Language in Scotland |
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In the beginning was a word - no I'm not quoting the bible - as if I would. But, once upon a time a hominid uttered the first word - yes animals and hominids had been able to communicate, but the hominids had developed more sophisticated communication than their primate ancestors and eventually one of those noises must have become a word - maybe it's like babies move from nonsensical gurglings, though they do have the benefit of word sounds to imitate. There doesn't appear to be any consensus as to how and when that first word was uttered - or by which species of hominid - homo ergaster, homo heidelbergensis, or homo neanderthalensis. There seems to be general consensus that it was probably uttered by a predecessor of homo sapiens.
But what would happen if you isolated two babies from other human contact, would they develop a language? Unthinkable now, but James IV was a fervent god botherer and he wanted to prove that Hebrew was the natural language - the language of god, and believed that the isolated children would learn to speak in Hebrew. They weren't quite isolated, but the woman given the job of raising them in isolation on Inchkeith was a deaf mute - there are no reliable results of this experiment - if it ever indeed took place. The Romulus and Remus myth - twins whose mother was a Vestal Virgin impregnated by the god Mars (someone else adapted that story...), abandoned and suckled by a she-wolf - but the myth doesn't seem to give any indication of whether they could speak by the time they were rescued.
A proto-human language is assumed to have existed 100-200,000 years ago and evolved into the languages of today. The first written language was still a long way off, so this can only be theoretical.
All current languages in Europe (except Basque) are believed to have descended from a common Proto Indo-European language or Proto-Uralic from the Eurasian north, Siberia in particular. The Uralic languages live on principally in Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian - all others evolved from the Proto Indo-European. The first to split off were the Indo-Iranian languages, which left the following early European Groups: Albanian; Armenian; Balto-Slavic; Celtic; Germanic; Hellenic; and Italic
Albanian and Armenian pretty much kept themselves to themselves - sure there were loan words from neighbouring languages and other peripheral influences. Hellenic had a few more variants and because of the influence of the Greeks from the 8th century BCE, though unlike the later Romans, the Greek city states were often at war with each other, and had frequent conflict with the Persian Empire. Phillip II of Macedon finally managed to form a federation of states - the Hellenic League - in 337 BCE, but was assassinated by a member of his bodyguard the following year. Despite a feud with his father, this brought Alexander III to the throne - better known as Alexander the Great - still regarded as one of he greatest military tacticians of all time, though his first actions as King were to eliminate potential rivals. His swift subjugation of the Persians in Asia Minor was followed by moving down the Levant and soon taking Egypt and the title of Pharaoh (which had been held by the Persians for more than 200 years) in 332. He then turned back north and set out to successfully co-nquer the rest of the Persian Empire. Alexander continued into India reaching the Ganges, by which time he was facing the possibility of a mutiny if he went further East as he had wanted. His army felt they had been away from Greece for too long. Alexander, was still looking at further conquest in 323, when he became seriously ill and died in Babylon - there has been some speculation that he was poisoned. He was 32, he had taken part in 20 battles - all victoriously - and founded 20 cities called Alexandria.
Some Hellenic culture took root in the areas conquered by Alexander, and a form of Greek known as Koine Greek evolved as the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East - it would survive as as the court language of the Byzantine Empire (what was the Eastern Roman Empire) until 1453, and is still used by the Greek Orthodox Church. It is also known as Biblical Greek as it was used for the New Testament and much other early christian writings. Though words from Greek as well as Latin are still used for scientific terminology, the Greek language rather stagnated evolving only into Medieval and Modern Greek. But through both the biblical use, and its use as a lingua franca, while the language contracted back to its origins, words from Greek were preserved and became loan words in other existing and evolving languages.
Celtic originated in the Russian steppes but moved West and was spoken widely across much of Europe by 275BCE. Italic was a relatively minor language branch in Southern Europe until the development of Rome, while Germanic languages spread in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, but the Celtic migration continued westwards and eventually came to the British Isles - initially from the Iberian Peninsula to Ireland, and then from France across to Great Britain, which would appear to account for the two flavours of Celtic that formed the basis of Irish and then Scottish Gaelic; and British - the language of the Ancient Britons when the Romans arrived. British survived the Roman occupation, though loan words from the Classical and Vulgar Latin used in that period influenced its development. Then came the Anglo-Saxons with their Germanic languages, which became Old English
The spread of people throughout the world is mirrored by the languages spoken. In Scotland, how did things get to today's situation where English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic are spoken? Could anyone today converse with someone in 1100.
The problem with living languages is that they evolve. As far as English is concerned, the farthest back that most people could go and hope to understand what was being said is about 1600 - and that largely because of the works of William Shakespeare. As for conversation, that would still be difficult, while you might understand some of the words, pronunciations would be very different, as would usage. Go back to Chaucer, 200 years earlier and you will be really struggling. In the original manuscripts you will be confronted not only with different spellings, but the letters themselves may not be familiar - the old style elongated 's' written: ſ is fairly easy to cope with. Old letters þorn (thorn) 'þ' (similar in form to greek letter sho 'ϸ') and ƿynn (wynn) 'ƿ' are likely to cause more problems. Both are derived from earlier runes of the same names - and both when carelessly written could be confused with 'p', which is probably why they were phased out. This was particularly so when written in Blackletter, a commonly used script up to about 1650 - most usually referred to today as Gothic Script. Wynn evolved into 'w'. Thorn was later written as 'y', but eventually evolved into 'th', but not before abbreviations such as y with an 'e superscript' meaning 'the' or with 't superscript' meaning 'that' came into regular usage - the former leading to the likes of the usually mispronounced "Ye Olde..."
So, Latin suddenly comes into its own - as a dead language it hasn't evolved - so probably the best bet for communication - with the educated people of 1100.
Scots is thought to have evolved from the form of Old English spoken in south-east Scotland - which was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. This seems the most likely evolution, but there are few records due to Viking raids and Edward I's removal of national records and their subsequent loss. The destruction of the monasteries and the other Reformation vandalism didn't help. As the Kingdom of Scotland developed, Gaelic influences from the
Old English itself was evolving from the Anglo-Saxon spoken prior to 1066 into Anglo-Norman with the addition of many Norman-French words thereafter. French remained the language of the English Court for some time.
Doric is a north-eastern dialect of Scots
Almost all European languages evolved from Indo-European - the main exceptions being Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian - the main historical language groups affecting the British Isles were Italic, Germanic and Celtic. The Italic languages evolved through Latin into French (as well as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese); the Germanic into English and Norse (as well as German); Celtic into Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, Gaelic, Manx and Welsh.
Proto-Celtic is believed to have originated in central Europe during the Urnfield culture around 3,000 years ago, though there have been suggestions it was earlier. Celtic language came to the British Isles about 2,500 years ago, though again there have been suggestions of earlier dates.
Continental Celtic is extinct, but up to 2000 years ago various such languages were spoken widely across the north of Europe - the most recent being Gaulish in France up to about 1,500 years ago.
Insular Celtic refers to the extinct and extant Celtic languages of the British Isles - and Brittany. They divided into two groups known as P-Celtic (Brittonic or Brythonic) and Q-Celtic (Gaelic). The prevailing theory is that these languages developed separately from different extinct Continental Celtic languages - P-Celtic from Gaulish; Q-Celtic from Celtiberian (Celtic spoken in Spain/Portugal). P-Celtic first developed into British or Brittonic (and possibly Pictish); while Q-Celtic developed from ancient forms of Irish.
Very little is known of Pictish, and it is believed to have not been a written language - anything that has survived from the Picts is pictorial, hence the name. Therefore the assumption that it was a Celtic language has to be made from similarities in other cultural aspects. The other attestation to Pictish is the Venerable Bede - a monk from Northumbria, who is partly responsible for this being the year 2018.
Very little remains of the British language either, though here the interaction with the Romans, allows for more evidence. The only possibly written British occurs at Bath in the Bath Curse Tablets - small metal tablets inscribed with curses against a specific person or people. Most of the tablets are in vernacular Latin, but two are in an otherwise unknown language, presumed to be British. The Romans remarked upon the similarity of the British language to Gaulish - of which there are many more examples.
At the time of Julius Caesar, France (Gaul as the Romans called it) was inhabited by Gauls (who called themselves Celts) and Belgae in an area to the north considerably larger than modern Belgium; and the Aquitani in the South. The Belgae may have spoken an extinct Belgian language - an Indo-European language separate from the Celtic and Germanic languages. Aquitanian is an extinct language, but related to Basque.
Even before the Roman Empire fell, the Classical Latin of Julius Caesar and official documentation, plaques etc had been supplanted in everyday life by Vulgar Latin, which is a generic term for many different dialects or proto-languages spoken and used in the various parts of the Empire. Though referred to as Vulgar Latin throughout the area of the former Empire the language evolved differently and more rapidly after the fall of the Empire eventually becoming recognisable separate languages by around the 9th century BCE. These became known as the Romance languages as a group, the main modern languages being Spanish (aka Castilinian); French, Portuguese; Italian and Romanian - though these national languages representing the modern day nations. For the rest of Western Europe things went differently, Scandinavia and most of Germany were never part of the Roman Empire; and though England and Wales were, the old Celtic languages soon came back to replace the British variant of Vulgar Latin - though not for long - as after the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 6th century, speakers of the British language were confined to the west, from Galloway down to Cornwall - and some emigrated to Amorica (modern-day Brittany) and also probably to Galicia in Northern Spain to a community now known as Santa Maria de Bretoña.
Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, though it was no longer capital of the Empire, its fall was very symbolic, but the signs of the end of empire were apparent long before that. Volumes have been written about the end of the Roman Empire - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon published between 1776 and 1789 is considered the first comprehensive work, though further evidence has been uncovered since then to challenge some of his conclusions. His contention, however, that "so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people" extraordinary perhaps for its time, cannot be faulted. So my précis of the subject is probably highly selective and subjective, but I hope it's a reasonable summary of what happened.
The Goths are thought to have originated in southern Sweden (Götaland), but began to spread out in the 1st century to Poland; as this spread continued - along with other Germanic tribes migrating in Central Europe - they came into contact with the Roman Empire. From 161 to 166 Rome had been at war with the Parthian Empire (modern day Iran/Iraq), which had been a success, but the returning soldiers brought a plague back with them, and 5m people were killed, which was a big strain on the Empire, which then found itself at war with the Macromanni (a confederation of Germanic tribes). Julius Caesar had come across them years earlier when they had made incursions into Roman Gaul. In the 2nd century the Macromanni allied with Quadi (from Moravia), Vandals (from Carpathia - Slovakia) and Sarmatians (from the Ukraine, south Russia) to move against the northern borders of the Roman Empire in central Europe - they were feeling the pressure of the migration of the Goths in particular. This pattern would continue, with wars between the Germanic tribes and Rome, then Rome did what it had always done. The Empire could not have lasted as long as it did without the assimilation of other peoples - well massacre and assimilation.
Before the Empire the Roman Republic had assimilated former enemy states, by offering Roman Citizenship to compliant states or Foederati, who were then obliged to provide fighting men when needed. Under the Empire this practise was widened to include subsidising 'barbarian' tribes in exchange for warriors to fight for Rome rather than against them. This worked particularly well when you took the mercenaries to fight well away from their origins. But it also meant that in effect a lot of warriors with only a monetary loyalty to Rome were within the bounds of the Empire. This could lead to rebellion, which at the height of the Empire's strength was an inconvenience that could be easily, and usually brutally, beaten down. The term barbarian seems to have been used in different ways at different times - from merely the equivalent of foreigners, or people who had not adopted the culture of the Empire, but was easily tuned up into more pejorative, racist meanings - painting anyone outside the Empire as savage, uncivilised - more easily justifying massacring them. But the 'Barbarians' had the last laugh, as they ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire.
Further and real heavy pressure came in the 4th century with the migration into Europe of the Huns. The most remembered of the 'barbarian' tribes - especially in the figure of their most successful leader Attila - but little is really known about them. They appeared in the 4th century, were gone by the 8th. Even less is known of the Hunnic language - Gothic also appears to have been spoken within the Hunnic coalition. All that remains from Hunnic are around 30 proper names and three other nouns, which is not much to go on to classify the origins of a language, so opinion remains divided - Indo-European? Uralic? Turkic? Mongol? Though the Huns had a big impact on the history of central Europe, they don't appear to have had a great influence linguistically.
The Gothic spoken amongst the Huns speaks to Gothic participation in the Hunnic invasion, but other Goths were pushed South, and Vizigoths some of whom may have been notionally part of the Roman Empire were responsible for sacking Rome in 410; the Ostrogoths, an eastern branch of Goths are believed to have built an empire strteching from Black Sea to the Baltic by 370 when defeated. The Huns got as far as Orléans in 451 before being beaten back, and also invaded northern Italy, but didn't get as far as Rome, after Attila's death in 453 the Hunnic empire fell apart fairly quickly.
The Visigoths, having sacked Rome, settled in Southern Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula
The Vandals also appear to have originated in Sandinavia and migrated to eastern Germany, ending up in Pannonia (north of Dalmatia) after the Macromannic wars, but by 235 Rome was in crisis, as factions fought for supremacy, the Empire was effectively split into three warring parts until Aurelian from 270 and Diocletian from 284. Aurelian defeated the Vandals and Goths amongst others, plus the other warring parts of the Empire and thus reunited it, but he was murdered in 275, after which for a short time his widow Ulpia appears to have ruled Rome in her own right - the only woman to do so. The next few years saw a quick succession of Emperors, mainly murdered by their successors until the accession of Diocletian who ruled as Emperor from 284 to 305, mainly as co-Emperor with Maximian - both abdicated in 305, though Maximian tried to regain power and eventually forced to commit suicide by Constantine
The Western Roman Empire ceased to be in 476, when the final Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, who was de facto King of Italy, though he recognised Julius Nepos, who had preceded Romulus Augustulus as Emperor, and was still recognised by the Eastern Empire as Emperor, though by then actually only ruling Dalmatia until assassinated in 480. The Eastern Empire no longer recognised the continued existence of the Western Empire after 480. Odoacer had the support of the Roman Senate and added Dalmatia to his kingdom after 480. In 493 he signed a treaty with Thoderic, King of the Ostrogoths, and held a banquet to celebrate the treaty, at which Thoderic toasted Odoacer, and then drew his sword and killed him! He took over Italy following this and later became de facto king of the Visigoths, but the unity of the Goths didn't last.
So where did French come from? As mentioned above, Gaulish (and Vulgar Latin) were still spoken in France up to the 5th century. The Franks had been making considerable inroads into Gaul by then, but they didn't speak French - or even Old French. Vulgar Latin in Gaul had been developing into
The Franks gave their name to France by invading Gaul; much in the way that the Angles did to England. They were a combination of Germanic tribes, though mythological sources claim that they originated from Troy after its destruction by the Ancient Greeks. As with many other bordering tribes, the Romans were best of frenemies with the Franks - allies when the Romans needed mercenaries, but just as likely to be turned on if the Romans felt they'd taken too many liberties. This was the Roman way of controlling their borders, there would be frontier raids, this would often lead to the slaughter of raiders and reparations against the tribe - but also seek to maintain future peace by settling members of the tribe each side of the border - and taking them on as mercenaries. A group of Franks got as far as Spain in 260 (a time Rome was weak), but were eventually expelled by the Romans a decade later.
The Franks made their real advances after the fall of the Western Roman Empire - there was nothing now to prevent them moving into former Roman Gaul. Almost 300 years after the fall in 476, Charlemagne became King of the Franks in 768.
Pre-Historic
But what would happen if you isolated two babies from other human contact, would they develop a language? Unthinkable now, but James IV was a fervent god botherer and he wanted to prove that Hebrew was the natural language - the language of god, and believed that the isolated children would learn to speak in Hebrew. They weren't quite isolated, but the woman given the job of raising them in isolation on Inchkeith was a deaf mute - there are no reliable results of this experiment - if it ever indeed took place. The Romulus and Remus myth - twins whose mother was a Vestal Virgin impregnated by the god Mars (someone else adapted that story...), abandoned and suckled by a she-wolf - but the myth doesn't seem to give any indication of whether they could speak by the time they were rescued.
A proto-human language is assumed to have existed 100-200,000 years ago and evolved into the languages of today. The first written language was still a long way off, so this can only be theoretical.
All current languages in Europe (except Basque) are believed to have descended from a common Proto Indo-European language or Proto-Uralic from the Eurasian north, Siberia in particular. The Uralic languages live on principally in Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian - all others evolved from the Proto Indo-European. The first to split off were the Indo-Iranian languages, which left the following early European Groups: Albanian; Armenian; Balto-Slavic; Celtic; Germanic; Hellenic; and Italic
Albanian and Armenian pretty much kept themselves to themselves - sure there were loan words from neighbouring languages and other peripheral influences. Hellenic had a few more variants and because of the influence of the Greeks from the 8th century BCE, though unlike the later Romans, the Greek city states were often at war with each other, and had frequent conflict with the Persian Empire. Phillip II of Macedon finally managed to form a federation of states - the Hellenic League - in 337 BCE, but was assassinated by a member of his bodyguard the following year. Despite a feud with his father, this brought Alexander III to the throne - better known as Alexander the Great - still regarded as one of he greatest military tacticians of all time, though his first actions as King were to eliminate potential rivals. His swift subjugation of the Persians in Asia Minor was followed by moving down the Levant and soon taking Egypt and the title of Pharaoh (which had been held by the Persians for more than 200 years) in 332. He then turned back north and set out to successfully co-nquer the rest of the Persian Empire. Alexander continued into India reaching the Ganges, by which time he was facing the possibility of a mutiny if he went further East as he had wanted. His army felt they had been away from Greece for too long. Alexander, was still looking at further conquest in 323, when he became seriously ill and died in Babylon - there has been some speculation that he was poisoned. He was 32, he had taken part in 20 battles - all victoriously - and founded 20 cities called Alexandria.
Some Hellenic culture took root in the areas conquered by Alexander, and a form of Greek known as Koine Greek evolved as the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East - it would survive as as the court language of the Byzantine Empire (what was the Eastern Roman Empire) until 1453, and is still used by the Greek Orthodox Church. It is also known as Biblical Greek as it was used for the New Testament and much other early christian writings. Though words from Greek as well as Latin are still used for scientific terminology, the Greek language rather stagnated evolving only into Medieval and Modern Greek. But through both the biblical use, and its use as a lingua franca, while the language contracted back to its origins, words from Greek were preserved and became loan words in other existing and evolving languages.
Celtic originated in the Russian steppes but moved West and was spoken widely across much of Europe by 275BCE. Italic was a relatively minor language branch in Southern Europe until the development of Rome, while Germanic languages spread in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, but the Celtic migration continued westwards and eventually came to the British Isles - initially from the Iberian Peninsula to Ireland, and then from France across to Great Britain, which would appear to account for the two flavours of Celtic that formed the basis of Irish and then Scottish Gaelic; and British - the language of the Ancient Britons when the Romans arrived. British survived the Roman occupation, though loan words from the Classical and Vulgar Latin used in that period influenced its development. Then came the Anglo-Saxons with their Germanic languages, which became Old English
The spread of people throughout the world is mirrored by the languages spoken. In Scotland, how did things get to today's situation where English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic are spoken? Could anyone today converse with someone in 1100.
The problem with living languages is that they evolve. As far as English is concerned, the farthest back that most people could go and hope to understand what was being said is about 1600 - and that largely because of the works of William Shakespeare. As for conversation, that would still be difficult, while you might understand some of the words, pronunciations would be very different, as would usage. Go back to Chaucer, 200 years earlier and you will be really struggling. In the original manuscripts you will be confronted not only with different spellings, but the letters themselves may not be familiar - the old style elongated 's' written: ſ is fairly easy to cope with. Old letters þorn (thorn) 'þ' (similar in form to greek letter sho 'ϸ') and ƿynn (wynn) 'ƿ' are likely to cause more problems. Both are derived from earlier runes of the same names - and both when carelessly written could be confused with 'p', which is probably why they were phased out. This was particularly so when written in Blackletter, a commonly used script up to about 1650 - most usually referred to today as Gothic Script. Wynn evolved into 'w'. Thorn was later written as 'y', but eventually evolved into 'th', but not before abbreviations such as y with an 'e superscript' meaning 'the' or with 't superscript' meaning 'that' came into regular usage - the former leading to the likes of the usually mispronounced "Ye Olde..."
So, Latin suddenly comes into its own - as a dead language it hasn't evolved - so probably the best bet for communication - with the educated people of 1100.
Scots is thought to have evolved from the form of Old English spoken in south-east Scotland - which was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. This seems the most likely evolution, but there are few records due to Viking raids and Edward I's removal of national records and their subsequent loss. The destruction of the monasteries and the other Reformation vandalism didn't help. As the Kingdom of Scotland developed, Gaelic influences from the
Old English itself was evolving from the Anglo-Saxon spoken prior to 1066 into Anglo-Norman with the addition of many Norman-French words thereafter. French remained the language of the English Court for some time.
Doric is a north-eastern dialect of Scots
Almost all European languages evolved from Indo-European - the main exceptions being Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian - the main historical language groups affecting the British Isles were Italic, Germanic and Celtic. The Italic languages evolved through Latin into French (as well as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese); the Germanic into English and Norse (as well as German); Celtic into Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, Gaelic, Manx and Welsh.
Proto-Celtic is believed to have originated in central Europe during the Urnfield culture around 3,000 years ago, though there have been suggestions it was earlier. Celtic language came to the British Isles about 2,500 years ago, though again there have been suggestions of earlier dates.
Continental Celtic is extinct, but up to 2000 years ago various such languages were spoken widely across the north of Europe - the most recent being Gaulish in France up to about 1,500 years ago.
Insular Celtic refers to the extinct and extant Celtic languages of the British Isles - and Brittany. They divided into two groups known as P-Celtic (Brittonic or Brythonic) and Q-Celtic (Gaelic). The prevailing theory is that these languages developed separately from different extinct Continental Celtic languages - P-Celtic from Gaulish; Q-Celtic from Celtiberian (Celtic spoken in Spain/Portugal). P-Celtic first developed into British or Brittonic (and possibly Pictish); while Q-Celtic developed from ancient forms of Irish.
Very little is known of Pictish, and it is believed to have not been a written language - anything that has survived from the Picts is pictorial, hence the name. Therefore the assumption that it was a Celtic language has to be made from similarities in other cultural aspects. The other attestation to Pictish is the Venerable Bede - a monk from Northumbria, who is partly responsible for this being the year 2018.
Very little remains of the British language either, though here the interaction with the Romans, allows for more evidence. The only possibly written British occurs at Bath in the Bath Curse Tablets - small metal tablets inscribed with curses against a specific person or people. Most of the tablets are in vernacular Latin, but two are in an otherwise unknown language, presumed to be British. The Romans remarked upon the similarity of the British language to Gaulish - of which there are many more examples.
At the time of Julius Caesar, France (Gaul as the Romans called it) was inhabited by Gauls (who called themselves Celts) and Belgae in an area to the north considerably larger than modern Belgium; and the Aquitani in the South. The Belgae may have spoken an extinct Belgian language - an Indo-European language separate from the Celtic and Germanic languages. Aquitanian is an extinct language, but related to Basque.
Even before the Roman Empire fell, the Classical Latin of Julius Caesar and official documentation, plaques etc had been supplanted in everyday life by Vulgar Latin, which is a generic term for many different dialects or proto-languages spoken and used in the various parts of the Empire. Though referred to as Vulgar Latin throughout the area of the former Empire the language evolved differently and more rapidly after the fall of the Empire eventually becoming recognisable separate languages by around the 9th century BCE. These became known as the Romance languages as a group, the main modern languages being Spanish (aka Castilinian); French, Portuguese; Italian and Romanian - though these national languages representing the modern day nations. For the rest of Western Europe things went differently, Scandinavia and most of Germany were never part of the Roman Empire; and though England and Wales were, the old Celtic languages soon came back to replace the British variant of Vulgar Latin - though not for long - as after the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 6th century, speakers of the British language were confined to the west, from Galloway down to Cornwall - and some emigrated to Amorica (modern-day Brittany) and also probably to Galicia in Northern Spain to a community now known as Santa Maria de Bretoña.
Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, though it was no longer capital of the Empire, its fall was very symbolic, but the signs of the end of empire were apparent long before that. Volumes have been written about the end of the Roman Empire - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon published between 1776 and 1789 is considered the first comprehensive work, though further evidence has been uncovered since then to challenge some of his conclusions. His contention, however, that "so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people" extraordinary perhaps for its time, cannot be faulted. So my précis of the subject is probably highly selective and subjective, but I hope it's a reasonable summary of what happened.
The Goths are thought to have originated in southern Sweden (Götaland), but began to spread out in the 1st century to Poland; as this spread continued - along with other Germanic tribes migrating in Central Europe - they came into contact with the Roman Empire. From 161 to 166 Rome had been at war with the Parthian Empire (modern day Iran/Iraq), which had been a success, but the returning soldiers brought a plague back with them, and 5m people were killed, which was a big strain on the Empire, which then found itself at war with the Macromanni (a confederation of Germanic tribes). Julius Caesar had come across them years earlier when they had made incursions into Roman Gaul. In the 2nd century the Macromanni allied with Quadi (from Moravia), Vandals (from Carpathia - Slovakia) and Sarmatians (from the Ukraine, south Russia) to move against the northern borders of the Roman Empire in central Europe - they were feeling the pressure of the migration of the Goths in particular. This pattern would continue, with wars between the Germanic tribes and Rome, then Rome did what it had always done. The Empire could not have lasted as long as it did without the assimilation of other peoples - well massacre and assimilation.
Before the Empire the Roman Republic had assimilated former enemy states, by offering Roman Citizenship to compliant states or Foederati, who were then obliged to provide fighting men when needed. Under the Empire this practise was widened to include subsidising 'barbarian' tribes in exchange for warriors to fight for Rome rather than against them. This worked particularly well when you took the mercenaries to fight well away from their origins. But it also meant that in effect a lot of warriors with only a monetary loyalty to Rome were within the bounds of the Empire. This could lead to rebellion, which at the height of the Empire's strength was an inconvenience that could be easily, and usually brutally, beaten down. The term barbarian seems to have been used in different ways at different times - from merely the equivalent of foreigners, or people who had not adopted the culture of the Empire, but was easily tuned up into more pejorative, racist meanings - painting anyone outside the Empire as savage, uncivilised - more easily justifying massacring them. But the 'Barbarians' had the last laugh, as they ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire.
Further and real heavy pressure came in the 4th century with the migration into Europe of the Huns. The most remembered of the 'barbarian' tribes - especially in the figure of their most successful leader Attila - but little is really known about them. They appeared in the 4th century, were gone by the 8th. Even less is known of the Hunnic language - Gothic also appears to have been spoken within the Hunnic coalition. All that remains from Hunnic are around 30 proper names and three other nouns, which is not much to go on to classify the origins of a language, so opinion remains divided - Indo-European? Uralic? Turkic? Mongol? Though the Huns had a big impact on the history of central Europe, they don't appear to have had a great influence linguistically.
The Gothic spoken amongst the Huns speaks to Gothic participation in the Hunnic invasion, but other Goths were pushed South, and Vizigoths some of whom may have been notionally part of the Roman Empire were responsible for sacking Rome in 410; the Ostrogoths, an eastern branch of Goths are believed to have built an empire strteching from Black Sea to the Baltic by 370 when defeated. The Huns got as far as Orléans in 451 before being beaten back, and also invaded northern Italy, but didn't get as far as Rome, after Attila's death in 453 the Hunnic empire fell apart fairly quickly.
The Visigoths, having sacked Rome, settled in Southern Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula
The Vandals also appear to have originated in Sandinavia and migrated to eastern Germany, ending up in Pannonia (north of Dalmatia) after the Macromannic wars, but by 235 Rome was in crisis, as factions fought for supremacy, the Empire was effectively split into three warring parts until Aurelian from 270 and Diocletian from 284. Aurelian defeated the Vandals and Goths amongst others, plus the other warring parts of the Empire and thus reunited it, but he was murdered in 275, after which for a short time his widow Ulpia appears to have ruled Rome in her own right - the only woman to do so. The next few years saw a quick succession of Emperors, mainly murdered by their successors until the accession of Diocletian who ruled as Emperor from 284 to 305, mainly as co-Emperor with Maximian - both abdicated in 305, though Maximian tried to regain power and eventually forced to commit suicide by Constantine
The Western Roman Empire ceased to be in 476, when the final Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, who was de facto King of Italy, though he recognised Julius Nepos, who had preceded Romulus Augustulus as Emperor, and was still recognised by the Eastern Empire as Emperor, though by then actually only ruling Dalmatia until assassinated in 480. The Eastern Empire no longer recognised the continued existence of the Western Empire after 480. Odoacer had the support of the Roman Senate and added Dalmatia to his kingdom after 480. In 493 he signed a treaty with Thoderic, King of the Ostrogoths, and held a banquet to celebrate the treaty, at which Thoderic toasted Odoacer, and then drew his sword and killed him! He took over Italy following this and later became de facto king of the Visigoths, but the unity of the Goths didn't last.
So where did French come from? As mentioned above, Gaulish (and Vulgar Latin) were still spoken in France up to the 5th century. The Franks had been making considerable inroads into Gaul by then, but they didn't speak French - or even Old French. Vulgar Latin in Gaul had been developing into
The Franks gave their name to France by invading Gaul; much in the way that the Angles did to England. They were a combination of Germanic tribes, though mythological sources claim that they originated from Troy after its destruction by the Ancient Greeks. As with many other bordering tribes, the Romans were best of frenemies with the Franks - allies when the Romans needed mercenaries, but just as likely to be turned on if the Romans felt they'd taken too many liberties. This was the Roman way of controlling their borders, there would be frontier raids, this would often lead to the slaughter of raiders and reparations against the tribe - but also seek to maintain future peace by settling members of the tribe each side of the border - and taking them on as mercenaries. A group of Franks got as far as Spain in 260 (a time Rome was weak), but were eventually expelled by the Romans a decade later.
The Franks made their real advances after the fall of the Western Roman Empire - there was nothing now to prevent them moving into former Roman Gaul. Almost 300 years after the fall in 476, Charlemagne became King of the Franks in 768.
Pre-Historic
Why is it 2018?
OK, you've got to start somewhere. But why 2018 years ago? The short answer is that a monk in the 6th century thought that was when his god was born, and he thought that was more appropriate than numbering from the start of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian or the old Jewish Anno Mundi calendar based on the estimated year of creation - generally thought to be around 5,500 BCE, but there was no general agreement. However, general acceptance in Europe for this new convention didn't occur for another 200 years, when the Venerable Bede
Time isn't an easy thing to quantify - well actually it is - now. The second is defined precisely in a way that has nothing to do with the rotation of the earth, and which is completely meaningless to virtually everyone. The day is then defined as 86,400 seconds. This is of course going completely the other way around from the original definitions, which was problematic because the Earth doesn't play to the same rules - the orbit isn't a perfect circle, so a day might be 8 seconds longer or shorter than the official definition. And of course 365 days in a year was always an approximation. And ancient civilisations needed something to measure between a day and a year, so the obvious thing was to measure by was the moon, with is regular cycles and phases. A full moon every 29 days or so, hence the month, roughly 13 of them a year - and each month could be divided into 4 phases of the moon or a week, but again none of the divisions was exact. For ancient civilisations, even as recent as the Romans, the only thing that really mattered was the inconsistencies that the yearly approximation made. So when things got seriously out of synch, a few days would be added to get things back to normal. Actually until fairy recently, this only really mattered to the administrators and armies - and of course the church, who needed to drag the population in for its weekly dose of deception and theft.
Why do days start at midnight? Well it's obvious to us now - the middle of the night is clearly the best time to reset to zero. But it wasn't always. Before accurate clocks people didn't know when midnight was. Or care. They were asleep - they had no light after all. Mid-day they could measure courtesy of the sun, but why start a day then? The day was over at sunset (no artificial light remember), so that's when the new day began - and still does for the fundamental followers of some religions - Judaism, Islam for example.
Why does the year start on January 1? Well it doesn't in many cultures, Chinese New Year, Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) for example. Rosh Hashanah is traditionally the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve, or others suggest the beginning of the agricultural cycle. The Chinese New Year date varies as it depends on their lunisolar based calendar - the new moon near the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox - thus between 21 January and 20 February.
The Greeks had various different names for the months, and different starting points for their years, dependent upon region or state. But the general principle seems to have been 12 lunar months, alternating between 29 and 30 days to take account of an actual lunar cycle being 29½ days. Of course this didn't fit the solar cycle, so extra intercalary days had to be added.
The Romans initially had a calendar based on 38 nunindae (8 day weeks) organised into 10 months - which left 50 additional days in the winter, initially not organised into months. The total of 354 days in a lunar year - 12 moons of 29.5 days. This meant that years soon became out of synch unless you added some intercalary days - or saved them up to make an intercalary month every couple of years. With the original 10 month scheme, the year started in March, hence the names of September to December make sense as the 7th to 10th months, but then two new months January and February were added to organise the winter days, but February was still considered to be the end of the year, when the intercalary days would be added, or an intercalary month inserted before March.
The Romans had an infuriatingly complicated way of expressing days of the month: each month had three key days: Calends - the first day of each month; Nones - initially either the 4th or 6th of the month depending on its length, but this appears to have been standardised later on to the 4th; Ides - originally the day before the middle of the month, but standardised later as the 13th. The numbering of the days was the number of days before the next big day, (and Romans counted inclusively) so 30th January would be 3 days before the Calends of February.
Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in 46 BCE to bring it into line with the solar year - basically as we have it today, though that meant a lot of extra days in 46 BCE - 446 days altogether. Though the instructions stipulated a leap day every 4th year on the 24th February - so there was a 6th day before the Calends of March and then a 2nd 6th day before the Calends of March. Because of inclusive counting this got added every 3rd year until the time of Augustus, who then had to suspend the leap days for a number of years to get back on track. The actual administration of the calendar and promulgation of dates seems to have been left in the hands of priests.
The fifth and sixth months (starting from March) were originally named Quintilis and Sextilis, but were renamed after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the revised Gregorian Calendar - because in the 1600 years since Julius Caesar, the Julian year had drifted from the solar year, this played havoc with the Church's setting of the date of Easter which relates to the date of the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Julian Calendar has assumed that a solar year was 365.25 days, so a leap day every 4 years would keep things on track, but by 1582 the length of the solar year was calculated more accurately, with 365.2425 days being used (by omitting leap years in centennial years unless they are divisible by 400). 10 days were cut from the calendar to make up for the drift since 46 BCE. While Catholic countries were quick to adopt the new system, Protestants saw it as a Papist plot, so the Gregorian Calendar wasn't adopted in Britain until 1752 - the Act of Parliament went to great lengths to avoid mentioning Gregory, whilst adopting the Gregorian Calendar and the Calculation of Easter. At the same time Britain and its Empire also changed the start of the year from 25th March (Julian, 5th April Gregorian) to 1st January - though this had been adopted in Scotland in 1600. So between 1600 and 1752 there can be different years attributed to dates in Scotland and England. This is also the reason that the tax years commences on 6th April - the skipped leap day in 1800 moved the day to the 6th April, but that in 1900 did not move it again.
Further reform of the calendar was mooted in the 20th century, and a World Calendar was pushed which would have equalised the four quarters of the year, with a 31 day month followed by two of 30 days; a leap day at the end of June when necessary and an extra day after 30 December every year, neither of these would be a conventionally named weekday. This was considered by US Congress, but they eventually succumbed to the religious bullies, who couldn't possibly adapt to the idea of there occasionally being 8 days between their propaganda fests.
A little used calendar the Holocene, seeks to avoid the problem of negative counting BCE and the absence in the AD system of year 0. The Holocene is the current geological era, beginning when humanity first began to have an influence on the planet - with the beginning of agriculture and permanent settlements. The Holocene Calendar seeks to simplify things by simply adding 10,000 years to the Gregorian AD year, BCE dates are converted by subtracting from 10,001. Obviously, the 10,000 is an estimate, but it's not too far out - currently the consensus is around 9,700. So welcome to 12018 HE.
Islamic year is 1439 AH (from 21/9/18 to 10/9/18 - approximately because
According to the Hebrew Calendar it is the year AM (anno mundi - year of the world - ie when the world was created) 5778. Various different early Christian sects sought to determine the year of creation, mainly as a means of putting a date on the birth of Christ. The Romans tried on a number of occasions to work out a calendar, which they made extremely complicated - but they did try to sort out the fundamental problem that a year wasn't an exact number of days.
- but until what we would now regard as 525, no-one suggested starting from the supposed date of the birth of Christ.
In Rome it was the year Diocletian 270
a monk, Dionysius
Time isn't an easy thing to quantify - well actually it is - now. The second is defined precisely in a way that has nothing to do with the rotation of the earth, and which is completely meaningless to virtually everyone. The day is then defined as 86,400 seconds. This is of course going completely the other way around from the original definitions, which was problematic because the Earth doesn't play to the same rules - the orbit isn't a perfect circle, so a day might be 8 seconds longer or shorter than the official definition. And of course 365 days in a year was always an approximation. And ancient civilisations needed something to measure between a day and a year, so the obvious thing was to measure by was the moon, with is regular cycles and phases. A full moon every 29 days or so, hence the month, roughly 13 of them a year - and each month could be divided into 4 phases of the moon or a week, but again none of the divisions was exact. For ancient civilisations, even as recent as the Romans, the only thing that really mattered was the inconsistencies that the yearly approximation made. So when things got seriously out of synch, a few days would be added to get things back to normal. Actually until fairy recently, this only really mattered to the administrators and armies - and of course the church, who needed to drag the population in for its weekly dose of deception and theft.
Why do days start at midnight? Well it's obvious to us now - the middle of the night is clearly the best time to reset to zero. But it wasn't always. Before accurate clocks people didn't know when midnight was. Or care. They were asleep - they had no light after all. Mid-day they could measure courtesy of the sun, but why start a day then? The day was over at sunset (no artificial light remember), so that's when the new day began - and still does for the fundamental followers of some religions - Judaism, Islam for example.
Why does the year start on January 1? Well it doesn't in many cultures, Chinese New Year, Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) for example. Rosh Hashanah is traditionally the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve, or others suggest the beginning of the agricultural cycle. The Chinese New Year date varies as it depends on their lunisolar based calendar - the new moon near the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox - thus between 21 January and 20 February.
The Greeks had various different names for the months, and different starting points for their years, dependent upon region or state. But the general principle seems to have been 12 lunar months, alternating between 29 and 30 days to take account of an actual lunar cycle being 29½ days. Of course this didn't fit the solar cycle, so extra intercalary days had to be added.
The Romans initially had a calendar based on 38 nunindae (8 day weeks) organised into 10 months - which left 50 additional days in the winter, initially not organised into months. The total of 354 days in a lunar year - 12 moons of 29.5 days. This meant that years soon became out of synch unless you added some intercalary days - or saved them up to make an intercalary month every couple of years. With the original 10 month scheme, the year started in March, hence the names of September to December make sense as the 7th to 10th months, but then two new months January and February were added to organise the winter days, but February was still considered to be the end of the year, when the intercalary days would be added, or an intercalary month inserted before March.
The Romans had an infuriatingly complicated way of expressing days of the month: each month had three key days: Calends - the first day of each month; Nones - initially either the 4th or 6th of the month depending on its length, but this appears to have been standardised later on to the 4th; Ides - originally the day before the middle of the month, but standardised later as the 13th. The numbering of the days was the number of days before the next big day, (and Romans counted inclusively) so 30th January would be 3 days before the Calends of February.
Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in 46 BCE to bring it into line with the solar year - basically as we have it today, though that meant a lot of extra days in 46 BCE - 446 days altogether. Though the instructions stipulated a leap day every 4th year on the 24th February - so there was a 6th day before the Calends of March and then a 2nd 6th day before the Calends of March. Because of inclusive counting this got added every 3rd year until the time of Augustus, who then had to suspend the leap days for a number of years to get back on track. The actual administration of the calendar and promulgation of dates seems to have been left in the hands of priests.
The fifth and sixth months (starting from March) were originally named Quintilis and Sextilis, but were renamed after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the revised Gregorian Calendar - because in the 1600 years since Julius Caesar, the Julian year had drifted from the solar year, this played havoc with the Church's setting of the date of Easter which relates to the date of the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Julian Calendar has assumed that a solar year was 365.25 days, so a leap day every 4 years would keep things on track, but by 1582 the length of the solar year was calculated more accurately, with 365.2425 days being used (by omitting leap years in centennial years unless they are divisible by 400). 10 days were cut from the calendar to make up for the drift since 46 BCE. While Catholic countries were quick to adopt the new system, Protestants saw it as a Papist plot, so the Gregorian Calendar wasn't adopted in Britain until 1752 - the Act of Parliament went to great lengths to avoid mentioning Gregory, whilst adopting the Gregorian Calendar and the Calculation of Easter. At the same time Britain and its Empire also changed the start of the year from 25th March (Julian, 5th April Gregorian) to 1st January - though this had been adopted in Scotland in 1600. So between 1600 and 1752 there can be different years attributed to dates in Scotland and England. This is also the reason that the tax years commences on 6th April - the skipped leap day in 1800 moved the day to the 6th April, but that in 1900 did not move it again.
Further reform of the calendar was mooted in the 20th century, and a World Calendar was pushed which would have equalised the four quarters of the year, with a 31 day month followed by two of 30 days; a leap day at the end of June when necessary and an extra day after 30 December every year, neither of these would be a conventionally named weekday. This was considered by US Congress, but they eventually succumbed to the religious bullies, who couldn't possibly adapt to the idea of there occasionally being 8 days between their propaganda fests.
A little used calendar the Holocene, seeks to avoid the problem of negative counting BCE and the absence in the AD system of year 0. The Holocene is the current geological era, beginning when humanity first began to have an influence on the planet - with the beginning of agriculture and permanent settlements. The Holocene Calendar seeks to simplify things by simply adding 10,000 years to the Gregorian AD year, BCE dates are converted by subtracting from 10,001. Obviously, the 10,000 is an estimate, but it's not too far out - currently the consensus is around 9,700. So welcome to 12018 HE.
Islamic year is 1439 AH (from 21/9/18 to 10/9/18 - approximately because
According to the Hebrew Calendar it is the year AM (anno mundi - year of the world - ie when the world was created) 5778. Various different early Christian sects sought to determine the year of creation, mainly as a means of putting a date on the birth of Christ. The Romans tried on a number of occasions to work out a calendar, which they made extremely complicated - but they did try to sort out the fundamental problem that a year wasn't an exact number of days.
- but until what we would now regard as 525, no-one suggested starting from the supposed date of the birth of Christ.
In Rome it was the year Diocletian 270
a monk, Dionysius
Dancing on the Head of a Pin
From what I've written elsewhere, you'll be aware I'm not a fan of religion - the world's longest con; or organised bullying. Not seeking to single any out - they're all as bad as each other in their different ways. The excesses of the stupidity of Christianity have sometimes been exemplified by the debates that clerics are supposed to have had on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Whether this was ever debated in reality, the tortuous wranglings that the church got itself into over determining when Easter should be is totally bizarre - yet still much of the world adheres to this nonsense. It appears to have been first celebrated at the time of the Jewish Passover, which begins on the 15th of the Jewish month Nisan, which typically is on the night of a full moon after the spring equinox. But the exact timing varies because the Hebrew Calendar is based on a 12 lunar month year, with an additional month added every two to three years. That sound complicated? Simple compared with Easter!
The date of Easter was important as the church also sought to bully its adherents into fasting for the 40 days of Lent prior to Easter, and spent a great deal of time defining how much could be eaten of what type of food and inventing rules for special days. At certain times the rich could buy their way out of some of the restrictions by helping pay for the church's so-called holy wars - the terrorist crusades against Islam.
In 325 the Council of Nicea established two fairly simple rules - independence from the Hebrew Calendar and worldwide uniformity. No rules as to how it would be set however. In 725 the Venerable Bede put it as "The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox" - which would be simple to follow, except that the equinox can be between 19 and 21 March, but the church determined that for the purposes of calculating Easter 21 March would be used (a simplification, I guess!). BUT then they complicate matters by defining the ecclesiastical full moon based on a 19 year calendar covering 235 lunar months. The first day of the month is an ecclesiastical new moon (which may or may not be the actual new moon) which falls between 8 March and 5 April each year. Easter is the Sunday following the notional full moon 13 days after this new moon, and is thus between 22 March and 25 April.
Simples!
In the 7th century the Kingdom of Northumbria was in deep crisis - they couldn't agree on how Easter should be fixed!
Columba and other Irish monks had set up a base on Iona to bring Christianity to Britain and they used a different system to determine Easter based on an 84 year cycle and an equinox on 25 March (which dates back to the Roman calendar). But there had also been other missionaries from Rome, where the Roman or Alexandrian cycle (as described above) was used. King Edwin of Northumbria had been sucked into the religion by a Roman emissary; he was succeeded by Oswald a convert of Irish monks; then his brother Oswiu, but the latter's second wife was a fan of Wilfrid - the major champion of Roman customs in the area; and factions developed at the royal court. The Synod of Whitby was called in 664 to resolve this matter so that the royals could celebrate Easter at the same time. It also discussed the vital matter of the style of tonsure monks should have. (You almost wished they had discussed angels and pins). Oswiu sided with Rome and won the day - mainly on the infallibility of the Pope.
It was this formulation that drifted so far away from real full moons that Pope Gregory felt he had to change the base calendar and developed the Gregorian Calendar. Eastern Orthodox church still uses Julian Calendar dates, presumably just to be perverse.
In 1997 the World Council of Churches proposed a simplification to be adopted around the world to base Easter on actual full moons and equinoxes - this of course was far too sensible to be actually implemented.
The date of Easter was important as the church also sought to bully its adherents into fasting for the 40 days of Lent prior to Easter, and spent a great deal of time defining how much could be eaten of what type of food and inventing rules for special days. At certain times the rich could buy their way out of some of the restrictions by helping pay for the church's so-called holy wars - the terrorist crusades against Islam.
In 325 the Council of Nicea established two fairly simple rules - independence from the Hebrew Calendar and worldwide uniformity. No rules as to how it would be set however. In 725 the Venerable Bede put it as "The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox" - which would be simple to follow, except that the equinox can be between 19 and 21 March, but the church determined that for the purposes of calculating Easter 21 March would be used (a simplification, I guess!). BUT then they complicate matters by defining the ecclesiastical full moon based on a 19 year calendar covering 235 lunar months. The first day of the month is an ecclesiastical new moon (which may or may not be the actual new moon) which falls between 8 March and 5 April each year. Easter is the Sunday following the notional full moon 13 days after this new moon, and is thus between 22 March and 25 April.
Simples!
In the 7th century the Kingdom of Northumbria was in deep crisis - they couldn't agree on how Easter should be fixed!
Columba and other Irish monks had set up a base on Iona to bring Christianity to Britain and they used a different system to determine Easter based on an 84 year cycle and an equinox on 25 March (which dates back to the Roman calendar). But there had also been other missionaries from Rome, where the Roman or Alexandrian cycle (as described above) was used. King Edwin of Northumbria had been sucked into the religion by a Roman emissary; he was succeeded by Oswald a convert of Irish monks; then his brother Oswiu, but the latter's second wife was a fan of Wilfrid - the major champion of Roman customs in the area; and factions developed at the royal court. The Synod of Whitby was called in 664 to resolve this matter so that the royals could celebrate Easter at the same time. It also discussed the vital matter of the style of tonsure monks should have. (You almost wished they had discussed angels and pins). Oswiu sided with Rome and won the day - mainly on the infallibility of the Pope.
It was this formulation that drifted so far away from real full moons that Pope Gregory felt he had to change the base calendar and developed the Gregorian Calendar. Eastern Orthodox church still uses Julian Calendar dates, presumably just to be perverse.
In 1997 the World Council of Churches proposed a simplification to be adopted around the world to base Easter on actual full moons and equinoxes - this of course was far too sensible to be actually implemented.