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.
That's a very simplistic and simplified view. What about Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Basque, Albanian, Maltese, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Saami, etc.?
Also, they are called the "Romance languages" (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.). They evolved from Latin, yes, but they are not the same as Latin.
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?
The short answer is:
history happened. Alexander's conquests were circa 2300 years ago. World history happened in the meantime, notably the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Migration Period, the spread of Christianity and Islam (the latter accompanies by the expansion of the Arabic language), the Turkic migrations, the Mongol conquests. If you look at place names in the Near East and in Central Asia, you can still see some that were originally Greek, like "
Alexandria" (Alexandria in Egypt, or Al-Iskandariyah as it is called in Arabic, but also Kandahar in Afghanistan), "
Antiochia" (Antakya in southern Turkey), "
Laodicea" (Al-Ladhiqiyah or Latakia in Lebanon), "
Neapolis" (Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank) or "
Ptolemais" (Ṭolmayta in Libya). As you can see, the traces of the former Greek presence in these areas are still visible today, even if the Greek language is no longer spoken there (and hasn't been spoken there for centuries). In contrast,
much of western and northern Europe never had Greek presence to begin with (there were Greek colonies in what is now Mediterranean France and Spain, but these were no areas that Alexander ever conquered).
Even most of Greece's native population today didn't speak Greek.
That is not true. The area of modern Greece has been predominantly Greek throughout. There's also Greek spoken today in Cyprus, for example. And there was Greek spoken in much of Anatolia (especially Smyrna/Izmir) until the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece during the 20th century.
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.
Historians make no mistake there. Modern Greek is the evolved form of the same language that was spoken 2300 years ago. One thing you must not underestimate is that languages are not static and continue to evolve.
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?
That is, no offense to you, nonsense. Latin language and usage of the Latin alphabet are quite obviously two very different things. For example, in the 20th century, Turkish (a Turkic languages, later on other Turkic languages such as Azeri and Uzbek) and Vietnamese (an Austrasiatic language) were started to be written with Latin. This has
obviously nothing to do with the Roman Empire and the romanization of the areas that the Roman Empire (in its day) conquered...
