I have a question for the more knowledgeable about languages.
From what I can tell there are basically 4 base languages in Europe, Latin, Germanic, Slavic, and Greek. North west Europe is Germanic, South West is Latin, and East is Slavic.
The part that baffles me is why are there no other countries that use Greek as a base language? Now to be clear I'm talking about spoken language. Obviously the written languages, Greek Cyrillic, and Latin all derive from Greek, and that's what confuses me even more. The Greek written language is basically used in every European country, but the spoken language is as far as I know only used in Greece, and was only used in its current for for the last 200 years and then not until antiquity.
So the basic question is: If Greek culture was so prominent, and Macedonia spread Greek culture through the world via Alexander, then why is it that the spoken Greek is not used by anyone today as a basis for a spoken language? Even most of Greece's native population today didn't speak Greek.
To me it suggests that the written language predates the spoken, and historians mistakenly associate the two as both Greek. Where the written language was an already common universally popular language that Greeks as well as Macedonians and others already used. That would explain why their spoken language never caught on anywhere. The only evidence we have of "Greek" is written so we automatically assume that if they written in a certain language then the speak in a certain language. Yet if wee look at today, Latin is the written language for English and other Germanic languages, so by the same standard a 1000 years from now if we look back will we say that the Germans and the English speak Latin because they write in Latin, and even Latin is basically Greek. I just find it odd that the written language "spread" so easily and vastly but the spoken never did.
Thoughts?
From what I can tell there are basically 4 base languages in Europe, Latin, Germanic, Slavic, and Greek. North west Europe is Germanic, South West is Latin, and East is Slavic.
The part that baffles me is why are there no other countries that use Greek as a base language? Now to be clear I'm talking about spoken language. Obviously the written languages, Greek Cyrillic, and Latin all derive from Greek, and that's what confuses me even more. The Greek written language is basically used in every European country, but the spoken language is as far as I know only used in Greece, and was only used in its current for for the last 200 years and then not until antiquity.
So the basic question is: If Greek culture was so prominent, and Macedonia spread Greek culture through the world via Alexander, then why is it that the spoken Greek is not used by anyone today as a basis for a spoken language? Even most of Greece's native population today didn't speak Greek.
To me it suggests that the written language predates the spoken, and historians mistakenly associate the two as both Greek. Where the written language was an already common universally popular language that Greeks as well as Macedonians and others already used. That would explain why their spoken language never caught on anywhere. The only evidence we have of "Greek" is written so we automatically assume that if they written in a certain language then the speak in a certain language. Yet if wee look at today, Latin is the written language for English and other Germanic languages, so by the same standard a 1000 years from now if we look back will we say that the Germans and the English speak Latin because they write in Latin, and even Latin is basically Greek. I just find it odd that the written language "spread" so easily and vastly but the spoken never did.
Thoughts?
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