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
I read that as “problematic Greek queen” 😅 I guess, same question, but for Greek?
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 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.
It seems to me that you misunderstood the meaning of almost. At least, I have never heard almost to mean ‘less than half’.
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.
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?
I will create a historically accurate version, using grok!
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.
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.
Does this mean we should cut off John Cleeses balls?
Latin is really interesting in its history. While it was a very large part of Roman culture and certainly still influences other languages today, it was mostly an Italian thing during the Empire. Romans from the Italian peninsula and, later on, the provinces closer to Italy, were the primary speakers of Latin in day to day use. Outside of that, the language was quite widespread, but was more of an administrative language, as others have said.
With imperial Rome’s penchant for integrating/melding itself with conquered cultures, and the influence of Latin through the Roman Catholic Church in the middle ages, Romance languages of Europe can really be seen more as expressions of Latin through different existing linguistic traditions.
I have heard that in some ways, Spanish is one of the closer varieties to Imperial Latin as, between the Roman conquering of the Iberian tribes and the eventual invasion of the Visigoths during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was one of the most culturally and administratively stable regions of the empire with much of its population being quite proud to consider themselves a part of the empire. Two of the more famous emperors, Trajan and Hadrian were both from Hispania and the region was seen as somewhat of a model province. When the Germanic Visigoths took over, they were already dealing with a pretty strong linguistic tradition in the region.
French is sort of another Germanic take on Latin. The Franks really started picking up Latin in the middle ages. Like the majority of Europe, the Franks brought Latin influences in primarily through Christianization and Roman Catholicism’s power structure, prestige, and connection to the somewhat mythical days of the empire.
Both of these languages evolved from continual and persistent contact with a conquering empire and religious structure where Latin was seen as a connection to power and importance. Latin’s place in other European languages comes largely from those connections as well and I would say, the strongest connections come from the religious framework of the Catholic Church.
The Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, by contrast, had already been leaning more heavily into Greek language and culture, even from the earlier days of the empire. This is mostly due to geography and preexisting cultures, but also due to the Eastern Empire’s ability to operate more like it had before the split. As they controlled the wealthier and more productive provinces, Byzantine rulers initially had more resources at their disposal and less of a need to create/capitalize on the mythological prestige of an old imperial language and religious structure to bring together disparate peoples.
Instead of promoting a more cohesive cultural/religious framework with outside civilizations, rulers in the East relied more on wealth and payment to pit rivals against each other or just bribe warlords to go away for a while. This would eventually lead to the slow retreat of Eastern borders and the conquest of important provinces by the more unified Arabs and Turks as allies became harder to find and the money ran out.
Basically, by the time Latin resurfaced as a prestigious language in Western Europe, it had already been largely abandoned in the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. With less linguistic tradition of Latin in the region, the cultures that took over after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire did not need to engage with the language much past scholarly curiosity, and even then, most of the important works were already written in Greek to begin with.
I would argue that due to the nature of the Roman Empire, Latin struggled to spread (especially Eastward and Northward) even during its heyday and was largely resurrected as an administrative language in Western Europe due to Germanic warlords wanting to have a connection to past glories of the Roman Empire and the potentially lucrative economic system of the Roman Church. It really is amazing how far it has reached linguistically since then. We still collectively treat it with reverence in academic and legal contexts millennia after it was spoken in day to day usage.
All of this, but I will also add that at least part of it is because the Roman Empire already had a pretty strong administrative hegemony to work from in the the eastern empire because it consisted of the leftover rump states from the fall of the Hellenic (Greek) Empire under Alexander the Great. The existence of a unifying Greek administrative class (the infamous Byzantine Bureaucracy of which much ink has been spilled) made it viable to simply leave Greek as the administrative language of the east. Where they had to build their own institutional infrastructure from the ground up in the west which made the association with Latin as the language of leadership far easier, it was far less ubiquitous in the east where most officials outside the governor’s inner circle spoke Greek.
Lots of great comments in here (I’ve really enjoyed it all, so great question!)
If you decide to dig in a little deeper, there’s a great podcast called The History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud.
While it’s the history of English, since you can’t separate English from Latin (plus the other PIE languages) nor from history itself, he ends up covering a lot of general history and languages.
In the context of biblical history, I’ve heard that, because of the Alexandrian empire and it’s 3-4 off-shoot kingdoms, Greek was actually the ‘Lingua Franca’ (default language for international communication) throughout the middle east; from before the Romans arrived, to Jesus’s time, to until after the Roman empire split in two for good.
I guess it is hard to supplant an existing Lingua Franca. France today is a good example - they are very defensive of their language, once the Standard Internationale, and so France sees less English speakers proportionally than other European countries such as Spain, Nederland and Germany.
So… The middle East’s dominant languages were Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian - then Muhammed shows up with Islam, and they conquer surrounding states. Arabic is spreading. And this is testament to Persia’s linguistic domination, right - Arabic calligraphy comes from the Persian alphabet. That’s bonkers; a group of people, B, subjugated by A, manages to get A to assume their script for all writing.
At that point, the whole(-ish) middle east now had a different alphabet - neither greek nor Roman - to write in. Languages don’t tend to change their script once they’ve settled on one. The only examples I know are Poland, who did it because of catholic church’s influence , and Mongolia, who were forced to by the soviet union; it doesn’t happen naturally. Oh also Turkey, which was again a government mandate.
Certain scripts are better for certain language sounds; I don’t expect Arabic will ever be written in Latin script in general practice. It didn’t spread at first because Greek was already so dominant, then because the catholic church wast spreading into Muslim territories in the middle east, and now because it is not Lingua Franca, languages have settled on the correct scripts, and Christianity isn’t spreading in the middle east, same as usual.
The Empire in the West basically shattered all pre-Roman forms of social organization, turning everyone into Roman citizens/subjects. This didn’t happen in the East, so they protected local language and culture from being subsumed by Greek (not Latin, as other comments have said). I’m only parroting this from when I asked the sam question so don’t ask me why this happened.
So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there
I’m assuming you’re referring to the Latin alphabet? Because the entire Germanic language family was not based on Latin.
Let’s assume I meant the Romance languages.
When I first started taking high school Latin, I thought any language with such an arcane grammar deserved to die. Later, I joked with a linguist about how I was so relieved modern romance languages like French have abandoned all that, and he said “Well, we still have Romanian.” Now, I live in horror of visiting eastern Europe.
It kinda did but it was supplanted by Arabic.
That’s not true
