Re: Hell(en)ish oddities

At 6:15 am -0500 23/11/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>[....]
>
>That's very interesting, thank you. I hadn't thought the Greeks had been
>Romanized enough to ever call themselves Romans. I thought the Eastern
>empire to be, on the contrary, strongly Hellenized, in spite of a Roman
>administration.
Romanized in the sense of feeling Roman, but not Romanized enough to adopt
Latin  :)

But Latin did, in fact, continue to be the official language of the Eastern
Empire for some considerable time after the collapse of the western Empire.

>So this is very significant new information to me, which I
>wish they had mentioned at school.
Yes, there are many things I wish had been taught me also when I was at
school   :)

>Speaking of school, I wish history teaching would be more "relative", i.e.
>that it would try to describe also the events as the contemporaries saw
>them, not just how we see them in retrospect. In all the teaching about the
>collapse of Rome and the later "Byzantine" Empire, I've never been told how
>the people of that time felt about it, and how they really viewed the Roman
>Empire.
yes, that's quite interesting.  It's evident that in the west also it took
a while for people to realize the old Empire really had gone for ever.
When, e.g., Patrick took Christianity to Ireland, he thought he was making
the Irish Christians and _Romans_ (no, not in the narrow sense of 'Roman
Catholic', but Romans like the Romans).

[...]
>
>BTW, how did the "Greek" name come about? Were the Romans the first to call
>them "Graeci"?
Yes.

>What does the name mean?
I don't think it's known.  It was the name of first "tribe" of Greeks that
the Romans came into contact with in southern Italy.  They applied the name
to Greeks generally; rather in a similar way that the Romance nations (&
the Welsh) have named the Germans generally after one particular Germanic
"tribe" (the Allemani).

>Somebody tried to tell me it means
>'slave' in Turkish, which I immediately disbelieved because the name's much
>older than the Turks.
You did well to disbelieve it!

>Also, on Greek being a major language in the Eastern Empire, were there many
>Greek Roman citizens who did not speak Latin? Did all of the Roman
>administration there speak Greek?
The Roman upper classes were generally bilingual in Greek & Latin from the
1st cent BC onwards.  It's said, e.g. that Caesar's dying words were not
Shakespeare's "Et tu, Brute?" but rather: kai sy, Broute;

>Was Greek equally strong in Palestine,
>Syria and Egypt?
Greek was the generally language of merchants and many other in these
areas; Syria & Egypt also had sizable Greek populations living among them.
But official administration was in Latin.

>Or were there some prestigious Semitic languages there?
No.  The inclusion of 'Hebrew' (actually Aramaic) as well as Greek & Latin
on the inscription above Jesus or other condemned criminals in Palestine
would be simply to make sure the ordinary, literate populace know.  It's a
bit like the old Apartheid South-Africa; official notices were always in
English & Afrikaans (whose relation could be roughly equated to Greek &
Latin respectively in Roman Palestine), but if it was deemed important that
native African speakers should also understand (like "Beware of the dog")
then Zulu or Xhosa (or whatever the local native was) was included.

>And regarding the Turks; has there been any significant exchange between the
>Greek and Turkish languages?
Vocab borrowing - dolmades, baklava etc.  - and Turkish 'effendi' is from
Greek 'authentis' /afTendis/. Some dialects of Greek in Asia Minor did
develop vowel harmony under Turkish influence, but these are certainly (and
regretably) extinct now.

>Hmm, lots of questions I'm having, hope you don't mind answering some of
>them :)
Nope.

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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