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In Egypt, Coptic predominated, [132] but Greek had been in use since the conquest of Alexander, and Latin and Greek were the administrative languages during the Roman Imperial period. [133] Alexandria , founded in 331 BC under Greek rule and one of the three largest cities of the Roman Empire, was a leading city in Greek intellectual life ...
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa , as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
The Latin language and the related Italic languages first came to be written using alphabetic scripts adapted from the Etruscan alphabet (itself ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet). Initially, Latin texts commonly marked word divisions by points, but later on the Romans came to follow the Greek practice of scriptio continua. [3]
Some northern Italian languages (e.g. Friulian) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels. French phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ > /VːC/ (where V is any vowel and C any consonant ...
As r in Italian and several Romance languages. RH [r̥] As r in Italian and several Romance languages, but voiceless; e.g. diarrhoea διάῤῥοια . (see Voiceless alveolar trill). Transcription of Greek ῥ , mostly used in Greek loanwords. S [s] As s in say, never as s in rise or measure. T [t] As t in stay TH [tʰ]
The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization.
The Italian language has developed through a long and slow process, which began after the Western Roman Empire's fall and the onset of the Middle Ages in the 5th century. [23] Latin, the predominant language of the western Roman Empire, remained the established written language in Europe during the Middle Ages, although most people were illiterate.
Latin words incorporated into Greek were very common by the early imperial era, especially for military, administration, and trade and commerce matters. [75] Greek grammar, literature, poetry and philosophy shaped Latin language and culture. [76] [77] A 5th-century papyrus showing a parallel Latin-Greek text of a speech by Cicero [78]