Re: Greek language Re: European languages Re: Brits don't speak foreign languages

I have been led to understand that Italian is pretty close to the vulgate
Latin spoken by most people at the time of the Roman Empire and the
vulgate had, at that time, already drifted toward being a different
language than classical Latin. Was there a similar "vulgate" Greek
spoken in ancient times, but all we usually see in ancient texts is
the classical Greek?

No one language would have been spoken by most people at the time of
the Roman Empire - the Romance languages/dialects of Italy have been
multifarious and mutually incomprehensible as far back as we can trace
them.

Present-day standard Italian is based on the Florentine dialect of the
mid-19th century. When it was adopted as a national language, only
about 5% of the population of Italy could understand it.

There are Greek dialects preserved in Italy (Sicily in particular)
which have been divergent from any kind of Greek spoken in Greece
for about 2000 years. Pontic Greek is similarly old, and until 1923
had a much larger community of speakers. Dunno how many people speak
it now; probably rather few in Greece (Greek governments have always
repressed it) and more in the diaspora. (The largest Pontic-speaking
community remaining was in Abkhazia until the war of independence of
the 1990s).

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