Latin Name Pronunciation

[Phaichtos]

Phaichtos,

Since language is a special interest item for you, what have you learned about people in the Roman empire being bilingual? Did they pretty much stick to their native languages, or did they learn Latin as well? Since the Romans ruled everything, it would seem that learning Latin might be essential to success in the empire. If I'm way off here, you can tell me.

It is hard to say too much about the lower classes in the provinces with much certainty. Archaeologically speaking though, their material culture (including things like building type) seems to have changed relatively little during Roman occupation, so we can assume that Roman society itself must have been largely confined to urban centers. As such, while the cities may have been largely Latin-speaking with the locals imitating the Roman elite, the countryside could have largely been left to its own devices to speak their ancestral languages. Rome was pretty good about letting subject peoples do their own thing as long as they had at least their theoretical allegiance (and tax money!) A good (and *gasp* readable!) book which touches upon the subject of how the "barbarians" conducted themselves under Roman occupation is Peter Wells' The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped the Roman Empire.

The elites though, throughout the Empire, were a different case. At least through the high empire, Roman (originally Italian, but later from the provinces as well) elites were essentially a bilingual class of people who spoke Latin in their daily lives, but were also raised on a heavy diet of Greek culture. Take for instance the fact that Marcus Aurelius, perhaps seeking to look like a "true philosopher", wrote is Meditations in Greek, despite being a Latin speaker. We also have to remember too that from a line somewhere around Illyria and eastward, the Hellenistic footprint of Greek never really went away. Perhaps since the east was always richer than the west, they never felt the pull of Romanization (at least in the form of language) the way the western provinces did; and since, as mentioned, the Romans had a sort of built-in reverence for Greek culture, this never seemed to become a problem for them. We can imagine the local administrators during the high empire perhaps writing dispatches to Rome in Latin, and the locals in Greek. But then, (and this might just be my opinion, but...) it seems to me that the local elites in the East felt far less pressure to use Latin in local matters than did the local elites in, say, Gaul; the Gallic elites might have had their aboriginal language displaced by Latin, but the Hellenistic royalty in the East were speaking a "more noble" tongue which was brought to the area by Alexander himself. What Roman administrator would take issue with that? As an example, we might think of how Josephus (aka Yosef Ben Matityahu), who was himself a member of the local Jewish priestly elite in Palestine, wrote his history of the Jewish people in Greek; Greek (as opposed to Latin) was the prestige (as well as practical) language of the East, so it is perhaps telling that he wrote in that language, as opposed to Latin (the language of the region's recent conquerors), his ancestral Hebrew, or even Aramaic. He knew his audience, and they spoke Greek.

As a side note, it has always been interesting to me that the eastern half of the Empire, after the "fall" of the west, has become known to us as the Byzantine Empire, even though the people themselves kept on believing that they were Romans ("???????") until at least 1453. I suppose the best rationale for this is that after the city of Rome itself was "lost", there could be no more "Romans"... but then again, Roman emperors had been coming from the provinces for centuries by that point... so who is to say what "Roman" was, really? I think the biggest reason people often don't connect the two (Roman Empire = Byzantine Empire) is because after the loss of the Latin west, all that was left was a Greek-speaking, more foreign-seeming (to the modern observer) realm which on the surface may seem to have had little in common with Rome of the days of Cicero. But then again, other than the Latin language (which may have been substantially different by that time!), how similar was Rome of 50 BCE to Rome of 350 CE?

Anyway, I digress, but I hope I touched upon some of what you were asking