What squeezes taught me about language shifts

My work on the squeeze collection made as part of the preparation for Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum is taking me in interesting directions. My current task is cataloguing. Fortunately, ye editors, O.A. Danielsson and Carl Pauli, left the squeezes in fairly good order, and most of the squeezes are marked (though the numbering is sometimes eclectic). 

The process, practically speaking, goes like this. I take a squeeze out of the box and measure it. I input the results into a spread-sheet. After that is done, I copy what’s written on the labels on the squeeze. They use the same type of label for the same information on each squeeze, so after a month of doing this I know what each represents (e.g. the location of the inscription and the date the squeeze was made), they are still described as “smaller golden label”, “larger blue label” and so forth. The labels are always on the obverse of the squeeze – that is the top, seen from when the squeeze was made. This means that while I am typing up the labels, all I can see is the area where the brush met the paper. How well you can read the obverse depends on a lot of things, not least the type of paper used and the condition of the inscription. Still, I often don’t know quite how readable the squeeze will be until I turn it over. That moment when I flip the squeeze is the best part of it all. It’s feels like the thrill just as a slots-machine starts slowing down – that anticipation where you think maybe, just maybe you’ll win this time. 

Sometimes, I get another hit immediately afterwards when the squeeze is really good. Some of them are so crisp I don’t even have to tilt them or get a light out to read them. Even when that doesn’t happen, the actual steps I go through are the same. I read the squeeze and identify the inscription, making note where the reading in Etruskische Texte (ET) differs from what I can see. I use ET as my go-to as it’s only two volumes (one with texts, one with indices), and it is what is most widely used in linguistic circles. Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum (CIE) is large and (at the time of writing this) consists of thirteen volumes. 

When Danielsson and Pauli set out, they knew that their focus was Etruscan. That’s why I was surprised at first when I found squeezes of Latin inscriptions along with the Etruscan ones. First, I attributed this to how they were working. Because the squeezes are dated and the place where they were made is recorded, I can tell that they are spending several days in the same museums, producing dozens of squeezes each. Perhaps they simply made squeezes of some Latin inscriptions by accident and then thought it wasn’t worth throwing them out? In one or two cases, I thought the reason may be that they did not realise that the inscription was Latin. Those inscriptions use letter-forms almost indistinguishable from the Etruscan inscriptions, and if you are working fast (and if the general knowledge of Etruscan is much poorer than it is now, considering there is not yet a reliable corpus) you may not accurately identify it as Latin. Some other inscriptions, however, are obviously Latin. For one thing, they are written from left to right, unlike Etruscan which goes right to left. Additionally, the letter-forms of these ones are so obviously Roman. The layout on the stone is immediately recognisable. Why make squeezes of those? Surely they don’t belong in a collection of Etruscan squeezes?

Last week, I was working my way through inscriptions from the place the Romans (and therefore Danielsson and Pauli) called Volaterrae. There were a large number of squeezes of inscriptions originally from the Necropoli del Portone, from the tombs of the Ceicna family. Almost all inscriptions I had gone through that day contained the nomen ceicna. There were also quite a few including the name tlapuni, evidently a cognomen. I made note of it, as these particular squeezes were difficult to read and the cluster /tl/ threw me off. Considering how there were multiple people called both ceicna and tlapuni (I count at least four), it seems like we are dealing with a branch of the Ceicna family. 

I put the squeeze I’d just finished with back and got the next one out. Even before flipping it, I could see it was Latin – quite distinctly Latin. This was not one of the ones that could be mistaken for Etruscan. Why did you make a squeeze of this? I thought. It was included in Fabretti’s Inscriptiones Italicae, but so was a lot of things. I noticed it was from one of Carl Pauli’s later trips – perhaps he’d rather make too many squeezes than too few? 

I finished making notes of the labels and turned it over. The words leapt out at me: 

L · CAECINA · L · F · TLABONI · VIX · ANN[- -] · XXX

It wasn’t the same hit as when I see a nice squeeze. This was more profound. It was like in the movies, when a character suddenly sees the universe as a whole. It’s beautiful and overwhelming and strange all at once. 

It was an odd realisation to have, sitting with a piece of nineteenth century paper in my hands in a rare books room, but in that moment, I felt like I saw inscriptions I’d always taken for granted in a new light. This wasn’t just a random Latin inscription – it was commemorating someone from the same family as the Etruscan ones. I could see the history of these people – older generations in Etruscan, and here a younger one in Latin. The names are still noticeably Etruscan, though. The nomen has been Latinised, with another diphthong and the reintroduction of the syncopated vowel. Spelling the cognomen with a <B> instead of <P> makes it feel a little more Latin, but it still has that initial cluster that I’d noticed. 

Now when I look through my catalogue, I can find more examples of this, even from the Ceicna family. For instance, there is one Caecina Caspo, son of Gaius (the praenomen has been lost), who has the same nomen and cognomen as Aule Ceicna Caspu, son of Larθ and Curi (Vt 1.4). 

This has made me think about how we categorise inscriptions and build our corpora. Why was my reaction for so long that those Latin inscriptions did not belong among the Etruscan ones? If you are a linguist, having the evidence of the language I’m studying collected in one place is important. However, by having this be the only way we present inscriptions, we are losing important context. The fact that there are epitaphs in the same necropolis, for members of the same family in different languages tells us a lot. The family of Lucius Caecina Tlaboni buried him in the same place as Laris Ceicna Tlapuni had been buried. They commemorated him in a new language (for we cannot know which language he himself spoke), but his name was still recognisable as the name of his ancestors. How many generations kept using the cognomen Tlaboni? Perhaps it was further Latinised, perhaps it was dropped. When this family went to the grave, did they look at the Etruscan epitaphs? Could they read them – did they try to? I cannot help wondering what those inscriptions made them think and feel. 

In Classics, we often talk of language shifts in antiquity as being done willingly and eagerly, as a way to be part of something greater (that ‘something greater’ often being the Roman empire). But just because the state did not issue laws forbidding the use of a language does not mean that the language death was not in fact a murder. The loss of Etruscan might still have been traumatic. I feel that here, I should say something along the lines of “as academics we should not speculate on such things”, but I do not know if I believe that. There are communities today who have had their language taken from them by force. There are people who want to learn the language they feel should be their mother-tongue, but can’t, because so many speakers are gone. There are cultures that have all but disappeared because European colonial authorities did their upmost to suppress people’s language and customs.

The position that people happily adopted Latin to participate in Roman culture is not in fact neutral. It is one tinted by imperialism, that assumes that ‘being part of the empire’ is always desirable and beneficial. This is not to say that the question of language shifts is simple, and that one model can be used in all instances. The mechanisms are going to be different on an individual level than on a community level, and people can feel multiple things at the same time. Nonetheless, it is an oversight to downplay the trauma of language death, particularly when it is intentional.

When I sat down to write this blog-post, I intended it to be a meditation on why we group inscriptions by language rather than location. However, the way we speak about language in antiquity has an impact on how we think of language in the modern day, and it would be wrong to overlook that. In these discussions, there is the risk of taking post-colonialist concepts, shaking out anything to do with the modern world and applying them to ancient Mediterranean (though most often European) history. If we spend more time talking about the consequences of Roman expansion in the ancient world than we do talking about the consequences of European imperialism and settler colonialism today, we are doing something wrong. 

With this in mind, I want to end by linking a number of articles and documentaries about language revitalisation in North America and Australia: 

Saving the Yurok Language – a PBS documentary about teaching Yurok, a Native Northern Californian language, in public school.

Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa – an organisation that teaches Kanyen’keha in Ohio

Living Languages – Indigenous Australian languages

Reviving and Maintaining Torres Strait Island Traditional Languages