How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe?

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• phr@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      *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.

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  • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I read that as “problematic Greek queen” 😅 I guess, same question, but for Greek?

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• trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Do y’all just not understand the word almost or something? Or is this just general internet nitpickery?

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    • ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It seems to me that you misunderstood the meaning of almost. At least, I have never heard almost to mean ‘less than half’.

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    • FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨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.

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• FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• robomuffin79@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Wait a second, does that mean Life of Brian was inaccurate and the graffiti grammar correction should’ve been in Greek instead?

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    • 1hundred47@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I will create a historically accurate version, using grok!

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    • Rothe@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Latin would have been used by 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).

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    • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Does this mean we should cut off John Cleeses balls?

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• Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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 English Podcast by Kevin Stroud.

  While it’s the history of English, since you can’t separate English from Latin (plus the other P.I.E languages) nor from history itself, he ends up covering a lot of general history and languages.

  The History of English Podcast

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

  (Source: Google AI)

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  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There are other (minor) Romance languages, like Provencal, Catalan and then the various Italian languages like Venetian, but most speakers of these also speak one of the six big ones so the overall number shouldn't change much.

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  • DrBob@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • zout@fedia.io ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Very substantive comment Dr. Bob!

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  • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Cmon man that is such a needless nitpick, especially as I had the qualifier almost in there. Also; booo AI, booo!

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    • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      ok, so almost all americans have an IQ below their presisent? 😅

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  • anothermember@feddit.uk ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    (Data source: Google AI)

    Then why bother us with it?

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• luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  In short: Administrative pragmatism meant that Latin never took as much hold in the east as it did in the west.

  The central influence of Rome runs was constrained by a fundamental difficulty of premodern logistics and communication: When the fastest way to deliver a message on land is “messenger on horseback” and the only way to move large armies is along major routes in well-populated territory you can plunder “acquire” food from, the ability to effectively administer a region diminishes with distance. Naval transport and supply can extended that range, to the degree that territories are navigable. Thus, it is essential to have local structures to facilitate administration.

  In western and middle Europe, such structures were largely absent, so Rome had to build its own, more or less by transplantation of Roman (educated) citizens via land grants to soldiers, creating a local military reserve and elite that could enforce Rome’s laws. However, Rome rarely bothered to stamp out local customs or enforce a strict cultural dominance: Whatever kept the locals content and compliant was good enough. This wasn’t progressive respect or inclusion or anything, just a pragmatic way to save on manpower.

  That led to a form of bidirectional cultural blending: Romans would adopt customs from those around them, while those seeking social status would adopt customs and learn the language of the Roman administration (particularly if they hoped to become citizens themselves). This blending of cultures and identities meant that, even as Rome’s central power crumbled, the emerging local elites still spoke Latin, or some locally flavoured variant thereof.

  In the east and south, the Macedonian conquest and successor states had already established an administrative system, staffed with a strongly separated Greek-speaking upper class. The same pragmatism that had led to the laissez a faire approach in Europe led to instead taking over the existing system, including Greek as dominant administrative language.

  The Roman Empire was eventually separated into two sub-empires, each with their own subordinate emperor, because a single administration became unfeasible due to various conflicts and the sheer size of it. As the western half started collapsing, the eastern empire almost exclusively used Greek for official matters, eventually supplanting local languages. However, it had to contend with (and lost some land to) the Arab Empire, which brought its own family of semitic languages, then eventually fell to the Ottoman Empire, which also brought its own Turkish languages.

  To sum it up, the reason it spread across Europe is the fact that it was a valuable language to learn for social and political reasons, while the reason it didn’t spread in the east is the existing of structures that made learning it obsolete, and its stand-in (Greek) didn’t survive the assault of other, powerful empires with enough administrative capacity to impose their own language.

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• tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  When I first started taking high school Latin, I thought any language with such an arcane grammar deserved to die. Later, I joked 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.

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• NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The Empire in the West basically shattered all 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.

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• rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  If we replace Latin with Greek, I’d say that the european areas were either just never conquered for long enough periods by people with different languages, or the conquerors weren’t enough (or not brutal enough) to enforce the spread of their own language (e.g. the Franks conquered vulgar latin-speaking France, but they adopted the latin-based language instead of making everyone else speak a Germanic language). Closely related to that is that Europe was almost fully christianized, which is heavily based on the Latin and Greek languages, while the middle east was almost fully (muslimized? islamized? there’s got to be a word for that).

  So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there

  At best half, by population. Germanic and slavic languages are a thing, they aren’t based on latin even if they use many latin loan words.

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  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    or the conquerors weren't enough (or not brutal enough) to enforce the spread of their own language; e.g. the Franks conquered Vulgar Latin-speaking France, but they adopted the Latin-based language instead of making everyone else speak a Germanic language.

    You're forgetting an important aspect: It was cool to be Roman back then. The people who conquered the Western Empire were people who wanted to be part of Roman citizens but were refused by the xenophobia of the late Western Empire (not to mention the whole christianization thing), and would essentially larp as Roman for a bit, so it's not like they were in a rush to assert ethnic dominance. "Barbarian" peoples conquering centers of civilization and assimilating into them rather than vice versa is a pretty common thing in history, see: the Mongols. This as opposed to early Muslim Arabs, who rode their own religion and culture to regional dominance and would have them spread across their conquered territories instead.

    while the middle east was almost fully (muslimized? islamized? there's got to be a word for that).

    "Islamized" is the word.

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• RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Let’s assume I meant the Romance languages.

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• muzzle@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It kinda did but it was supplanted by Arabic.

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  • icanbrewmushrooms@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That’s not true

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