Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

Just a thought that occurred to me:
I see a lot of posts from people that don't like/feel irritated at being talked to in English on the assumption that they wouldn't know Korean and are also a native speaker.
I've never studied Roman history but I can imagine a 20-something Roman traveller around 300 A.D. going off to Northern France to learn Breton and being discouraged at being spoken to in Latin every time...I wonder if there are any records of this. Latin being nearly extinct now it gives one some perspective.
Just a thought...

[William Beckerson]

As I understand it, the Romans bent over backwards to make everyone feel at home in the empire. I dont think it's too unreasonable to assume that they had folks with linguistic skills there.

But it's easier to make the locals speak the empire's language, which is why you can find Latin all over Europe. So I figure that's what happened.

My major was Asian studies. Ask me about chinese history.

[Corvid]

One interesting fact in English is that the bad words for sex and genitalia are the Celtic and other tribes' words and the proper words, p'nis, v'gina, intercourse, are derived from Latin. These became the words of choice for the upper classes. So remember next time someone uses the "C" word that it's just another term for the "V" word; just class snobbery codified into our linguistic sense of what's a "bad" word.

[panthermodern]

Latin is not extinct, it evolved.

This of a language as an oraganism; a virus. To survive it had to change and mutate. Since a virus spreads and changes as it does, the strain of Latin that survived and propagated arel the strains know as the Romance Languages.

In addition, Latin is used commonly in the sciences.

Latin is not extict but rather it's progeny make it a very sucessful species indeed.

[Gladiator]

Don't forget the Romans were also conversant in ancient Greek, that other great language of the past modern day English owes so much to.

This is evidenced by the Roman empire's conquest of the Hellenic world after that nation's power, influence and culture had diminished sometime in the 3rd/2nd century BC. At the time of that great power transition all of Greece's colonial territories (i.e. Alexandria, modern day Egypt) would have been run in Greek and centurions and other administrators would have been bilinguial.

Now if you'll excuse me Caesar requires me to fight some lions in the Colosseum this afternoon so I've got to get some spear practice in.

[HardyandTiny]

[itaewonguy]

arhhh CEASER!!! what a man!! what a salad!!

[mithridates]

It's interesting how English spreads out into other languages too. Japanese and Korean will take in a lot of English words, but as they become way too long when imported (chocolate, two syllables, becomes three in Korean and five in Japanese - is often just referred to as choko now), they mutate and become shorter and sometimes lose all relevance to English entirely. I was in a coffee shop yesterday and they had stainless steel mugs for sale to my right, but they took out the 'less', and 'steel', and so it just said 'stain mug'.
Anther:
Apartment (three syllables) has become ����Ʈ (also three) and in Japanese it's apaato, which is four but much shorter than apaatomento.