Re: CHAT: Punic sources

At 11:33 am -0600 13/12/00, Microtonal wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> >Fat lot of
>> >good it did them, anyway. ;)
>>
>> Certainly - the Roman Church has survived fairly well for nearly 2000 years.
>
>I was referring more to the idea of Christian universality,
Sorry - misunderstood.  But the 'Roman universality' thing didn't, surely,
become an issue until the 'Constantinople universality' idea was promoted -
or maybe each were reflexions of secular political tensions between the two
centers also.

>which, in
>fact, never really existed. There were strong dogmatic divisions between
>the eastern and western churches from the very beginning.
Both still generally claim that the other is schismatic rather than
heretical.  There was an awful lot of politics mixed up with the east-west
division also.

And I think a division on similar lines would probably have happened even
if the Carthaginians had wiped out the Romans.  I don't think the latter
would've been any more successful in stemming presure from Germanic tribes
on the western provinces.  The two centers would've been different.
Carthage and Alexandria?  Perhaps even more of Europe lost.  A stronger
Christian north Africa might have caused the early Muslims to to sweep
across Asia Minor & the Balkans rather than across north Africa.

The whole of western & central Europe might have been essentially Germanic
speaking.  There'd certainly be no Ramance languages!

[....]
>
>Here's the passage I was referring to, from Paul Jouon's 1923 French grammar:
>
>Phoenician, which is represented by the inscription of King Kilamuwa
>(9th cent.) and by fairly numerous inscriptions later than the fifth
>cent., is closely related to Hebrew. The Punic dialect of Carthage and
>her colonies is related to Phoenician.
>
>I forgot to include the word "dialect".
Yep - there were Phoenician dialects around the Med - especially on the
eastern seaboard of Spain.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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