The world has a lot of different languages--
anywhere between 3 and 7 thousand, coming in all shapes and varieties-- English for
example is a Germanic language that originated in England and is now spoken as a major world
language, Spanish is also a widely spoken language, but is a Romance language from the
Iberian Peninsula, German is a Germanic language more limited to Central Europe, Arabic is
a widespread and diverse Semitic language divided into several different dialects, Chinese
is either one language with a bunch of different dialects or a family of several similar languages
depending on your political views, and Basque is… yeah literally no one knows what Basque
even is, but turn the clock back a couple thousand years, and what exactly were all
the languages spoken in the ancient world like? Starting off for no real reason in particular
in Rome, Latin is today a dead language largely used for liturgical purposes within the Catholic
church. However 2,000 years ago it was of course the
main language of the Roman Empire, where it would spread across Europe, diversifying into
the various Romance languages we see today. Latin first popped up as an Italic language
nearly 3,000 years ago, and is one of the most recognizable dead languages out there,
having influenced not only its Romantic descendants, but also the English language as the language
of science and medicine, and-- through both its prestige in Europe following the collapse
of the Western Roman Empire and the Norman conquests of England-- also became the fancy-pants
language of England. Think of the difference between raising a
‘Schwein’ and eating ‘porcus’. One thing to also keep in mind about Latin
is how it was pronounced, especially with how modern Romance languages pronounce their
C’s and J’s and V’s, in Latin C’s were always pronounced “K”, J didn’t
exist and was written as an I (and pronounced accordingly), and V also didn’t exist and
was actually a U, just shaped like a modern V, also H was actually pronounced, as opposed
to being silent. Also they like always wrote in caps lock rage,
it was annoying. NativLang made a much better video on this,
but in a sense what this means it that one of GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR’s famous quotes was
in fact pronounced “weni, widi, wiki”, and once he crossed the Rubicon and had to
continue on his current path, IACTA ALEA ESTO, though his ambitions did certainly pay off
for his adoptive son IMPERATOR CAESAR DIVI FILIVS AVGVSTVS (now it is important to remember
that, although Latin is effectively a dead language, it has still evolved since the time
of the Romans, so you’re not really pronouncing it wrong in any way if you pronounce it like
Italian, maybe unless you’re actually quoting someone from Ancient Rome). By the way if you want to hear people actually
speaking these languages, I’ve linked some videos down below that you can check out. Though they stem from different branches of
the Indo-European family tree, one language that had a huge impact on Rome, and even the
Latin language, was Greek, likely the sole inhabitant of the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European
language family. Greek is still spoken today by over 13 million
people as the official language of two countries, though obviously with many differences from
its counterpart spoken by all the famous philosophers and engineers and generals and what have you. From what I’ve been able to find, Ancient
Greek is not fully intelligible to Modern Greek speakers, though a lot of core vocabulary
is still recognizable. If you’re proficient in Greek though, please
do confirm or deny if this is true. As different as Ancient Greek was from Modern
Greek though, especially regarding the pronunciation of certain letters in their script which changed
over the millennia, there were also many different dialects spoken across the city-states, divided
into groups including the Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot, West, and Ionic-Attic. However after the 4th century BC, especially
with the conquests of Alexander the Great, the dialects started to merge to form a more
closely knit language, with Koine Greek developing as a kind of supra-regional dialect, what
with it now being spoken in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and that one Greek Kingdom that established
itself all the way out in Bactria (that’s a real thing, by the way). Greek wasn’t the only language that influenced
Latin though, another one was Etruscan (mekh Rasnal), a non-Indo-European language part
of the theoretical Tyrsenian language family, spoken in the north of Italy by the Etruscans,
and which wrote with the Old Italic script, another descendant of the Greek script which
would evolve into the Latin script. As the language died out in the early 1st
century AD, not much is known about this language or what it sounded like, though it did loan
plenty of words to Latin, such as ‘satnal’, which likely gave rise to the Latin ‘satelles’,
which in turn gave rise to the English term ‘satellite’. The language would eventually dissipate under
the pressure of the expanding Roman Republic, though would still be known to scholars, effectively
going extinct in the 5th century. Emperor Claudius even knew Etruscan and wrote
a 20-volume history of the Etruscans, though none of these survive to this day, so what
precious little we do know of the language and its grammar we’ve had to piece together
ourselves. Moving into the Middle East, where we have
a lot of languages to talk about, today Egypt is the most populous Arab country in the world,
however the Arabic language originated in, well, Arabia, and while it is indeed an old
language, it of course isn’t nearly as old as the Egyptian language (“ra’ n-kumat”). Egyptian however-- like Arabic-- was an Afro-Asiatic
language, as we can tell through various features such as its fusional though not quite agglutinative
grammar, emphatic consonants, the feminine suffix “-at”, and its three core vowel
sounds of a, i, and u. That being said though, it was not a Semitic
language like many of the other Afro-Asiatic languages you’ve probably heard of (e.g.
Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic), though it does share many close similarities with these languages,
as well as with the Amazigh (Berber) languages to the west. Of course I should be careful with how I say
the word “was” in this context, since a descendant of Egyptian-- known as Coptic
Egyptian-- is still used for liturgical affairs in the Coptic Church of Alexandria, though
it largely fell out of use in daily life in the 18th century… AD. Let’s go back into the Mediterranean world
and talk about the Canaanite language of Phoenician (Kana’nim), the language whose script ultimately
gave rise to basically every single script used on the European continent. Phoenician however wasn’t an Indo-European
or Tyrsenian language, but a Semitic language, so obviously there were a few letters used
for sounds more often used in Semitic languages that were only kind of awkwardly integrated
into the Indo-European languages, and it was actually an abjad, meaning vowels weren’t
always written like they are in alphabets. Unlike Cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs though,
this system was one that could easily be used and molded by other languages, as had indeed
happened. Through what we know of the language, it had
a lot of similarities to Hebrew and Aramaic, though most of the 10,000 inscriptions we
have access to today are on monuments and pottery, not the papyrus and parchment that
they would have mostly written on, since those materials don’t hold up very well after
3,000 years in the salty sea air. Finally, we finish off-- at least for this
video-- with Sumerian (Emeg̃ir), a language isolate spoken in *REGION of Sumeria throughout
the 4th and 3rd millennia BC. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a language
isolate is simply a language with no known relatives, so there aren’t any languages
we can compare Sumerian to in any way, though many have theorized connections to families
from Sino-Tibetan to Uralic to even trying to see if it can fit in with Basque, but Basque
and Sumerian ain’t about checking all your little boxes! Despite this, Sumerian was as far as we know
the earliest language to be written down, with its system of cuneiform being the oldest
on record. Sumerian was an agglutinative language with
an SOV word order and two grammatical genders, animate or inanimate. Sumerian had been prominent in the region
for well over 1,000 years, and would later coexist with and eventually disappear to the
Semitic Akkadian language, with Sumerian later being used for liturgical purposes up until
the 1st century AD, which is actually amazingly recent when you think about just how old this
language was! So I realize I probably didn’t talk about
some of the languages you might have wanted me to, Akkadian, Aramaic, Hittite, Old Chinese,
Mayan, Inca, whatever you’re thinking, it was a hard decision to omit from this video. Regardless, this is a video that I feel definitely
deserves a follow-up (as do a lot of my other recent videos, now that I think about it),
so if this video does well enough I’ll make another overview video on some other languages
of your choosing, do let me know in the comments below, and once again if you want to actually
*hear* these languages, check the links in the description, right below the sources. Thanks as always for watching, if you liked
this video and want more of the KhAnubis experience, might I recommend you visit a couple places,
the first is the KhAnubis Discord server (invite link down below) and also our subreddit r/KhAnubis,
which isn’t as active but I’d like it to be. Either way, do be sure to like and share this
video, consider supporting through Patreon or merch if you can, and subscribe to learn
something new every Sunday.
