Roman Latin - the language of the Caesars?

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1. My understanding is something somewhat stranger, that Romans venerated Greeks but would have not emulated them, it would have been seen as low-level heresy since it wasn't what their forefathers did, however in Rome-occupied Greece the aristocrats would have definitely been Greek speakers, and this extended to all former Greek territories, such as Egyptians, Anatolians, Levantines, Armenians, Thracians, and even Sicilians, which is partly why they all mostly became Eastern Orthodox instead of Catholic.
2. Don't kown who has spread this wrong info but c pronounced as k is related to an arcaic version of latin, I mean the first centuries of Rome
3. Nothing on the difference between common vvlgar (wool-gar) Latin and the Latin of Cicero (ki-ke-ro).
4. Could such a thing happen in our U.S.A., even if by slow evolution?
5. Sounds like the UK
6. I don't understand why the wealthy or well-educated people of the world were obsessed with French until the 20th century. I know France was powerful, but so was England. Spain and Portugal were very powerful for a time as well, why didn't one of those languages become the language of the well-to-do.
7. Makes sense,
   I always wondered why the original bible was written in Greek, while the historic documents of the time were written in Latin.
8. 0:28 I swear I misheard that as sex.
9. The problem I have with histories, especially of places like "Rome", is that they're treated as temporally monolithic; we act as though the Rome of 500BC is the same as the Rome of Christ's time, is the Rome of 419AD.
   That's a bit like thinking the Britain of Henry VIII's period is the same as the Britain of George III is the same as the Britain of WWII is the same as the Britain of today.
10. Es FALSO que los romanos de clases altas tuvieran el griego como lengua materna. La mayoría conocía algo de griego (algunos incluso lo hablaban muy bien), porque tenía un gran prestigio cultural y además era una lengua franca extendida por todo el centro y este del Mediterráneo (e incluso en colonias de Hispania, norte de África, etc.), pero de ahí a decir que era la lengua predominante hay un gran trecho. En la propia Roma se oía el griego junto al latín cotidianamente, pero porque había muchos extranjeros de otras regiones del imperio que o no hablaban bien latín o estaban más habituados al griego. No olvidemos que las clases poderosas imponen su propio idioma, no uno extranjero, y en ese sentido fue el latín, y no el griego, la lengua que emplearon como idioma oficial y materno. Sería bastante absurdo suponer que unos patricios grecohablantes utilizaron al latín del "pueblo" para sus leyes, su literatura, etc. Esto es contra-historia; sólo podría haber sucedido si esas clases dominantes hubieran sido culturalmente colonizadas por otra potencia y por tanto no fueran soberanos, sino un Estado vasallo.
11. Are you sure of that? Cicero in his speeches spoke latin to his senator peers, and you can't get more "posh" than that. Actually, he makes frequent references in his speeches to latin idioms and common expressions, so he makes it clear that senatorials outside the Senate did speak Latin, too.
12. The language of the Kaisars, of Kickero!! Yes, there was no soft C.
13. God damn you fallout New Vegas. I always read it Kai-zar.
14. Does anyone know whether the Roman Elites spoke Attic Greek or Koine Greek?
15. episode 1 has a woman baptised in bulls blood 200years before the cult of Mithras reached Rome. the series was not good on religion
16. Ludvig Holberg once wrote:
    Every man, with smarts and education,
    On latin only wrote,
    With the ladies French,
    German to his dog
    and Danish to his servant he spoke.
    
    Something like that
17. Frederick the Great of Prussia spoke and wrote in French, since French was the cool language in the 18th century.
18. In Greece, up until the 1980s (and to some extent even today), we had diglossia, all the way from the Classical Era and possibly before. Higher classes had a form of Greek (called "Katharevousa", meaning "pure" or "Archaizousa", meaning "archaic") which they spoke and only highly educated people could understand, which was always closer to "proper" Classical Attic. The simple people spoke (and speak, just like everyone after it was officialised) "demotic" dialects (ie. those of the people). Koine (both Hellenistic and Modern) is one example.
19. Hi Lloyd, love your videos!
    Not sure that is entirely correct. While they certainly knew Greek, I doubt at that time that they would have spoken Greek in ordinary conversation, unless quoting poetry or something like that. Cicero's letters to Atticus, a man living in the east, as well as his correspondences with numerous other posh Romans (which he published for a predominantly upper class audience), are all written in Latin, having only occasional quotes in Greek.
    They absolutely would have written serious literature in Greek, however, as we can tell from the histories of Fabius Pictor, a Roman a little bit earlier than the late Republic.