Emphasis on "both languages". Latin was used for many things in the Greek East under the Romans, but it didn't replace Greek, and apart from the army and the bureaucracy it didn't have very much reach. In the East, the Empire mostly coined in Greek, kept Greek cultural institutions going, and never really applied the indirect pressure to speak and use Latin to the same extent that it did in the western provinces.
History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
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salty mud
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Thank you Dachs that is interesting but still my question remains somewhat unanswered. My question is why. Did they not apply the indirect pressure simply because they admired Greek culture and language?
All very true. However, when you say 'apart from the army and the bureaucracy, it didn't have very much reach', I think there's a danger of overstating how much reach Greek had. After all, Greek dominates the written evidence we have from the Roman world because literate people spoke it, but that ignores the majority of people who couldn't read or write anything. It certainly wasn't the only language around - there were people speaking Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac and all sorts of things throughout and beyond the Roman period. Incidentally, there were also people speaking (and writing inscriptions in) Punic in the West, and there's some evidence for at least heavily Celtic-flavoured Latin being spoken in Gaul.
EDIT: One interesting (and unsolicited) point on 'Greek culture' - by the 4th century AD or so, the words 'Greek' and 'Roman' had taken on the religious meaning of 'Pagan' and 'Christian' respectively. You had the slightly odd situation of Greeks writing tracts saying how 'the religion of the Greeks' was obviously false.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Is it so? Sounds odd, Greece having been an important focus of Early Christianity.
Those who would have been called 'Greeks' before had been calling themselves 'Romans' for long enough that it just seemed natural. 'Romaic' was the name given to the modern Greek language before independence. It wasn't until the 2nd millennium that Greek writers used the word 'Hellene' (the ancient word for 'Greek') without meaning 'Pagan' at all, and the name never really caught on again until the age of nationalism.
There's not a super large amount of evidence for it, and to make it seem like it was a decision somebody made and a specific policy followed would probably be going too far. To piggyback on what Flying Pig said, we shouldn't overstate the extent to which either Greek or Latin was spoken by people in either part of the Empire, even in the fourth and fifth centuries. (Nor should we understate it. We don't have very good evidence for what most people spoke, even in this comparatively well-documented era of late antiquity. There is a very limited amount that one can extrapolate from the limited source material we have.) Perhaps Latin was about as widespread in the West as it was in the East, but persisted and spread further in the West because of Latin Christian liturgy. There's an interesting chicken-and-egg question about whether the Syriac, Coptic, Greek, and even Latin churches developed their liturgies in those languages because people spoke them, or if people spoke them because that was what they heard in church all the time.Which, again, doesn't really answer your question. I suppose you could hypothesize that a widespread Roman cultural, uh, "appreciation" of Greek stuff and Greek language meant that it wasn't as subject to the sorts of pressures other languages were under, but you'd find it very difficult to demonstrate both the "appreciation" and the pressure (or lack thereof). I'm sorry if that's a long-winded and unsatisfying answer, but it's about all I've got as a nonspecialist.
Yep.
Ajidica
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How similar was spoken Greek across the empire? Would a moderately well educated person from Athens speak more or less the same Greek as someone from Antioch where the difference is only an "accent" (like a Texan or Australian accent) or would they need to put some work into understanding each other, such as modern English and Old English?
Educated people put a lot of effort into sounding 'right' - there was a huge movement that 'proper' literature and speaking should sound exactly like that made in Athens in the 5th century BC. The problem was that Greek, since at least the Macedonian conquests (of the 330s and 320s BC, and bear in mind I'm talking here about the 2nd century AD onwards), had generally changed to a kind of 'international version' (found in the New Testament) which, among other things, sounds totally different - in particular, almost all of the vowels sound the same, like in modern Greek, and the system of accents is completely different. There's a story of one sophist (professional philosopher-cum-teacher-cum-speaker) taking part in a public speaking contest, when the judge called him out using a particular word, and asked which Classical author he could cite as a precedent for using it in 'proper' oratory. According to the story, he replied 'me'.
That's a slightly roundabout way of getting at two points. The first is that the Greek texts we have from the Roman world (like the Latin, if perhaps less so) deliberately create the illusion that everyone spoke an identical language. The second is that that language was artificial - in reality, nobody spoke it. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to get at what they actually did speak. Pre-Roman Greek had a lot of dialects - there are several jokes in Athenian comedy mocking how Athenian audiences couldn't understand (or at least noticed the thick accents of) people from other cities. It's difficult to believe that differences of accent and dialect didn't exist on the much broader scale of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially after almost a thousand years of ruminating and mixing with local languages. But beyond a vague statement like 'more than they'd have you think', it's difficult to quantify how much difference there was between regional 'Greeks' as they were spoken.
Incidentally, they did precisely the same thing with modern Greek - the original policy of the Greek state was to bring back Attic Greek as spoken by Plato and Thucydides, and they ended up adopting a 'proper' dialect called katharevousa (which can roughly be translated as 'the dialect without corruption'), which essentially nobody spoke as a 'first language', and which was hugely different from the language actually used in daily life. If you look at the books published in Greece in the early part of the last century, they would give you one idea of what the Greek language looked like, but wouldn't let on that people essentially had to learn a second language in order to read and write them. Essentially the same thing was going on in the Roman period - the whole point of the complicated, archaic 'literary' dialect was that it took a lot of time and money to get the education that would allow you to speak, read and write it, which was an easy way of identifying who to be snobby about.
That's a slightly roundabout way of getting at two points. The first is that the Greek texts we have from the Roman world (like the Latin, if perhaps less so) deliberately create the illusion that everyone spoke an identical language. The second is that that language was artificial - in reality, nobody spoke it. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to get at what they actually did speak. Pre-Roman Greek had a lot of dialects - there are several jokes in Athenian comedy mocking how Athenian audiences couldn't understand (or at least noticed the thick accents of) people from other cities. It's difficult to believe that differences of accent and dialect didn't exist on the much broader scale of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially after almost a thousand years of ruminating and mixing with local languages. But beyond a vague statement like 'more than they'd have you think', it's difficult to quantify how much difference there was between regional 'Greeks' as they were spoken.
Incidentally, they did precisely the same thing with modern Greek - the original policy of the Greek state was to bring back Attic Greek as spoken by Plato and Thucydides, and they ended up adopting a 'proper' dialect called katharevousa (which can roughly be translated as 'the dialect without corruption'), which essentially nobody spoke as a 'first language', and which was hugely different from the language actually used in daily life. If you look at the books published in Greece in the early part of the last century, they would give you one idea of what the Greek language looked like, but wouldn't let on that people essentially had to learn a second language in order to read and write them. Essentially the same thing was going on in the Roman period - the whole point of the complicated, archaic 'literary' dialect was that it took a lot of time and money to get the education that would allow you to speak, read and write it, which was an easy way of identifying who to be snobby about.
Should be noted- i think it is revealing - that anyone speaking current greek can easily read the new testament (which- as known- was written in greek originally). That doesn't mean the language in the new testament was particularly refined (it wasn't). Yet it does help show that the greek language is continuous since ancient times, or at least if you go up to the first century AD or even up to Aristotle (who is closer to current greek than Plato is, while Homer is impossible to read if you do not know actual ancient/archaic greek he used).
Yet even in Homer, most of the words used still exist, albeit most of the time they have acquired different meant. Homer's grammar is not close to current greek grammar, though...
As a final note, i had some difficulty reading Byzantine-era manuscripts. It can be done, although again the same words have different meaning. The grammar is virtually the same, though. And the 'kathareuousa' you mentioned, yes, it was a more rigid version of greek, yet naturally it got a sort of fusion with more usual grammar (less austere) used up to now. Then again, the counter-movement (in the 60s iirc) to have a different and simplified version, the so-called 'demotike', followed the opposite direction, given what is now used is a mixture of the two.
I think at least some of that is to do with the pressure, for about the first century and a half of Greek independence, on people to see increasingly 'ancient' forms of speech and writing as increasingly 'correct'. In other words, as you've said, just as katharevousa took on features of demotike over time, so the regional and modern features of demotike declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as some deliberate official attempts to bring features of koine (New Testament) Greek into the everyday language. Interestingly, the law phasing out katharevousa as the official language said that the new one would be demotike, but 'without regional or extreme forms' - which ruled out one popular idea of demotike as a language which should embrace all of these, as the true language (in the sense of what they actually spoke) of the Greek people. One particularly important contribution of katharevousa is in how modern Greek handles words that weren't around in Antiquity. It normally forms its own compounds as an ancient speaker would have done, rather than (as, say, French and German usually do) borrowing the word directly from another language. Hence 'television' is τηλεόραση (far vision), a car is an αυτοκίνητο ('self-mover') and computer is
ηλεκτρονικός υπολογιστής (electronic calculator).
It's less straightforwardly 'continuity', and at least part a process of conscious reconstruction. It would be interesting to have gone around the villages in the final years of Turkish rule and found out how many of them could read Plato.
This (sort of) moves towards a second point - that the similarities are strongest when the two languages are written down, because the Greek writing system is (and historically was) extremely conservative. Modern Greek uses the same characters as Ancient Greek to make totally different sounds, and has a completely different system of accenting words - though until the 1970s, was still written with the ancient polytonic markings, which hadn't reflected ordinary speech since (at least) the Byzantine period. If you wrote ancient and modern Greek in the same system (like the IPA, for instance), you'd notice quite a lot more differences than are obvious on the page. For a modern speaker, understanding the manuscripts of Homer might be one thing, but it would be another thing entirely to have understood somebody reciting them.
I cannot make a comment on how different the sounds are - i have zero insight on that... Yet the loss of the polytonic was not just a loss about sound (my mother, for example, learned polytonic at school, while i did not) but also a hindrance as to intuitively telling etymological differences, given many words that now are written the exact same way had slightly different polytonic version.
The demotike was not a good idea, although neither was the kathareuousa. They are sort of different extremes, and in that respect the current version (which is virtually free to use parts of either) is a lot better in my view. And while the current Greek is not on par with Plato's, it is still a very intricate language, and (far more importantly) it is one that retains most of the etymological calculations going on in the undercurrent of the language, which is often termed as having parallelisms to mathematical ties (by which i mean the various structures of complex words, based on the foundation of a root that allows for huge numbers of variations). I am surely very happy that i write in greek, despite so few people in the world being able to read the language.
Re the terms used for modern machinery, it should be noted of course that many were coined by non-greeks, as in the case of Electricity (Electron, afaik, means 'unable to stay in one place; ever-moving, or similar. Electra iirc has the same root), aeroplane, astronaut, and even other words like television already have one part being greek.
Coining new terms in greek is still routinely being done, anyway, by foreign scientists.
The demotike was not a good idea, although neither was the kathareuousa. They are sort of different extremes, and in that respect the current version (which is virtually free to use parts of either) is a lot better in my view. And while the current Greek is not on par with Plato's, it is still a very intricate language, and (far more importantly) it is one that retains most of the etymological calculations going on in the undercurrent of the language, which is often termed as having parallelisms to mathematical ties (by which i mean the various structures of complex words, based on the foundation of a root that allows for huge numbers of variations). I am surely very happy that i write in greek, despite so few people in the world being able to read the language.
Re the terms used for modern machinery, it should be noted of course that many were coined by non-greeks, as in the case of Electricity (Electron, afaik, means 'unable to stay in one place; ever-moving, or similar. Electra iirc has the same root), aeroplane, astronaut, and even other words like television already have one part being greek.
Coining new terms in greek is still routinely being done, anyway, by foreign scientists.
Yes, that's true. But there was still a deliberate policy of not introducing the non-Greek (mostly Latin) parts of those compounds, which made the language seem 'purer' than simply borrowing them would have done.
^Yes, although it is also a practical (as well as stylistic) matter of sounding more continuous/homogeneous, given greek terms tend to sound very notably different than foreign ones. And if in latin this is diluted to a degree given most of the non-greek root terms we have are latin (and many everyday words are latin in origin, despite the greek also existing, eg 'spiti' instead of 'oikos' for 'house') it is not at all as similar sounding if you go with terms from languages such as turkish, which are just not near at all.
Personally i don't feel like using terms which are very non-greek sounding, although obviously i would choose that instead of sounding really pompous or out of context. Thankfully the balance keeping there is easy
Personally i don't feel like using terms which are very non-greek sounding, although obviously i would choose that instead of sounding really pompous or out of context. Thankfully the balance keeping there is easy
Yes, "the Greeks" did indeed become a common way of referring to pagan religion rather earlier than you suggest, by the second century or so - but I don't think I've encountered "Roman" meaning "Christian" - do you have any examples? It would seem a bit odd given that the heartlands of Christianity right up to the time of Constantine and beyond were mostly in the east (Africa being the main exception).
Only by implication - so when you have people like Tatian and Athanasius writing about the beliefs of 'the Hellenes', they clearly mean 'the Greeks who are pagan'. The word left over to describe the Greeks who are not Hellenes - that is, the Christian ones - is 'Romans'. Christianity becomes a necessary part of what that word means. You're right, though - when they wanted to say 'Christian' to talk explicitly about religion, they said 'Christian'.
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