Western academics claim they are civilised because they have constructed a self-serving, self-satisfied, self-referential pedigree [aka historical narrative] that stretches back through history to Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. 600 AD).

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Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece Ancient Rome was an Italic civilization that began on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants (roughly 20% of the world’s population) and covering 6.5 million square kilometers (2.5 million sq mi) during its height between the first and second centuries AD. In its approximately 12 centuries of existence, Roman civilization shifted from a monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it came to dominate Southern and Western Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa, and parts of Northern and Eastern Europe. Rome was preponderant throughout the Mediterranean region and was one of the most powerful entities of the ancient world. It is often grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome

This is a remarkable achievement because the academics had to bridge a 700 year gap in the historical narrative [“roughly the 6th to 13th centuries”] that they called the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages is a historical periodization used originally for the Middle Ages, which emphasizes the cultural and economic deterioration that supposedly occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.

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The term once characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the “light of Rome” after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.

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Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29

Bridging this Academic Abyss [aka the Dark Ages] was largely achieved by the Western academics swallowing [hook, line and sinker] the self-serving historical narrative manufactured by the Machiavellian Monasteries.

Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries

Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden

The Journal of Economic History – Vol. 69, No. 2 – 2009

Click to access Charting%20the%20%27Rise%20of%20the%20West%27.pdf See: https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/the-heinsohn-horizon-the-academic-abyss/

Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, the foundations of Western academia rest upon an historical narrative designed to initiate [and justify] an age of barbarism during the second millennium.

Therefore, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 was primarily a co-ordinated Viking Mercenary Invasion on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and thus probably qualifies as the Second Roman Invasion of England. https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/the-heinsohn-horizon-the-academic-abyss/ The crusader armies initially fought the Turks at the lengthy Siege of Antioch that began in October 1097 and lasted until June 1098. Once inside the city the crusaders massacred the Muslim inhabitants and pillaged the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

Nevertheless, these wonderful Western academics prefer their victims to focus upon their carefully crafted pedigree they have constructed i.e. the Indo-European language tree.

These terrifically talented Western academics are highly skilled in the arts of Crossword Puzzles and Jigsaw Puzzles because they claim to have reverse engineered the academic equivalent of the London Bus Timetable by judiciously selecting samples from their fragmentary collection of [frequently indecipherable] used bus tickets.

The Western academic bus journey begins in the Greek island of Euboea in the 8th century BC with the Euboean alphabet with [somewhere between] 27 and 35 characters [depending upon your perspective].

The Euboean alphabet was used in the cities of Eretria and Chalkis and in related colonies in southern Italy, notably in Cumae and in Pithekoussai. It was through this variant that the Greek alphabet was transmitted to Italy, where it gave rise to the Old Italic alphabets, including Etruscan and ultimately the Latin alphabet. Some of the distinctive features of the Latin as compared to the standard Greek script are already present in the Euboean model. The inscription of the so-called Cup of Nestor, found in Ischia;

Euboean alphabet, 8th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumaean_alphabet#Euboean

The first stop is in the Bay of Naples [also] in the eighth century BC where they drop off the Old Italic alphabet of 26 characters and the Etruscan alphabet of up to 34 characters.

Old Italic refers to any of several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC. Various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch (Faliscan and members of the Sabellian group, including Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene, and other Indo-European branches such as Celtic, Venetic and Messapic) originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script

Heading north [on their leisurely journey towards Rome] the academics drop off the Latino-Faliscan family of languages in the 7th century BC.

The Faliscan language was the now-extinct Italic language of the ancient Falisci, forming, together with Latin, the Latino-Faliscan languages group of the Italic languages. It seems probable that the language persisted, though being gradually permeated with Latin, until at least 150 BC.

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An estimated 355 inscriptions survive, mostly short and dating from the 7th to 2nd centuries BC. Some are written in a variety of the Old Italic alphabet derived from the Etruscan, and are written from right to left, but show some traces of the influence of the Latin alphabet. An inscription to Ceres of c. 600 BC, found in Falerii and usually taken as the oldest example, reads left to right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faliscan_language The Latino-Faliscan languages are a group of languages that belong to the Italic language family of the Indo-European languages. They were spoken in Italy. Latin and Faliscan belong to this group, as well as two others often considered to be archaic Latin dialects, Lanuvian and Praenestine. Latin eventually absorbed the others, replacing Faliscan as the power of the Romans expanded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino-Faliscan_languages

The academics then travel back in time so they can drop-off some Etruscans in the general vicinity of Rome during the 8th century.

Latium is the region of central western Italy in which the city of Rome was founded and grew to be the capital city of the Roman Empire.

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The Etruscans, from their home region of Etruria (modern day Tuscany) exerted a strong cultural and political influence on Latium from about the 8th century BC onward. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latium

The academics then loiter around Rome for several centuries whilst they gently morph the Etruscan Old Italic characters through Old Latin into Classical Latin.

The Latin alphabet is the main writing system in use in the Western world and is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as “the alphabet” in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet Slowly the Latin alphabet became increasingly standardized. Writing direction settled on left-to-right toward the 5th or 4th century BCE, and letter shapes became more or less the same in Latium. And by Rome’s Republican period (3rd century BCE), the Latin alphabet has evolved to the “modern” form: AncientScripts.com – Latin – Lawrence Lo

http://www.ancientscripts.com/latin.html

However, whilst the academics are busy working on their Latin character set the “educated Roman citizens” are still busy conversing in Greek whilst the “first Popes” were apparently still writing in Greek during the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD.

The Church issued the dogmatic definitions of the first seven General Councils in Greek, and even in Rome Greek remained at first the language of the liturgy and the language in which the first Popes wrote. During the Late Republic and Early Empire periods, educated Roman citizens were generally fluent in Greek, although state business was conducted in Latin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin The word pope derives from Greek πάππας meaning “Father”. In the early centuries of Christianity, this title was applied, especially in the east, to all bishops and other senior clergy, and later became reserved in the west to the Bishop of Rome, a reservation made official only in the 11th century. The earliest record of the use of this title was in regard to the by then deceased Patriarch of Alexandria, Pope Heraclas of Alexandria (232–248). The earliest recorded use of the title “pope” in English dates to the mid-10th century, when it was used in reference to Pope Vitalian in an Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.

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Some historians have argued that the notion that Peter was the first bishop of Rome and founded the episcopal see there can be traced back no earlier than the 3rd century. The writings of the Church Father Irenaeus who wrote around AD 180 reflect a belief that Peter “founded and organised” the Church at Rome.

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Some writers claim that the emergence of a single bishop in Rome probably did not occur until the middle of the 2nd century. In their view, Linus, Cletus and Clement were possibly prominent presbyter-bishops but not necessarily monarchical bishops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope

In other words: Romans were speaking and writing Greek until Rome collapsed at the Heinsohn Horizon.

In reality, the destruction of the aqueducts happened swiftly, and with a power no humans had at their disposal. This happened, in 234 CE, only eight years after the last system had been completed under Alexander Severus in 226 CE.

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At the same time, Rome’s population was reduced from nearly one million to no more than 50,000.

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The cataclysm had struck with such force that more than half a millennium passed before Europeans could begin to slowly regain the technological competence of imperial Rome. Toppling of Rome’s Obelisks and Aqueducts – Ewald Ernst – August 2014

Click to access ewald-ernst-on-trevor-obelisks-aqueaducts-01-08-2014.pdf

However, those frightfully clever chaps in academia overcame this catastrophic calamity by inventing Vulgar Latin which [so they say] was a spoken language with “no official orthography”.

Evidently, “common or vernacular” Latin was spoken in an extremely loud voice because these astute academics [with very acute hearing] can heard the echoes of Vulgar Latin [all these centuries later] in the Romance Languages.

Vulgar Latin is a generic term for the nonstandard (as opposed to classical) sociolects of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. The word vulgar in this case refers to its original meaning of common or vernacular, and not the more pejorative usage, tasteless or indecent. Works written in Latin during classical times used Classical Latin rather than Vulgar Latin (originally called sermo vulgaris), with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon). Because of its nonstandard nature, Vulgar Latin had no official orthography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography An orthography is the methodology of writing a language. It includes rules of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography

Needless to say, Vulgar Latin is good for business because it provides academics with an excellent excuse to trawl through their ancient collections of indecipherable bus tickets looking for “traces” of Vulgar Latin.

Traces of their language appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements.

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It cannot be supposed that the spoken language was a distinct and persistent language so that the citizens of Rome would be regarded as bilingual. Instead, Vulgar Latin is a blanket term covering the popular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language throughout its range from the hypothetical prisca latinitas of unknown or poorly remembered times in early Latium to the death of Latin after the fall of the empire. Although making it clear that sermo vulgaris existed, the ancients said very little about it. Because it was not transcribed, it can only be studied indirectly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

Thus armed with Vulgar Latin these academics [with acute hearing] talk themselves back onto the bus bound for the Romance Languages.

The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (410 million), Portuguese (216 million), French (75 million), Italian (60 million), and Romanian (25 million). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

Remarkably, Italian text just appears in Italy after the Academic Abyss [960-963 AD].

The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the twelfth century, and the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Italian as a language used in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called Italian (or more accurately, vernacular, as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960–963, although the Veronese Riddle contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early Italian dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placiti_Cassinesi

The ever inventive academics [armed with acute eyesight, acute hearing, vivid imaginations and their indecipherable bus tickets] implausibly claim to have found some Vulgar Latin “written on the margin” of a parchment possibly during the 8th or 9th centuries by a monk.

The Veronese Riddle is a riddle written inlate Vulgar Latin written on the margin of a parchment, on the Verona Orational, probably in the 8th or early 9th century, by a Christian monk from Verona, in northern Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_Riddle

It is important to pause in Italy because [according to the mainstream] the “educated Roman citizens” jumped from writing Greek immediately before the Academic Abyss to writing Italian immediately after the Academic Abyss.

This highly implausible situation requires an explanation.

But the situation becomes understandable if we simply assume Italians communicated [i.e. spoke, read and wrote] in Italian before and after the Academic Abyss.

This very simple approach implies that it was only the Machiavellian Monasteries that transitioned from writing [mainly] Greek before the Academic Abyss to writing [mainly] Latin after the Academic Abyss.

This transition is called the East–West Schism in the 11th century mainstream narrative.

Conflicts involving authority in the church, particularly the authority of the Bishop of Rome finally culminated in the East–West Schism in the 11th century, splitting the Church into the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church In 1053, the first step was taken in the process which led to formal schism. Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople, in response to the Greek churches in southern Italy having been forced to either close or conform to Latin practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism

Therefore, the Romance Languages did not develop from Latin or Vulgar Latin.

The more likely linguistic relationship is that Latin developed as an administrative language of the Roman Empire as it spread across Europe before the Academic Abyss and that the Latin alphabet was subsequently used to develop the written form of the native Romance Languages as the Machiavellian Monasteries spread across Europe after the Academic Abyss.

In Romania the amazing academics invented another spoken language [Proto-Romanian] to bridge themselves across the Academic Abyss until Romanian could finally emerge in “historical record in the early 16th century.”

Proto-Romanian (also known as “Common Romanian”, româna comună or “Ancient Romanian”, străromâna) is a Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today’s Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) before ca. 900 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Romanian_language The history of Eastern Romance between the 3rd century and the development of Proto-Romanian by the 10th century, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, is unknown. It is a matter of debate whether Proto-Romanian developed among Romanized people who were left behind in Dacia by the Roman withdrawal or among Latin-speakers in the Balkans south of the Danube. During the Middle Ages, Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree by Greek. Romanian remains unattested throughout the Middle Ages, and only enters the historical record in the early 16th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language

In France the creative academics are really stumped and prefer to simply state that “French is a Romance language” descended from Vulgar Latin.

French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France by the Belgae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#History

The inventive academics half-heartedly invoked their favourite recipe of morphing their spoken Vulgar Latin into another invented spoken language: Old French.

Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; Modern French ancien français) was the Gallo-Romance dialect continuum spoken from the 9th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d’oïl, contrasting with the langues d’oc or “Occitan” languages in the south of France. The mid 14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Ile de France region.

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Beginning with Plautus’s time (254–184 b.c.), Classical Latin’s phonological structure changed, eventually yielding Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. This latter form differed strongly from its classical counterpart in phonology; it was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French

The reason the august academics are so restrained in France is because the earliest known document of written French [The Oaths of Strasbourg] were “written in three different languages: Medieval Latin, Old French and Old High German.”

In other words: the earliest written records show that Medieval Latin and Old French are completely different languages [that were both written using the Latin alphabet].

Given that the The Oaths of Strasbourg are dated 842 they appear to be forgeries manufactured after the Academic Abyss by the Machiavellian Monasteries.

Therefore, the Machiavellian Monasteries implicitly confirm the view that Medieval Latin and Old French are different languages.

No wonder the authoritative academics prefer simple authoritarian statements.

Extract of the Oaths of Strasbourg, the earliest French text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#History The Oaths of Strasbourg, were mutual pledges of allegiance between Louis the German (†876), ruler of East Francia, and his half-brother Charles the Bald (†877), ruler of West Francia made on 12 February 842. They are written in three different languages: Medieval Latin, Old French and Old High German. The Old French passages are generally considered to be the earliest texts in a language that is distinctly French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg

The story is very similar in Spain where the [now less than inventive] academics invented a verbal bridge between Vulgar Latin and Old Spanish [which they cannot document, detail or define] before Old Spanish finally morphs into written Spanish sometime during the 13th or 14th century AD.

The Spanish language evolved from Vulgar Latin (colloquial Latin), which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War, beginning in 210 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language#History Old Spanish, also known as Old Castilian (Spanish: castellano antiguo, romance castellano) or Medieval Spanish (Spanish: español medieval), is an early form of the Spanish language that was spoken on the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th century until roughly the beginning of the 15th century, before a consonantal readjustment gave rise to the evolution of modern Spanish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language The Cantar de Mio Cid (Song of my Cid) is the earliest Spanish text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#History El Cantar de mio Cid (or El Poema de mio Cid, literally “The Song of my Cid”), also known in English as The Poem of the Cid, is the oldest preserved Castilian epic poem (epopeya).[1] Based on a true story, it tells of the Castilian hero El Cid, and takes place during the Reconquista, or reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Per Abbad puts the date 1207 after his name, but the existing copy forms part of a 14th-century codex in the Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library) in Madrid, Spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantar_de_Mio_Cid The Reconquista (“reconquest”) is a period of approximately 781 years in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, after the Islamic conquest in 711 to the fall of Granada, the last Islamic state on the peninsula, in 1492. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista

The exhausted [and very tiring] academics deploy the same recipe in Portugal with the same implausible results.

Galician-Portuguese developed in the region of the former Roman province of Gallaecia, from the Vulgar Latin (common Latin) that had been introduced by Roman soldiers, colonists and magistrates during the time of the Roman Empire. Although the process may have been slower than in other regions, the centuries of contact with Vulgar Latin, after a period of bilingualism, completely extinguished the native languages, leading to the evolution of a new variety of Latin with a few Gallaecian features. Gallaecian and Lusitanian influences were absorbed into the local Vulgar Latin dialect, and this can be detected in some Galician-Portuguese words as well as in place-names of Celtic and Iberian origin (e.g. Bolso).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician-Portuguese Portuguese evolved from the medieval language, known today by linguists as Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese or Old Galician, of the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia, the first among the Christian kingdoms after the start of the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. It is in Latin administrative documents of the 9th century that written Galician-Portuguese words and phrases are first recorded. This phase is known as Proto-Portuguese, which lasted from the 9th century until the 12th-century independence of the County of Portugal from the Kingdom of Galicia, then a subkingdom of León. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language

Clearly, these terrifically talented academics should switch to playing Tiddlywinks.