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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2026

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  • In the context of biblical history, I’ve heard that, because of the Alexandrian empire and it’s 3-4 off-shoot kingdoms, Greek was actually the ‘Lingua Franca’ (default language for international communication) throughout the middle east; from before the Romans arrived, to Jesus’s time, to until after the Roman empire split in two for good.

    I guess it is hard to supplant an existing Lingua Franca. France today is a good example - they are very defensive of their language, once the Standard Internationale, and so France sees less English speakers proportionally than other European countries such as Spain, Nederland and Germany.

    So… The middle East’s dominant languages were Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian, Greek and Persian - then Muhammed shows up with Islam, and they conquer surrounding states. Arabic is spreading. And this is testament to Persia’s linguistic domination, right - Arabic calligraphy comes from the Persian alphabet. That’s bonkers; a group of people, B, subjugated by A, manages to get A to assume their script for all writing.

    At that point, the whole(-ish) middle east now had a different alphabet - neither greek nor Roman - to write in. Languages don’t tend to change their script once they’ve settled on one. The only examples I know are Poland, who did it because of catholic church’s influence , and Mongolia, who were forced to by the soviet union; it doesn’t happen naturally. Oh also Turkey, which was again a government mandate.

    Certain scripts are better for certain language sounds; I don’t expect Arabic will ever be written in Latin script in general practice. It didn’t spread at first because Greek was already so dominant, then because the catholic church wast spreading into Muslim territories in the middle east, and now because it is not Lingua Franca, languages have settled on the correct scripts, and Christianity isn’t spreading in the middle east, same as usual.


  • They’re pretending to not understand that you mean Latin was the language of catholic church, Roman state, law, medicine, mathematics and thus the script for (almost) all European alphabets.

    There’s genuinely a toxicity problem on Lemmy, probably ingrained in many users from years of Reddit usage. 😮‍💨🥰 but DW about it.

    Technically it is not the “basis” of languages, but with contextual knowledge it’s so easy to know what you really meant by that. That it’s “the basis language for European civilization,” perhaps. Written on heraldry, churches, buildings and artifacts all over the continent.




  • Why would cities care about national or international companies? I’m confused.

    [This is OP on a different account + device] Good question, I didn’t make it clear. So what I was thinking is, where I live,

    1. The city council has large control over the economy, choosing where businesses can put up their store and monitoring which businesses take up office space in the city.

    2. There’s definitely some MLM presence (my local subreddit provided examples and often has people saying “don’t work for this scam!”)

    3. So… Does the city council just not care? Or are they perhaps less interventionist than I thought?

    4. Lastly, with just how many there are, from the vibe I’m getting from people online complaining about them, surely some of them end up doing business for the city council. So the council ends up getting ripped off or having jobs done to a poor standard.


    Thanks for your comment!