So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there, but how come it didn’t take as strong a hold in the Middle East? It’s not as if the Romans were never there, and they lingered there far longer than they did in Europe. Was it just a matter of a stronger preexisting culture, or did the Arabs have something to do with it? What happened here?
the roman administration in the east relied on greek, which was well established as an administrative language by alexander and his successors. cleopatra e.g. was a ptolemaic, greek queen.
Exactly this. Most Egyptians could speak Greek by the time Romans ruled Egypt and continued to learn and speak Greek until Arab conquest when Greek eventually became irrelevant
*Most Egyptian elites? I’m not well-informed on this, but I find it hard to believe that your average Egyptian peasant could speak Greek.
There an Arab historian called Maqrizi who lived in the 15th century. He wrote about south Egyptians monasteries saying: "… and most Christians of these monasteries the knowladge of Southern Coptic dialect [ Egyptian language ] followed by Northern Coptic dialect and Christian women of the south and their children almost speak nothing but southern Egyptian and have complete knowledge of Roman language (he means Greek since Romans in Egypt spoke Greek).
In addition to that many christian prayers are almost entirely in Greek. Its possible that really simple people like farmers may have not spoken Greek but most Egyptians had to understand it since it was the legal language of the country
The Levantine areas were controlled by the Eastern Roman Empire which used Greek as the main language. Plus, Greek had been spoken in some form or another since Alexander invaded centuries earlier. The only time Latin may have been used in the region was during the Crusades when European settlers began arriving
Wait a second, does that mean Life of Brian was inaccurate and the graffiti grammar correction should’ve been in Greek instead?
Latin would have been used by (most often Latin-native) governors and their administration when reporting to Rome, and there would have been Latin speaking personnel, but they would have been the exception.
So yes, it would have been more accurate to use Greek, but of course it would have made the whole thing a lot less funny because most of the audience wouldn’t have been able to decipher the Greek letters (and it would have added an extra layer of confusion to a clever joke).
Even in the Western half of the empire a lot of the elites spoke Greek. For example: while he would definitely have been capable of speaking Latin, Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations in Greek.
At that time, (first century CE) there really were Latin speaking Romans in Jerusalem and administrating the region they called Judea. This is before the larger cultural and then eventually political split of the empire, so your average centurion would likely still be speaking Latin in order to communicate with his superiors and other troops.
Of course, they could definitely have spoken other local languages as well (depending on their personal history and length of stay).
Edit: Edited to add the date and also wanted to say that while your average centurion and likely a lot of the soldiery would be able to speak (or at least understand) Latin, the aristocracy and administration of the province would likely be able to speak Greek as well, or at the very least communicate through proxies in Greek and Hebrew.
So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there
That is agross overstatement. Latin is not the basis for the Germanic, Slavic, Gaelic and Uralic language families, nor for Greek and Basque. Together those are a lot more languages than there are Latin descendants in Europe.
Do y’all just not understand the word almost or something? Or is this just general internet nitpickery?
It seems to me that you misunderstood the meaning of almost. At least, I have never heard almost to mean ‘less than half’.
It isn’t even close to almost. Maybe most of the countries on the Mediterranean, plus Portugal and debatably Belgium and Switzerland, but that’s very much not most of Europe.
They’re pretending to not understand that you mean Latin was the language of catholic church, Roman state, law, medicine, mathematics and thus the script for (almost) all European alphabets.
There’s genuinely a toxicity problem on Lemmy, probably ingrained in many users from years of Reddit usage. 😮💨🥰 but DW about it.
Technically it is not the “basis” of languages, but with contextual knowledge it’s so easy to know what you really meant by that. That it’s “the basis language for European civilization,” perhaps. Written on heraldry, churches, buildings and artifacts all over the continent.
being the basis of almost every language there,
That is simply not true.
Only for these 6 you can call it the basis: Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, Moldovan. It has also influenced English a lot.
That makes 280 mill people in Europe having one of these as their native language.
And then there are about 435 mill people in Europe who have one of the 35 other European languages as their native language.
(Data source: Google AI)
Any of us can ask AI and throw slop into a conversation. If you don’t have anything substantive to add maybe read and learn.
