Which language was spoken in ancient empire armies ?

Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 35 points –

A common critic we hear about an EU wide army is What language are they gonna speak but let's forget Europe 2024,

Rome had a huge empire over the whole Europe, I may be wrong, but I don't think that commoner spoke proper Latin in remote province. What happens when they join the legion ? Would the units be split by origin region (Dacian with Dacian, Lugdunumese with Lugdunemese) with only officer speaking latin ? Or would you merge legionaries from different province (So you have Tingitanian, a Lustitanian and a Thracian in the same unit) and give them a crash course in military latin (the way the french foreign legion does? ) Even going as far as Rome, Karl the great empire also spread over half of Europe, and modern European nation used to be way more multi-lingual than they are today, and most likely a random southerner/northerner in Britain, France or Germany couldn't talk to each other.

So how did ancient armies managed the language question ?

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Latin was the market language of Rome, and commanders/generals would have issued orders and received reports written in Latin.

Most soldiers would have spoken it, including the local auxiliaries that were conscripted. (Or at least a pidgin version of it.)

Even if the conscripts would speak whatever amongst themselves, they’d have understood Latin. (It’s also very likely that foreigners brought into the province would pickup at least a pidgin version of the local language.)

To clarify, this would be like the French foreign legion not speaking French. (The do. Maybe not natively, but French language skills are necessary for conscription.)

The issue at hand is that the EU is not an empire, it’s an economic alliance of sovereign countries each with whatever language they happen to speak. For an empire, it’s easy to dictate things like “Latin is the official language, all business is conducted in Latin.”

I for one vote for EU wide usage of Latin commands, EQUALITER AMBULA!

I might be wrong here but NATO countries already have to adapt language related practices to NATO practices, e.g. the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Good god no. Conjugation is bad enough in English. You don’t want know what my latin grammar is like.

For the record the phonetic alphabet isn’t language and I’m pretty sure there’s slight differences between regions/languages. (Alpha, Able, Apple; for example,)

It’s just a way to spell out letters for clarity over radio. The idea is to create extra syllables in the letters using “familiar” words so that if static or something comes across, you can piece it together; also, “a” is easily confused for “way” or “say” or “may”, and such.

As far as I understood, @Lazycog@sopuli.xyz was talking about the phonetic alphabet used in the armies of NATO countries, which is standardised by ICAO as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, ... and is not the everyday phonetic alphabet in each country, e.g. in Germany commonly Anton, Bertha, Cäsar, ... but there are plenty of different versions and variants for each German speaking country.

If we would go back to Latin, it wouldn't be the Latin as spoken by Cicero but some Vulgar Latin, as it is the origin of Romance languages like Italian, with simpler grammar.

oh, it's definitely standardized, no doubt. But people are people, and some of them are going to call out as it's familiar to them, and in some sort of urgent response... you're not going to get too confused at the German guy reading off grid coordinates as '24-Richard Wilhelm Theodor...' to get to a particular random stretch of the Atlantic. (using the MGRS coordinates. 24RWT)

but most of my point was that's not an actual language; you're still going to have to designate some language as the common language- and get enough understanding to at least be functional in that. it seems logical to just pick one... but, uh... well. humans aren't very logical.

If a German reads 24-richard-wilhelm-theodore to an English guy, he'd write down 24RVT if going by the sound, 24RWT if knowing German pronounces the W with a V sound. This is _exactly_why the NATO alphabet is standardized and swapping things around "in an emergency" isn't permissible. There are so many variances in pronunciations between languages like this. Since you're writing in English, watch what happens if you hear someone use Spanish and French words like "Javier Habanero Ennui Allo". An English speaker might know the words, or might write down HOOO. And then there's regional differences like Spain with some hard Cs or THs instead of soft C or Mexico with some indigenous Xs that sound like CH instead of H. Not to mention the typical English pronunciation of Uniform starts with a Y sound (some groups say oo-nee-form). And it's not xylophone in every language, so why not write down a Z?

That's why they developed one, singular group of words for the alphabet. It's not perfect, but it's the group that was picked.

P is for Pterodactyl. C as in Czar.

Exactly my point, thank you for clarification!

Yeah no I think I would just butcher the language trying to speak it.

Though, it’d be fun to have some French guy be like “how Vulgar!” And not be calling me rude.

Armies don't need complex phrases like "Last week did I see you go to the library?" And as such they've often used non-verbal communications in battle (especially because battle is fucking confusing) this has included drum signals, colored smoke, flags for different actions, and gestures.

When they are using verbal commands they're often a greatly simplified set of phrases - sometimes in a jargon that isn't even proper speech. It's rare to see ten syllable commands and you're much more likely to hear "company, right" than "Company of soldiers whom I command, please initiate a pinwheel rotation to the right around the rightmost file of your formation. Thank you kindly." So if Europe had to form an army inter lingually then "a derech" and "a isker" would probably end up being right and left respectively... that or they'd follow the EU trend of "When in doubt, default to French"... or they'd just signal their troops with different patterns of Eurohouse beats.

Emperor's of Rome podcast addressed this in a Q&A episode.

From memory the answer is that top level generals would almost always speak Greek and Latin, mid level commanders would speak either Greek or Latin adequately as well as the local language of the troops they were commanding.

Don't Europeans know basic English? Uk, basic enough to exchange coordinates and stuff? I doubt u would need to have a large enough vocabulary for this.

The World wars for example were fought together in a time where English competency wasn't as high as it is today.

EU wide force

No EU member has English as its main language

"They could simply use English!"

Anglos and the feeling of being at the center of everything, name a more iconic duo.

Edit: Ireland, does it even exist, right?

No EU member has English as its main language

Ireland?

Don't leprechauns speak Irish?

(I honestly just didn't think about them, oops!)

I went there a couple months ago, and it seemed like all the native folks spoke Irish (Gaelic) to some degree. It was pretty surprising, I thought I'd have to go to the west coast to get away from English, but nope, signs everywhere were printed in Gaelic and even the first cabbie I encountered in Dublin was more than happy to chat about linguistics!

While I have no doubt that officer (and even most NCO) do know more than basic english, I have some doubts regarding the typical high-school drop out who enlists in the infantry.

So if you need to talk about geopolitic, aircraft maintenance or even coordinates two different group of soldier, NATO english would be fine. But how would a multi-lingual crew works on a warship ? What about a multi-lingual patrol ?

Why would a multilingual crew even exist? Wouldn't an EU armed force be just like NATO without the US? Regiments and groups specific to countries instead of regiments involving multiple countries.