Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe?
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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, Scandinavian, 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.
AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Do y’all just not understand the word almost or something? Or is this just general internet nitpickery?
ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It seems to me that you misunderstood the meaning of almost. At least, I have never heard almost to mean ‘less than half’.
FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
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. It’s “the basis language for European civilization,” perhaps. Written on heraldry, churches, buildings and artifacts all over the continent.