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?
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 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
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!
Does this mean we should cut off John Cleeses balls?
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.
