Tsontos
08-01-2008, 12:38 AM
This thread is reserved for secondary quotes about koiné/ koine/ κοινή from linguists and historians.
"A koiné is a common language, but not necessarily a standard one, Petyt's examples of koinés are Hindi for many people in India and Vulgar Latin (vulgar: 'colloquial' or 'spoken) in the Roman Empire. The original version of koiné was, of course, the Greek koiné of the Ancient World, a unified version of the Greek dialects, which after Alexander's conquests (circa 330 BCE) became the lingua franca of the western world, a position it held until it was eventually superseded, not without a struggle, by Vulgar Latin."
-Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2002, p.40
"A koiné is a common language, but not necessarily a standard one, Petyt's examples of koinés are Hindi for many people in India and Vulgar Latin (vulgar: 'colloquial' or 'spoken) in the Roman Empire. The original version of koiné was, of course, the Greek koiné of the Ancient World, a unified version of the Greek dialects, which after Alexander's conquests (circa 330 BCE) became the lingua franca of the western world, a position it held until it was eventually superseded, not without a struggle, by Vulgar Latin."
-Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2002, p.40