Talk:Languages of the Roman Empire/Archive 1

Archive 1

Note on source of this article

This article originated at Roman Empire#Languages; however, since I contributed all the content in that section, I didn't think there were any issues of attribution when I moved it here for development. Hope this was procedurally OK. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:06, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Jewish use of Latin

Very nice! Gold glass and the sources there give some material on the use of Latin by Jews in Italy, and also on the "polite" use of Greek phrases like "pie zeses" by quite ordinary Romans. Johnbod (talk) 19:37, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I found that so interesting when I saw it yesterday that it left me speechless, and still kinda does. The pie zeses bit would make a nice addition somewhere, maybe the Greek-Latin bilingualism section. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:25, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Dispersal of Greek

(Copied from my talk, more or less, where Cynwolfe brought my attention to the brevity of the Greek section) I'm reluctant to tinker with this article, but the "Greek" section seems to overemphasise Alexander's conquests. There's no mention of the much earlier foundation of Greek trading colonies in Italian Magna Graecia and the Northwestern littoral of the Mediterranean. Surely their trading patterns offer an earlier and more pervasive instrument of dispersal, at least in the West, than later, Eastern conquests? I see this is dealt with later in the article. But should it be brought to the reader's attention somewhat earlier? Haploidavey (talk) 11:48, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Greek musti've been in active use during the Imperial period in Magna Graecia. One of my sources got into that, I'm assuming, or it wouldn't have popped in my head so freely. Maybe the one on Sicily. I think Alexander got emphasized because the source I started out with was concerned with "language policy" in the context of Roman rule. Also the continuation of Greek as the language of the Byzantine Empire. A structural peculiarity of the article is the division of looking first at individual languages, then at geographical distribution, which causes some issues of potential repetition or questions of "does this information go here or in the other section?" You shouldn't hesitate to add stuff, especially to Languages of the Roman Empire#Greek. I'm trying to minimize any history of languages in this geographical area before the Imperial period, but not exclude it when it's necessary to get a picture of how things stood at the beginning of Augustus's reign, and how that relates to the linguistic picture by the 5th or 6th century. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:22, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

My impression in the West is that Greek influence might be more noticeable on writing systems (as among the Celts), but I've always felt that the early Greek presence in what became the Narbonensis has been greatly underrated in Celtic studies. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:31, 28 July 2013 (UTC)