The world has a lot of different languages-- anywhere between 3 and 7 thousand, coming
in all shapes and varieties-- English for example is a Germanic language that originated
in England and is now spoken as a major world language, Spanish is also a widely spoken
language, but is a Romance language from the Iberian Peninsula, German is a Germanic language
more limited to Central Europe, Arabic is a widespread and diverse Semitic language
divided into several different dialects, Chinese is either one language with a bunch of different
dialects or a family of several similar languages depending on your political views, and Basque
is… yeah literally no one knows what Basque even is, but turn the clock back a couple
thousand years, and what exactly were all the languages spoken in the ancient world
like?
Starting off for no real reason in particular in Rome, Latin is today a dead language largely
used for liturgical purposes within the Catholic church.
However 2,000 years ago it was of course the main language of the Roman Empire, where it
would spread across Europe, diversifying into the various Romance languages we see today.
Latin first popped up as an Italic language nearly 3,000 years ago, and is one of the
most recognizable dead languages out there, having influenced not only its Romantic descendants,
but also the English language as the language of science and medicine, and-- through both
its prestige in Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Norman
conquests of England-- also became the fancy-pants language of England.
Think of the difference between raising a ‘Schwein’ and eating ‘porcus’.
One thing to also keep in mind about Latin is how it was pronounced, especially with
how modern Romance languages pronounce their C’s and J’s and V’s, in Latin C’s
were always pronounced “K”, J didn’t exist and was written as an I (and pronounced
accordingly), and V also didn’t exist and was actually a U, just shaped like a modern
V, also H was actually pronounced, as opposed to being silent.
Also they like always wrote in caps lock rage, it was annoying.
NativLang made a much better video on this, but in a sense what this means it that one
of GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR’s famous quotes was in fact pronounced “weni, widi, wiki”,
and once he crossed the Rubicon and had to continue on his current path, IACTA ALEA ESTO,
though his ambitions did certainly pay off for his adoptive son IMPERATOR CAESAR DIVI
FILIVS AVGVSTVS (now it is important to remember that, although Latin is effectively a dead
language, it has still evolved since the time of the Romans, so you’re not really pronouncing
it wrong in any way if you pronounce it like Italian, maybe unless you’re actually quoting
someone from Ancient Rome).
By the way if you want to hear people actually speaking these languages, I’ve linked some
videos down below that you can check out.
Though they stem from different branches of the Indo-European family tree, one language
that had a huge impact on Rome, and even the Latin language, was Greek, likely the sole
inhabitant of the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Greek is still spoken today by over 13 million people as the official language of two countries,
though obviously with many differences from its counterpart spoken by all the famous philosophers
and engineers and generals and what have you.
From what I’ve been able to find, Ancient Greek is not fully intelligible to Modern
Greek speakers, though a lot of core vocabulary is still recognizable.
If you’re proficient in Greek though, please do confirm or deny if this is true.
As different as Ancient Greek was from Modern Greek though, especially regarding the pronunciation
of certain letters in their script which changed over the millennia, there were also many different
dialects spoken across the city-states, divided into groups including the Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot,
West, and Ionic-Attic.
However after the 4th century BC, especially with the conquests of Alexander the Great,
the dialects started to merge to form a more closely knit language, with Koine Greek developing
as a kind of supra-regional dialect, what with it now being spoken in Egypt, Libya,
Syria, and that one Greek Kingdom that established itself all the way out in Bactria (that’s
a real thing, by the way).
Greek wasn’t the only language that influenced Latin though, another one was Etruscan (mekh
Rasnal), a non-Indo-European language part of the theoretical Tyrsenian language family,
spoken in the north of Italy by the Etruscans, and which wrote with the Old Italic script,
another descendant of the Greek script which would evolve into the Latin script.
As the language died out in the early 1st century AD, not much is known about this language
or what it sounded like, though it did loan plenty of words to Latin, such as ‘satnal’,
which likely gave rise to the Latin ‘satelles’, which in turn gave rise to the English term
‘satellite’.
The language would eventually dissipate under the pressure of the expanding Roman Republic,
though would still be known to scholars, effectively going extinct in the 5th century.
Emperor Claudius even knew Etruscan and wrote a 20-volume history of the Etruscans, though
none of these survive to this day, so what precious little we do know of the language
and its grammar we’ve had to piece together ourselves.
Moving into the Middle East, where we have a lot of languages to talk about, today Egypt
is the most populous Arab country in the world, however the Arabic language originated in,
well, Arabia, and while it is indeed an old language, it of course isn’t nearly as old
as the Egyptian language (“ra’ n-kumat”).
Egyptian however-- like Arabic-- was an Afro-Asiatic language, as we can tell through various features
such as its fusional though not quite agglutinative grammar, emphatic consonants, the feminine
suffix “-at”, and its three core vowel sounds of a, i, and u.
That being said though, it was not a Semitic language like many of the other Afro-Asiatic
languages you’ve probably heard of (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic), though it does share
many close similarities with these languages, as well as with the Amazigh (Berber) languages
to the west.
Of course I should be careful with how I say the word “was” in this context, since
a descendant of Egyptian-- known as Coptic Egyptian-- is still used for liturgical affairs
in the Coptic Church of Alexandria, though it largely fell out of use in daily life in
the 18th century…
AD.
Let’s go back into the Mediterranean world and talk about the Canaanite language of Phoenician
(Kana’nim), the language whose script ultimately gave rise to basically every single script
used on the European continent.
Phoenician however wasn’t an Indo-European or Tyrsenian language, but a Semitic language,
so obviously there were a few letters used for sounds more often used in Semitic languages
that were only kind of awkwardly integrated into the Indo-European languages, and it was
actually an abjad, meaning vowels weren’t always written like they are in alphabets.
Unlike Cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs though, this system was one that could easily be used
and molded by other languages, as had indeed happened.
Through what we know of the language, it had a lot of similarities to Hebrew and Aramaic,
though most of the 10,000 inscriptions we have access to today are on monuments and
pottery, not the papyrus and parchment that they would have mostly written on, since those
materials don’t hold up very well after 3,000 years in the salty sea air.
Finally, we finish off-- at least for this video-- with Sumerian (Emeg̃ir), a language
isolate spoken in *REGION of Sumeria throughout the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, a language isolate is simply a language with no known
relatives, so there aren’t any languages we can compare Sumerian to in any way, though
many have theorized connections to families from Sino-Tibetan to Uralic to even trying
to see if it can fit in with Basque, but Basque and Sumerian ain’t about checking all your
little boxes!
Despite this, Sumerian was as far as we know the earliest language to be written down,
with its system of cuneiform being the oldest on record.
Sumerian was an agglutinative language with an SOV word order and two grammatical genders,
animate or inanimate.
Sumerian had been prominent in the region for well over 1,000 years, and would later
coexist with and eventually disappear to the Semitic Akkadian language, with Sumerian later
being used for liturgical purposes up until the 1st century AD, which is actually amazingly
recent when you think about just how old this language was!
So I realize I probably didn’t talk about some of the languages you might have wanted
me to, Akkadian, Aramaic, Hittite, Old Chinese, Mayan, Inca, whatever you’re thinking, it
was a hard decision to omit from this video.
Regardless, this is a video that I feel definitely deserves a follow-up (as do a lot of my other
recent videos, now that I think about it), so if this video does well enough I’ll make
another overview video on some other languages of your choosing, do let me know in the comments
below, and once again if you want to actually *hear* these languages, check the links in
the description, right below the sources.
Thanks as always for watching, if you liked this video and want more of the KhAnubis experience,
might I recommend you visit a couple places, the first is the KhAnubis Discord server (invite
link down below) and also our subreddit r/KhAnubis, which isn’t as active but I’d like it
to be.
Either way, do be sure to like and share this video, consider supporting through Patreon
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