First page Back Continue Last page Overview Graphics

• As we said earlier, we have to remember that a fundamental shift from one national language to another, if it takes place at all, happens only over a very long period of time, measured not in decades, but in hundreds of years.
• The gradual shift from Aramaic in the Middle East to Arabic, for example, took literally hundreds of years - and that was despite the fact that Aramaic and Arabic are related Semitic languages!
• Similarly, when the Roman Empire invaded Britain, they ruled the country with an iron rule for more than four hundred years. The Romans were a Latin-speaking people. Yet despite this, and even although many of the names of towns and cities in Britain still bear Latin names, the ordinary people in Britain never spoke Latin.