God I love what-ifs. My favorite is What if the Bronze Age Collapse [0] never happened? Quick recap: due to some crazy things (the enigmatic 'Sea Peoples', maybe famine), all Mediterranean civs died in a 40 year timespan (best guess) back in 1200 BC. Like, this is just when we have civilizations in more than just Eqypt and Sumer, and blammo, ancient sea barbarians just wreck face in 1 lifetime. The Greek Dark Ages follow this up, as expected, and you just have all these terrible things happen to the people alive then in the area. Like, Rome and the rest of Egypt come out of what is left of these peoples after this event. Its like taking the Cambrian Explosion and then snuffing it out. Humans had finally figured out this city thing, we have palaces and kings and priests and the barest merchant class, and then whammo, sea peoples come and mess it all up. We have this Cambrian proliferation of cultures and we start having wars and stuff and its all fun happy evolution times. Yay! Art n stuff! Yay history! Yay literacy! And then a flippin meteor that is sea peoples comes in and kills all the dinosaurs (wow, I am straining metaphors here). Anyways, if the Collapse had not happened, things would be just radically different in terms of culture and human history. And the best thing is that no-one really knows this happened, it was so long ago. Like, we had this whole history and civilization thing just starting out, it's silenced before it really starts, and then we all go 'meh' and try it again. We live in at least civ2.0, if not even later.
"Civilization is always older than we think, and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time."
-- Will Durant, The Story of Civilization
For one, I think our writing system would likely be more similar to Korean and Japanese syllable systems. Linear A and B, the Bronze age greek versions of that, died in that collapse. The greek dark ages apparently deserve their name much more than the medieval ones - AFAIK Greece lost literacy for around 400 years after that event!
>I think our writing system would likely be more similar to Korean and Japanese syllable systems.
I don't think there's any reason to suppose that. Syllabaries like Japan's lend themselves to a certain kind of language, specifically one with a bunch of open syllables and simple onsets. Linear B seems to have been a pretty poor system for writing Greek, with lot's of vague approximations (e.g. 'pe-ma' for the word sperma), so unless the Greek of Linear B had less complex onsets and codas than the Ancient Greek we know, I don't imagine it would have stuck around in that form much longer anyway.
Incidentally Korean hangul is organized into syllable blocks in imitation of Chinese characters but is alphabetic in every other sense, which is actually good evidence for how writing will be changed or reinvented to fit the spoken language.
Would I be correct in assuming that you're taking inspiration and direction from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History here?
For those who don't know, Dan does a fantastic history podcast [0], and a pet fascination of his is exploring these what-if scenarios. The podcast comes with my highest recommendation.
as the wiki article linked suggests, there are numerous possible reasons, including eruption of Hekla in Iceland and subsequent mini ice age -> famine -> wars for scarce resources. Or many other possible reasons, all just educated guesses at best
There were periods prior to the Norman conquest when England was at the center of progress and learning.
Also, they had enjoyed some gender equality whereas the Normans introduced feudalism and its regressive society.
On the whole, though, looking back, it's remarkable that their conquest indirectly lead to where we are today --not dominated by Spanish, or Portuguese or French or Ottoman or even Chinese or Russians or anyone else who might have filled the role the English played in how the world organized and developed laws and international relations.
One of the take-aways from this is that the upheaval from conquest can lead to interesting new societies.
Listening to the History Hit Podcast [1], apparently the Normans got rid of slavery which was common in the Anglo Saxon world. So that's a vote for them.
"No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become subject to Normans" - do you have any other links or more information about this comment, i.e. which nobles and where did they go? I'm curious to find out more as was not aware of this aspect. Thanks
Harold's mother, Gytha, left England with other prominent nobles. I seemed to recall her going to Flanders, Wikipedia (that credible source) suggests somewhere in Scandinavia instead.[1]
"Composed primarily of Scandinavians for the first 100 years, the guard began to see increasing numbers of Anglo-Saxons after the successful invasion of England by the Normans.
[..]
the Guard was commonly called the Englinbarrangoi (Anglo-Varangians) [after a point]"
I'd also wonder if England and the British Isles more generally wouldn't have ended up more aligned with and culturally similar to the Nordics. Though there were of course already a history of ties to Southern Europe because of both the Romans and proximity.
There's an intriguing suicide note as well which claims even more widespread effects of Norman conquest.
“The Saxon/Norman origin of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world is the key to understanding why the discoveries of sociobiology have appeared to be so congenitally politically controversial.”
My favorite is what would have happened if the English pirate [1] Francis Drake had captured Cartagena Columbia. He had several ships and about 5000 marines for his third attempt and almost captured the city. Imagine if England and not Spain had the gold and jewels flowing from Central and South America. History would have been very different - and that last battle could have gone either way.
[1] Both times I have been in Cartagena, I heard someone refer to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Personally, I have nothing against the guy :-)
He was a slaver. That's at least one thing to hold against him, to say the least. Everything named after him should be renamed, all statues of him in public places should be toppled.
If you hold all the personalities of previous eras to today's moral standards, whom will you be left with?
Let me explain my idea on another, more clear cut example. Ancient Greece and Rome have been built on slavery. Almost all powerful and even educated men of that time used slave labour. Should we remove them from philosophy books and rename the months?
Should we just proclaim that everyone who lived then was evil, except the poor and the slaves themselves? But even they didn't hold some higher moral values, they just didn't have the means to enslave other people. So, we probably should say that everyone in ancient world was evil, period.
Yes. English has the most words of any language, mostly because a lot of words are duplicated with separate Germanic and Latin origins. The latter came mostly from the Normans. Tack on straight Latin influence from the Church, and Greek influence from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and some words are in triplicate or more.
I have heard that this is why there is the dichotomy in modern English between the words for meats and the animals from which they come, where the former (eg. pork, compare modern French porc) tends to have a Norman origin and the latter (eg. pig/swine, compare modern German Schwein) an Old English one.
>So many French words came into English via the Normans. //
IIRC those words were not yet French; it always gets a bit confused with languages when we're referring back like this IMO.
This is a thorough working - https://slmc.uottawa.ca/?q=french_history - it appears to concur that French as a language used across France arose in the 13th Century.
To recapitulate: In 1066 France wasn't called France and didn't speak French and yet we [common people of England] talk of the French coming and bringing French language to the English court.
My favorite English history what-ifs are:
1. What if Catherine of Aragon had borne an heir to Henry VIII? England might have remained Catholic and been spared a few bloody wars over religion and royal succession. Or maybe the English Civil War would have started earlier. Certainly the balance of power in Europe would have been different.
2. What if Henry VIII's older brother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur,_Prince_of_Wales had survived to become King Arthur?
With the Butterfly Effect, one can't even speculate on the consequences of stepping or not on a bug. If your parents had done anything the slightest bit different before you were conceived, you'd be a different person entirely (1 sperm out of zillions).
In my own life, there are several rather obvious nexus points where if things had gone slightly differently, the course of my life would have changed dramatically and unpredictably.
Readit News
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
I don't think there's any reason to suppose that. Syllabaries like Japan's lend themselves to a certain kind of language, specifically one with a bunch of open syllables and simple onsets. Linear B seems to have been a pretty poor system for writing Greek, with lot's of vague approximations (e.g. 'pe-ma' for the word sperma), so unless the Greek of Linear B had less complex onsets and codas than the Ancient Greek we know, I don't imagine it would have stuck around in that form much longer anyway.
Incidentally Korean hangul is organized into syllable blocks in imitation of Chinese characters but is alphabetic in every other sense, which is actually good evidence for how writing will be changed or reinvented to fit the spoken language.
For those who don't know, Dan does a fantastic history podcast [0], and a pet fascination of his is exploring these what-if scenarios. The podcast comes with my highest recommendation.
[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
- there might have been more interest in the early English kings.
- 11th c England would be darker to history, because there wouldn't be a Doomsday Book.
- Harold II would have a great-king reputation for beating Tostig, Hardrada and William.
- England would have remained politically chaotic, including ...
- A likely civil war between Harold II and his own relatives.
Not addressed:
- Changes to English society and life. Would feudalism have been imported anyway?
- No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become subject to Normans
Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake is an intriguing historical novel imagining how the Norman conquest affected everyday English folk.
Also, they had enjoyed some gender equality whereas the Normans introduced feudalism and its regressive society.
On the whole, though, looking back, it's remarkable that their conquest indirectly lead to where we are today --not dominated by Spanish, or Portuguese or French or Ottoman or even Chinese or Russians or anyone else who might have filled the role the English played in how the world organized and developed laws and international relations.
One of the take-aways from this is that the upheaval from conquest can lead to interesting new societies.
[1] http://www.historyhitpodcast.com/1066-battle-of-hastings-mar...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gytha_Thorkelsd%C3%B3ttir
Edit: Worth listening to are these BBC 4 In Our Time Podcasts.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011jvlt
The Domesday Book: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040llvb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard
"Composed primarily of Scandinavians for the first 100 years, the guard began to see increasing numbers of Anglo-Saxons after the successful invasion of England by the Normans.
[..]
the Guard was commonly called the Englinbarrangoi (Anglo-Varangians) [after a point]"
(That is all I really read about that subject.)
“The Saxon/Norman origin of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world is the key to understanding why the discoveries of sociobiology have appeared to be so congenitally politically controversial.”
My favorite is what would have happened if the English pirate [1] Francis Drake had captured Cartagena Columbia. He had several ships and about 5000 marines for his third attempt and almost captured the city. Imagine if England and not Spain had the gold and jewels flowing from Central and South America. History would have been very different - and that last battle could have gone either way.
[1] Both times I have been in Cartagena, I heard someone refer to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Personally, I have nothing against the guy :-)
And if anyone's looking for something against the guy, his involvement in the (very early) African slave trade is probably a better choice.
To the English he was a privateer. To the Spanish he was a pirate. =P
And Francis Drake also oversaw the massacre of 600 surrendered Irish rebels and civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathlin_Island_Massacre
So yeah, there's plenty of dirt on this guy.
And, ahem, the capital city of one of the 50 United States.
Let me explain my idea on another, more clear cut example. Ancient Greece and Rome have been built on slavery. Almost all powerful and even educated men of that time used slave labour. Should we remove them from philosophy books and rename the months?
Should we just proclaim that everyone who lived then was evil, except the poor and the slaves themselves? But even they didn't hold some higher moral values, they just didn't have the means to enslave other people. So, we probably should say that everyone in ancient world was evil, period.
IIRC those words were not yet French; it always gets a bit confused with languages when we're referring back like this IMO.
This is a thorough working - https://slmc.uottawa.ca/?q=french_history - it appears to concur that French as a language used across France arose in the 13th Century.
To recapitulate: In 1066 France wasn't called France and didn't speak French and yet we [common people of England] talk of the French coming and bringing French language to the English court.
In my own life, there are several rather obvious nexus points where if things had gone slightly differently, the course of my life would have changed dramatically and unpredictably.
[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-10-the-wha...