Expert: Maria - 11/23/2008

Question
Maria,

I have been told that there was a time when ancient Greek and Latin were very similar to each other, language-wise. Is that true, and specifically, was there ever a time when someone speaking ancient Greek would have been understood by a Latin speaker?
Thank you,

Dr. James Brooks

Answer
Hello,

actually there was a time when ancient Greek and Latin were very similar to each other, but this time dates back to 2500 BC or 2000 BC at least, when some nomadic tribes  who originally settled  in central Asia  close to  the Aral Lake (modern Kyrgyzstan, more or less ) migrated southward to India, Iran and later westwards  to Europe throughout Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.

So these nomadic tribes moved away from each other, losing contact, and then their language broke up into a number of tongues among whom there were also ancient Greek and Latin  which however  had already become different then,  so that  no one speaking ancient Greek would have been understood by a Latin speaker, though both Latin and Ancient Greek had many similarities with respect to vocabulary and grammar, as we can see today also.

See, for example, the noun “mother” which is “máter” in Latin, “méter” in ancient Greek, as well as the noun “father” sounds “páter” in Latin and “patér” in ancient Greek.

To conclude, we can say that as from the time when ancient Greece and Rome began having contacts, i.e. as from around the 2nd.century BC, no one speaking ancient Greek would have been understood by a Latin speaker  just because these languages, though originated from a same unrecorded prehistoric language, by then had become different.

Therefore a Roman citizen  could  have understood a Greek speaker and vice versa, only if they had learnt Latin or ancient Greek respectively, as well as today the Germans e.g. can understand English,  French, Italian, etc. only if they have learnt these languages which however have the same origin (see below).

Hope all is clear enough.
Best regards,
Maria
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Note that that  the so called Indo-Europeans, aka “Aryans”, gave  rise to  the following  Indo-European languages which are spoken still today:


-ROMANCE GROUP [Latin, from which derived  Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian]

-GERMANIC GROUP [German, English, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish]

-GREEK GROUP [ Ancient Greek and later Modern Greek]

-SLAVIC GROUP [Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech]

-ILLYRIAN GROUP [Albanian].