Tsontos
08-01-2008, 12:43 AM
This thread is for various observations from linguists and historians about the Greek language and its varieties.
"Languages have a relatively short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Basque, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and Tamil have lasted more than 2000 years"
-Originally from the UNESCO Courier, April 2000, reproduced in Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2002, p.43
"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conquests (circa 330 BCE) became the lingua franca of the western world, a position it held until it was eventually superseded, not without a struggle, by Vulgar Latin."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
"Languages have a relatively short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Basque, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and Tamil have lasted more than 2000 years"
-Originally from the UNESCO Courier, April 2000, reproduced in Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2002, p.43
"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conquests (circa 330 BCE) became the lingua franca of the western world, a position it held until it was eventually superseded, not without a struggle, by Vulgar Latin."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