So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there, but how come it didn’t take as strong a hold in the Middle East? It’s not as if the Romans were never there, and they lingered there far longer than they did in Europe. Was it just a matter of a stronger preexisting culture, or did the Arabs have something to do with it? What happened here?
That is agross overstatement. Latin is not the basis for the Germanic, Slavic, Gaelic and Uralic language families, nor for Greek and Basque. Together those are a lot more languages than there are Latin descendants in Europe.
Do y’all just not understand the word almost or something? Or is this just general internet nitpickery?
It isn’t even close to almost. Maybe most of the countries on the Mediterranean, plus Portugal and debatably Belgium and Switzerland, but that’s very much not most of Europe.
It seems to me that you misunderstood the meaning of almost. At least, I have never heard almost to mean ‘less than half’.
They’re pretending to not understand that you mean Latin was the language of catholic church, Roman state, law, medicine, mathematics and thus the script for (almost) all European alphabets.
There’s genuinely a toxicity problem on Lemmy, probably ingrained in many users from years of Reddit usage. 😮💨🥰 but DW about it.
Technically it is not the “basis” of languages, but with contextual knowledge it’s so easy to know what you really meant by that. That it’s “the basis language for European civilization,” perhaps. Written on heraldry, churches, buildings and artifacts all over the continent.