Bro will go down on to full historical accuracy and make 100s of ethnic groups in the region and make them speak myriad of extinct languages like Doric. Don't tell the crazies, history is more diverse than they think.
But Apocalypto is one of the most historically inaccurate films ever made. It is set during the Mayan Classical Collapse of 700-900CE, yet shows people clearly having died of smallpox. And then the Spanish show up 600 years before they're supposed to. ðŸ˜
vro latin was only really spoke widely by common people in the, y'know, west. there's a much stronger point for greek in the east. even then most people just spoke their native languages, besides the upper class which often had more assimilation for various reasons
Latin was a language for religion, international relations and politics. That's why most historic documents are Latin. It's safe to assume that well over 90% of people didn't speak or understand it.
Safe to assume? People went to church and in church was all latin. Latin has been taught in religious schools and in some countries in regular schools up thru the 1970’s.
Weren't the inability of most people to understand church and the question of whether to translate the bible into common languages quite a big deal at one point?
And until after medieval times, 90% of people didn't go to school at all, which is exactly my point.
It's a bit much to translate the correct terms into English, but in 813 the council of the Catholic Church decided that religion should be taught in regional languages as well, because simple people don't speak Latin. That's why I wrote "safe to assume" people didn't speak Latin - the church wrote about that themselves.
This is woefully simplistic. Alexander effectively established koine Greek as the lingua franca (another pre-19th century example) of the Mediterranean basin and as far away as Scythia and Persia.
Local dialects sometimes persisted, but many died out long before the middle ages.
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u/GoldTrade11 5h ago
Bro will go down on to full historical accuracy and make 100s of ethnic groups in the region and make them speak myriad of extinct languages like Doric. Don't tell the crazies, history is more diverse than they think.