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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 script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
As the language of Roman aristocrats and scholars, Greek died off along with the Roman Empire in the West, and by 500 CE, almost no one in Western Europe was able to read (or translate) Greek texts, and with the rise of the Islamic Empire, the west was further cut off from the language.
On the other hand, some Italian peoples (such as the Rhaetians, Camuni, Etruscans) likely spoke non- or pre-Indo-European languages. In addition, peoples speaking languages of the Afro-Asiatic family, specifically the largely Semitic Phoenicians and Carthaginians, settled and colonized parts of western and southern Sardinia and western Sicily. [1]
Latin evolved into the Romance languages while Medieval Greek became the language of the East. The Empire's adoption of Christianity resulted in the formation of medieval Christendom. Roman and Greek art had a profound impact on the Italian Renaissance.
It was common to hear Barbarian languages in the Italian peninsula and to hear Greek in Rome, largely because the Greeks dominated the economic life of Rome. This dependence caused tension with the Romans, so in 440 the western emperor Valentinian III decided to expel "all the Greek merchants" from the city. This caused a total famine which ...
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 ...