| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
A language, "A", occupies a given territory. A language, "B" (brought, for example, with migrations of population) arrives in the territory. It makes contact, and then interferes with language A. Language B is going to supplant language A: the speakers of language A abandon their own language in favour of that of population B, generally because they believe that it is in their best interests (economic, political, cultural, social). Nevertheless, language A influences language B, even if only because the speakers retain certain features characteristic of their former language.
For example, Gaulish is a substratum of French. A Celtic people, the Gauls, lived in the current French-speaking territory before the arrival of the Romans. Given the cultural, economic and political prestige which Latin enjoyed, the Gauls eventually abandoned their language in favour of Latin, which evolved in this region until eventually it took the form of Modern French. The Gaulish speech disappeared, but it remains detectable in some French words (approximately ninety). All Romance languages except Romanian share this lexical substratum.
There are many controversial theories related to linguistic substrata. For instance, some linguists contend that Japanese language is an Altaic superstrate imposed on an Austronesian or SiniticThe Chinese language (/, /, or ; pinyin: hany, huay, or zhongwen) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, regional variations in spoken language are compara substrate. It has also been proposed that the root of the Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. They are characterised by a number of unique linguistic feature was the imposition of an Indo-European language (most probably a CelticCeltic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages. They were spoken across western Europe in ancient times, but are now limited to a few enclaves in the British Isles and on the peninsula of Brittany in France. There are four main groups of Cel or SlavicThe Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages are the languages of the Slavic peoples. They form a distinct group of Indo-European languages, with speakers in most of Eastern Europe, much of the Balkans, parts of Central Europe, and the northern pa language) over a Finno-Ugric substratum.
In horticultureThe Latin words hortus ( garden plant) and cultura (culture) together form horticulture classically defined as the culture or growing of garden plants. Horticulture is, however, much more. Horticulturists work in plant propagation, crop production, plant: materials allowing the binding of roots of a plant.