Submitted by herewego199209 t3_z2t0h4 in history
One of the things I've noticed is that all of these countries waged war with various regions and they had to somehow communicate with the leaders from that region. Obviously learning a different language hundreds of years ago is not as easy then as it is now, nor is education as accessible. So I wonder how they knew how to negotiate surrenders or peace treaties. I can't imagine the Spartans had linguists that were fluent in Persian.
You're severely underestimating the amount of multilingual people that would have existed. Merchants, scholars, or diplomats would likely have known several languages and/or had access to people who could translate for them. In some cases a bridge language may have been used (ex: an American and German who both knew French, but not each other's language).
There were ambassadors between countries whose main job was this very thing.
I would argue that learning languages was easier for many people then, especially in centers of trade like a Greek city-state. As the other commenter mentioned, there were an abundance of multilingual people because of the large exposure to different languages.
I'd assume it's much more likely the Persians knew Greek than the Greeks knew Persian. There were Greek colonies/cities on the Anatolian coast within territory the Persians claimed. Persia exerting influence over the Ionian coast and mainland Greek city-states supporting the Ionians is what sparked the Persian invasion of Greece in the first place.
It's a fallacy to think of the ancient world as disconnected entities. There was a huge amount of trade and diplomacy between different cultures even well before the Persian/Greek wars. The leaders and scholars knew about each other's customs, traditions, culture, and language quite well.
Ah didn't think about that. I never thought about them using bridge languages.
I guess I must be discounting how easy it was to learn these things. I figure it's easier now because you have the internet to research the customs, languages, etc of the country and go from there.
The actual funny question is how the first Europeans, i.e. Columbus or Cortez, communicated with the various American natives.
Takes out whip, THIS IS GOLD? WHERE GOLD - proceeds to whip till gold
It's not exactly at the same period, but to give you a picture in the Viking Age at the beginning of the medieval period, the vikings were trading with Constantinople (and I mean a big trade route), and sometimes with Spain and Italy. They also had spies in about all the royal court of the major countries of Europe and again in Constantinople. So yeah, people managed to communicate.
Plus, you must not forget that people at the time had slaves. So one might capture someone and sell him to, let's say an intellectual, looking to learn the language.
No, I get you are trying to be funny, but...
They didn't even know there was gold there until after Cortez was invited by the Aztecs.
And the best interraction was March_1504_lunar_eclipse ... Columbus and the Natives had great relations, until they overstayed their welcome ( 6 months ), where the natives wanted to get rid of them... Columbus used the incoming lunar eclipse ( which he knew would happen, because stronomists released books about future cosmic events which were 99% accurate at least ), thus he lied and said God was angry at how the natives had treated them. Naturally they knew the languages pretty well by that point.
Naturally the communication issue was resolved within weeks, long, long before the issue of gold even came up ( and with other natives ).
More Greeks fought on the side of the Persians than they did on the side of the Greeks. These were cities that were vassals to Persia (Like in Asia Minor) or they were cities on the Greek mainland who simply thought that the Persians had a better chance and wanted to be on the winning side.
A few Greeks even famously changed sides midbattle (Thessalians).
Many Greek mercenaries from Athens and Sparta and other cities fought for the Persians both before and after the Peloponnesian wars. (see Xenophon)
All these Greek Vassals would have people speaking both languages by necessity.
There were even people in the Persian court who were Greek exiles.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume you're a native English speaker, because even today, there are an awful lot of multilingual people in the world, with probably over half knowing at least 2 languages. The dominance of the English language worldwide has led to a lot of anglophones not only not learning a second language, but resultantly not developing the skills for picking up languages. It's pretty well known that picking up new languages gets easier the more languages you already know, which actually means that ancient diplomats probably had it easier. You see, nowadays we generally have this idea that languages are independent and relatively rigid things, but before modern communications technology local dialects sprang up quite easily, and they could vary a huge amount even within the same language. This means that anyone who travelled around in the pre-modern world would essentially have to be able to integrate different languages into their knowledge base much more regularly than someone would have to today. The nature of dialects also means that languages in contact would often develop pidgins that could be used as a way to learn the other language by people who knew one. The standardization of languages really put an end to that.
Lewis and Clark were often confronted with these types of situations, especially the more they moved west.
How they managed to negotiate with five, six, or more interpreters without it devolving into a ridiculous game of telephone is remarkable.
How Interpreters Helped Topple the Aztec Empire / NativLang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWtQznfkDHU Check out this video. It does at least explain Cortez' case
As others have pointed out, there were plenty of polylingual people back then, and the Persians in particular would have had access to lots of subjects who were fluent in Greek, because they were Greek.
Another thing to recognize is that there were probably at least two languages that were widely understood because they belonged to people who engaged in lots of long-distance trade across the Mediterranean basin. One of those was, of course, Greek, since several wealthy Greek city-states (e.g., Athens, Corinth, Syracuse) did a lot of maritime trade. The other would have been Punic (Phoenician), and the home cities for that language were under Persian rule throughout the period.
Translators are obviously rarely explicitly mentioned in histories, but Caesar at some point for instance mentions changing translators due to questionable loyalty of his allies the Aedui, who apparently supplied them.
This detail has been of some interest in the discussions about the languages spoken in Gaul in Caesar's time, because it might explain why 'Germanic' tribes/chiefs/places have 'Celtic' names: the possibility of adoption of exonyms from the Gaulish language of his translators as a bridge between Latin and third languages.
The official language of the Persian Empire was Aramaic, a Semitic language. The Persians sent letters Aramaic written in cuneiform to Sparta. Aramaic was the linga franca of the Middle East from about 700 BCE until about 700 CE, when another Semitic language, Arabic, took over.
Old Persian was similar in many ways to Ancient Greek, but the languages were not mutually comprehensible.
First of all, there was plenty of international trade going on, so a surprising number of people probably spoke multiple languages. Merchants in particular, as well as bureaucrats responsible for customs duties and tax collection probably spoke multiple languages.
Secondly, most rulers probably had multiple scribes who were each literate in multiple languages as well.
There were also probably common languages as well, most likely originated in the big empires. So, a lot of people probably spoke Greek, Latin, Egyptian, or Persian to some extent.
The Persian empire took control of Anatolia which had many Greek Colonies like Pergamon, Rhodes, Sardes, etc. They had subjects which spoke both Persian and Greek.
King Leonidas: "We've been sharing our culture with you all morning."
Seriously though, much like in the modern day, there were multilingual people. And major city states and neighboring empires would keep trained citizens, slaves, and freedmen who were versed in multiple languages of important trading partners, regional powers, and potential enemies.
There are so many amazing studies on this. They actually used for the most part Native translators. It was the natives that often spoke more than one language because of the tribes always being so near to each other and consistently having to make alliances as well as war.
La Malinche is a great example of this. Although her origins remain murky she is suspected of speaking 3 native languages, Chontal Maya, Yucatec Maya, and Nahuatl, as well as Spanish. By being exposed to only new languages one will be forced to learn them. This happened to La Malinche when she was put into Cortez’ hands.
A common misconception is that the Spanish had no native help, when in reality Cortez used the already messed up relationships between the native groups to take down the Aztec Empire, which had conquered them. While there were Spanish interpreters, many were also native.
I don't know if this could help but, as far as I remember, regarding the Persian wars historian Herodotus sometimes is mentioning the use of interpreters [uses the word ἑρμηνεύς], while at other instances he places persons of different nations speaking directly. This underlines the possibility that he implies that they were speaking with the same language.
Mostly by translation. Keep in mind leaders rarely met face to face, and most communication was thus written, usually by scribes rather than the leaders themselves. A leader with a lot of resources could probably find a scribe that speaks Persian and can write in the various forms of Greek common at the time, or vice versa. Also, leaders tended to be multilingual themselves.
For Cortés, it was Geronimo de Aguilar and La Malinche (name unknown).
Specifically for the case you are referring to, the Persian king Xerxes had an exiled Spartan king Demaratus as an advisor in his court. Demaratus accompanied Xerxes I on his invasion of Greece in 480 BC and is alleged to have warned Xerxes not to underestimate the Spartans before the Battle of Thermopylae.
There were greek mercenaries in the Persian army, not to mention the other Greek populations the Persians were overlords of. Not all Greeks were against the Persians. Also, after the war, themistokles was later ostracized and served the Persians for the rest of his life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles
Go to the sub section titled "Greeks in exile to the achamaned empire" I'm sure you could find more info for other Greeks serving the Persians before the war following that source
It's not that it's easy, it's that it was necessary and you had some decent job opportunities. Hate backbreaking work of farming where you might break even? Learn a language from traveling salesmen and entertainers.Go tell a wealthy merchant you've got a language you think he could use, how much? Bam, you aren't a farmer anymore.
Most of the people that I've met during my travels have at least two languages, often more. It's the same as it was.
Trade and to even an certain sense global trade existed. Hundreds of years of mixed stories and intelligences.
Also Persia being a super-nation state would have hired,Merced out, or raised, Greek speakers.
Thank the Phoenicians.
It probably wasn’t any harder back then to be honest, the human brain hasn’t fundamentally changed enough in this amount of time. The internet may be helpful, but I would still say the easiest way to learn a language is to be exposed to it at a young age.
Children of merchants and diplomats likely shadowed their parents and that type of profession would simply give them the chance to practice frequently.
I read at one point it went 3-4 languages one way, and then of course, 3-4 back. 😂
Probably over exaggerated hand signs looking ridiculous lol. And/or sock puppets?? I sometimes wonder how natives made fun of Columbus and giggle to myself. Sorry, I've had a few drinks...
There's a super-famous example of this very thing that linguists often cite as a clue to the divergence of languages from a common root. I've forgotten the specifics, but it comes down to two kings/war-leaders/chieftains taking an oath of friendship. One of the big dudes spoke French and the other German. So the French speaker delivered his oath in German so the German-speaking troops could hear and understand him, and the German-speaking dude dutifully followed up by repeating HIS oath in French so the French-speaking troops would know what he was promising. I was like, cool, that's neat, but the significance of this is it's the first recorded instance of French and German having diverged sufficiently from their common predecessor language as to be unintelligible to someone who didn't speak French/German.
Finding translators has been a real challenge in international relations for as long as there have BEEN international relations. The problem is that there's not a huge amount of material in the historic record as to how this was handled.
We know that Sacagawea was enough of an expert in Native Sign Language (as it existed at the time) that she was able to teach a lot of it to the Lewis & Clark party.
The pre-Renaissance reclamation of ancient Greek-language texts on natural science, literature, philosophy, art, mathematics, engineering, and astronomy relied on European monks finding translators who spoke Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and who were also scholarly enough to be able to explain the contents to the monks doing the transcribing. Legend has it this is how we got the symbol for "zero"; the monk was puzzled by the concept, so the translator obligingly recommended that he just draw a little hole in the middle of the equation.
Too, there's the example of La Malinche (a title, not her name, which has been lost) making great use of her multilingual skills to help Cortez destroy the Aztecs.
This particular story isn't told too often, but in the aftermath of the Second World War, displaced persons all over Europe took to the roads to try to walk home. As the roads got larger, the displaced found themselves sharing with the victorious military. At select crossroads, the Allies stationed multilingual Europeans who had survived the mayhem to talk to the displaced people, getting their names, home locations, and stories to help with what must have been a world-class traffic jam.
I guess, if contemporary civilization collapses, anyone who is multilingual is gonna be very, very prized.
No idea the identity of the OP, but man living and growing up in the USA has given many of us a very wierd version of how the world communicates.
I worked in East Africa for a few years. The average Rwandan spoke three languages and many spoke four with only a limited education. (Kinyarwandan, Swahili (for the market), and either French (if you were old) or English (if you were young).
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Some Western bias in your post. Persia was a superpower, the Greek city states were a border irritant. (Until some guy called Alexander showed up). It's much more likely the Greeks had Persian speakers.
My office manager in Pakistan has a 10th grade education. His earlier profession was as a guy incharge of deliveries for logistics company so he travelled a lot. He speaks 6 languages.
Only in the US,UK, Australia etc is multilingualism a sign of education. In most places it's standard.
Realistically both had plenty of people fluent in the language of the other, because they were neighbouring peoples with trade relations. Most people in the ancient world were multilingual and some languages were established as the main one for regional trade. For example during the Roman empire, any Roman officer/educated person spoke Latin and Greek, and all the peoples under them spoke their native language plus Latin or Greek.
Very different situation.
My Uncle Joe ran a neighborhood grocery store in Chester Pa. back in the 30's and 40's. He had no formal education beyond High School, but could converse in German, Polish, Yiddish, just by doing business with his customers. I'm pretty sure the same held true with so many diverse tradesman across ancient borders.
Yep, because english is all you need in the west. Learning anither language is extra work.
Don't know about "anither" language, but another language isn't particularly hard.
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"Er spricht Gotisch! Er spricht Gotisch!"
[deleted] t1_ixhyz0e wrote
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