
in the Middle Ages they spread farther north. It is largely
Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old
features and Slav names. Slav place-names are as characteristic
on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the
non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of
language of a people already having some settled organization.
This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names
on the English plain. The changes of language areas since the
Middle Ages have probably been quite small. The zone west of
the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and
Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig'
of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable
and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.
The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one
another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the
western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinct
{41}
as 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the
last century. The new treaty boundary between Germany and
Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended
to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone. The Low
German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of
the people of that region and their concentration on the work
of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.
We thus have Dutch, Frisian, Low German, High German or
Alemannic, and naturally a Middle German developing between
the two latter along the zone where the southern hills grade into
the northern plain.
The complex topography of the south German hill country
had given rise to an infinite muddle of small states, and at the
end of the fifteenth century they agreed, as the people of South
France had done centuries before, to 'receive' the Roman Law.
This reception was effective over most of the hill country, but
not in any considerable part of the plain, a natural consequence
of the contrasts already noted, and a further accentuation of
them for the succeeding period. In the early sixteenth century
came the religious schism, during which the northern plain and
the foothill region left the Catholic Church almost _en bloc_, while
the people of the hill and valley country of South Germany
remained attached to Rome. This, however, by no means
adequately describes the territories of the two ecclesiastical
systems, for the Roman influence on the Rhine seems to have
kept the Ems region largely Catholic, while Protestantism occupied
the south along the Cassel-Frankfort line, and spread through
Württemberg and the Nürnberg district. The strongly Catholic
regions are the Rhine (except about Mainz), the Ems basin, the
upper Main area, focusing on Würzburg and Bamberg, and the
upper Danube basin (the chief part of Bavaria proper). The
Rhine and Danube, with the Roman frontier towns becoming
ecclesiastical cities, stand out remarkably in this connexion.
{42}