Sardinia (and sardines)

The red wine, which is good in Sardinia, had been drunk freely.

D.H Lawrence: Sea and Sardinia

I’ve just had a lovely week away in Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily. On the surface the island seems very Italian, but scratch a little deeper and you can see evidence of its rich and varied linguistic history everywhere. Although, the Romans took control of Sardinia in 238 BCE, Latin took a long time to supplant the indigenous Paleo-Sardinian language (Nuragic), as well as Phoenician, which had arrived several centuries earlier with colonists from Phoenicia (in modern-day Lebanon) and in a later separate wave via settlers from the Phoenician colony of Carthage. Nuragic – essentially a language of a Bronze Age culture – held out for hundreds of years in the remote, mountainous region of Barbagia, formerly Barbaria ‘Land of the Barbarians’. This coinage is attributed to Cicero, who particularly detested the inhabitants of this area for their resistance to the ‘civilised’ Romans, but was hardly less scornful towards the Sardinians as a whole, describing them as latrones mastrucati ‘thieves in rough sheepskins'. Eventually, Latin won out, and its daughter language, Sardinian or Sard, became the language of the whole island, though Nuragic and Phoenician words were incorporated into it. Due to Sardinia’s relative geographical isolation, Sard became a language in its own right and thus not intelligible to Italian speakers or speakers of other Romance languages. Up until the early-twentieth century Sard was the first language of the majority of the islanders, but rapid Italianisation has meant that it is now only spoken as a first language in isolated pockets of Barbagia – now holding out against Italian rather than Latin.

This is not the whole story, though. Not only Romans, Carthaginians and Phoenicians, but also Vandals, Byzantines, Pisans, Genoese, Aragonese, Savoyards and French took control of the island at various times and left their mark. The Aragonese invaded in 1323 and established the Kingdom of Sardinia, which lasted until 1720. Their coat of arms became the frankly disquieting flag of Sardinia – a red St George’s Cross on a white background with the bandaged head of a Moor in each quarter – thought to represent the severed heads of four Moorish kings who were defeated by the Aragonese at the Battle of Alcoraz in 1096. Apparently, the Moors were only overcome due to the miraculous intervention of St George at a decisive moment of the battle. An alternative tradition states that the heads represent four Aragonese victories over the Moors during the Reconquista in Zaragoza, Murcia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands. (Whatever the true origin of the flag, it became even more disturbing in 1800, when Sardinia passed to the House of Savoy. From this point until 1999, the Moors were depicted not with bandages but with blindfolds over their eyes, suggesting a very grisly fate.)

The cultural and economic centre of the Crown of Aragon was Barcelona, so Catalan was its major language. In 1372, Catalan-speaking colonists expelled the Sardinian inhabitants of the city of Alghero and ‘repopulated’ their homes, giving the city the nickname Barceloneta (little Barcelona). The actual root of the name Alghero is a bit more prosaic, given that it means ‘place of the seaweed’ > medieval Latin alguerium ‘seaweed, sea grass’, but it is both beautiful and strategically positioned so definitely worth fighting over. There are still around 20,000 speakers of Catalan in Alghero (L’Alguer in Catalan) and there is a rearguard action being fought to preserve the Catalan language and culture there. Street signs and notices in the old town are bilingual Italian-Catalan, so for every via, there is a carrer, spiaggia vies with platja for precedence in the names of beaches and a fortified tower on the sea wall goes by the Catalan name of Torre de Sant Jaume with an apologetic Italian Torre di San Giacomo in brackets. It was great to find that paella was on the menu in Alghero along with pasta and a lot of seafood – it was less great to fly back to our green and pleasant land after a few days there – we all know why England is green, and it was giving me a belligerently rainy welcome to prove it.

Anyway, to stop moaning and return to the topic – more or less – the name Sardinia first appears in the historical record as SRDN on the Phoenician-inscribed Stele of Nora aka Nora Stone (as with other Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, Phoenician isn’t too concerned about reproducing vowel sounds in its script as the consonants carry the word meaning). This stone tablet was found at the archaeological site of the pre-Roman city of Nora in 1773 and has been dated to around 800 BCE, meaning that the ethnonym Sardinia, or at least something like it, predates Latin by centuries. One possible etymology for Sardinia is the god Sardus, known to the Romans as Sardus Pater (Father of the Sardinians), a mythological hero to the Nuragic people. The Greek geographer and historian Pausanius (c.110-c.180 CE) writes that Sardus is the son of the Phoenician deity Melqart, protector of the world and ruler of the underworld. Melqart was identified by the Greeks as Heracles and by the Romans as the Tyrian Hercules. According to Pausanius, Sardus came from Libya at the head of an army and occupied the whole of the island, so its name was changed from Ichnusa (a name which lives on in Sardinia’s best-selling beer) to Sardinia in Sardus’s honour.

You can also find sardines in Sardinia, and popular etymology suggests that the fish got its name because the seas around Sardinia were, er, packed like sardines, with shoals of the fish. It is certainly true that the closeness of Ancient Greek Σαρδώ (Sardo) ‘Sardinia’ and σαρδῖνος (sardinos) ‘sardine’ has been attested in writings since the time of Aristotle. This theory isn’t without its detractors, though, as this would suggest that the Ancient Greeks were importing fish from Sardinia 2,400 years ago. However, sardine fishing took place in Greek waters, so it seems a bit odd that this fish would have been named after an island which is over 700 miles away from Athens. A possible alternative explanation for the source of σαρδῖνος (sardinos) – and ultimately Latin sardina and French and English sardine – is σαρδῐον (sardion) ‘sardonyx’, a gemstone also known as sard, carnelian, or red onyx because some sardines and pilchards have flesh that is the same reddish colour as the gem. Sardonyx takes its name from the city of Sardis (Σάρδιες) the capital of ancient Lydia (now Sart in western Turkey), which was captured by Alexander the Great, a former pupil of Aristotle, in 334 BCE. Sardis was famed for the hardstone carving of its craftsmen, who produced seals, jewellery and decorative objects out of semi-precious stones. That certainly sounds less fishy to me. Adiosu!