Latin Style Wood
Latin Style Wood
 |
 Latin Fish Style Large Wood GUIRO w Scratcher NEW $12.77 Time Remaining: 17d 12h 57m Buy It Now for only: $12.77 |
 Lot of 2 Latin Style Large Wood GUIRO w Scratcher NEW $24.77 Time Remaining: 19d 14h 14m Buy It Now for only: $24.77 |
 Lot of 4 Latin Style Large Wood GUIRO w Scratcher NEW $47.77 Time Remaining: 19d 14h 14m Buy It Now for only: $47.77 |
Were Greek & Latin standardised in pre-modern times?
I recently came across this passage: "Writers strove to establish for England a style and a diction worthy of their country and its traditions as [those] of Latin were of Rome [...] It was believed that Latin and Greek owed their vitality and the immortality of their literature to the fact that they had been standardised" ('An Outline History of the English Language', F. T. Wood)
I was wondering if this standardisation the writer refers to could've been actually contemporary or not... i.e. whether the two languages were subject to some kind of authority (similar to France's Académie Française, perhaps) when their 'classical literature' was actually written, or whether he means simply the guidelines for modern reproductions of such texts.
Thanks for any help 
Good question, you see there never was anything close to an Academie Francaise for Greek or Latin.
Instead you must remember that the literary sources you read from Roman and Greek eras are written by the elite. In the Greek world ,after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the spreading of Athenian (technically the Attic dialect) across his former Empire a new form of Greek emerged as the lingua franca across the Hellenistic world, this was Koine Greek, or 'common Greek', and this was a form of Greek spoken originally by non-natives, that spread and spread, and absorbed some of the features of the previous languages (just like when people learn a second language some features seep through into their grammar or vocabulary), some linguistis even believe that the entire pronunciation changed. They believe that Attic Greek was a tonal language, like Chinese, (tone is exemplified by a question, you can tel the difference between 'who' and 'who?' if it is spoken aloud, in a tonal language those two words have entirely different meanings), and because so many non-natives were learning this new langugae, they were poor at speaking it, and began to change this to one of STRESS rather than tone, the writing wouldn't change, but it would sound very different. For example 'different' sounds different (at least in British ENglish) to 'differentiate', you don't just add teh suffix, you change the place of the stress.
Anyways, back on topic, scholars decided they didn't like Koine Greek, and so began 'classicism' by which Greek speakers living centuries after the 'classical age' of the fifth century, began to use the language of the day. This was only a few hundred years later, mainly in Alexandria the capital of the Hellenistic world. It'd be the equivalent of authors tommorow deciding that Chaucher's English was superior, and trying to revive it by only writing in it, as it was 'more pure' in some way.
This was a movement that really caught on, and because there were relatively few really capable scholars, when they all started to adopt this position of archaic writing it changed the literary world. We can't hear the words of a pot maker in fourth century AD athens, his language has vanished (except for some writen on pots etc.) the poems and epics written were using an older form of Greek that only a few hundred people could speak.
This continued for centuries, and even in the fifteenth century educated Greeks still prefered to use the old 'classic' Greek of fifth cntury Athens rather than the actual language they themselves spoke aloud.
I believe this answers your question on Greek, HOWEVER, there is also the question of diacretics and such, (accents etc. on words, English doesn't have them, but French, SPanish etc. do.) THis 'standardisation' occured centuries after the classics were written, and was mainly the brainchild of one man living in Byzantium ( I really can't remember I'm afraid) to try and make it easier for foreigners to learn Greek he invented diacretics and developed lower case letetrs for the alphabet I believe.
As for Latin there was a relatively similar story, the educated elite preffered and older form of Latin 'classical Latin' rather than the usual form spoken outside on the street called 'vulgar latin' (from which all Romance languages eveolved). They wrote their poems and stories in this, even when it wasn't actually being spoken by anyone aloud.
It might be worth remembering whenever you hear such statements as standardisation of languages in the pre-industrial era, that:
Only a relative minority of the population would be writing down texts, even if more were literate paper etc. wwas very expensive, so very few people could 'standardise' a language simply if they used the same formats and words, even though the majority of people outside weren't
'Standardisation' of a langauge is extraordinarly difficult at any time, and damn near impossible if the speakers of the language aren't all unified under one authority (the Greeks never were, and had MANY dialects, which still exist today). Also 'Standardisation' implies there is a non-standard version, and languages spoken by people rarely tend to die out completly in favour of another without some sort of massive upheaval.
