AHC/WI: all hellenic languages extinct by modern day.

Challenge: with a POD no early than 400 B.C, make all hellenic languages extinct in modern day, which means no surviving greek dialect or anything close to it. You have a good part of ancient history and all medieval and modern era to work.

WI: what are the impacts ? What languages would probably be spoke in the place of greek in their territory? How would this effect our knowledge about ancient greek culture and civilization?
 
There's possibly a window of opportunity in Late Antiquity. The ERE takes a beating in the 4th/5th centuries, which weakens them immensely against the later invasions of the 6th-8th centuries. A Justinian like figure emerges but is vastly less successful while he and his successors cripple the treasury and make tons of enemies. Persians and Avars roll in and sack Constantinople in the 7th century. The remnants of Byzantium in Greece and the Mediterranean islands are overrun by the Slavs no later than the 9th century.

The last holdouts of the Greek language are on said islands, but from the 10th to 15th they are conquered by various nearby countries, including a Turkish (they still settled in Anatolia in the middle ages) shahdom, Venice/some Italian power, and for Crete, the Coptic Egyptians. Cyprus ends up speaking Aramaic due to settlers from Syria (ruled by Aramaicised Arabs). The last speakers of Greek die out on some small Mediterranean island in the 19th-20th century.

The main proponent of Greek culture is the Kingdom of Greece, a Slavic speaking nation which has attempted to revive the use of Ancient Greek to some extent. Modern Greek is very influenced by Greek, and perhaps most similar to OTL Greek dialects of Macedonian/Bulgarian. The Greek islands speak Venetian, Coptic, or Turkish depending on where you are, but Cyprus speaks Aramaic. Anatolia is wholly Turkicised except the parts which shifted to Armenian, Kurdish, or even Aramaic (Cilicia). Other Greek communities around the Mediterranean or Black Sea have long since assimilated into their neighboring populations.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
More numerous Anatolians or their alternate migrations can could help. Virtually impossible after Alexander the great. So Anatolians Indo-Europeans in this timeline could stretch from Balkans to Anatolia eventually assimilating the Hellenic speakers in smaller numbers. In OTL,the opposite happened. This is the only one I can think of for now.

Most PODs are plausible within Indo-European migration patterns. None else.
 
Challenge: with a POD no early than 400 B.C, make all hellenic languages extinct in modern day, which means no surviving greek dialect or anything close to it. You have a good part of ancient history and all medieval and modern era to work.

WI: what are the impacts ? What languages would probably be spoke in the place of greek in their territory? How would this effect our knowledge about ancient greek culture and civilization?

Extinction of Greek language might not ever happen, even with a total and permanent conquest. For example, see Persia. Even though it was conquered by Arabs and Turks for centuries, the Persian language has survived and is still spoken today in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and other places.

I'm not sure extinction of the language would have any significant impact on our knowledge of ancient Greece. The contribution of modern Greeks to knowledge about ancient Greece was virtually nil in the 19th century. All the efforts were done by western Europeans, for the most part.

Ancient Egyptian language didn't survive but that didn't stop western scholars deciphering the hieroglyphs in the 19th century. Other languages that fill the gap are probably Slavic in the Balkans and Turkic, Armenian, Kurdish or Arabic in Anatolia.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Extinction of Greek language might not ever happen, even with a total and permanent conquest. For example, see Persia. Even though it was conquered by Arabs and Turks for centuries, the Persian language has survived and is still spoken today in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and other places.

I'm not sure it would have any significant impact on anything. The contribution of modern Greeks to knowledge about ancient Greece is virtually nil. All the efforts were done by western Europeans, for the most part.
Post the Turkish invasions,Greeks were devastated. The Turks did the final stage of destruction with the taking of the Capital though various factors contributed. Historically Greece began from the borders of Greater Armenian highlands and Anatolia and Greece were the total extent with small region of Northern Levant. So what can you expect more from a nation that has undergone this magnitude of destruction?
 
It seems fairly easy with even a Seljuk-era POD to have no major area speak Greek. For example, had the Seljuks conquered mainland Greece and treated it the same way they did Anatolia, the area would almost certainly be Turkish-speaking and Muslim today. In the 1520s, Ottoman Anatolia was 92.1% Muslim.

ITTL, Greek would be reduced to a somewhat influential diaspora language in the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps equivalent in status and use to Ladino.
 
Source?

This looks suspiciously like propaganda to me. I suspect a more realistic figure was nearer 66%.

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From Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor. So... Greek-American propaganda?

Generally, there's a bizarre tendency in this forum to vastly overestimate the number of Christians in medieval Muslim countries, including claiming that the Copts were the majority of the Egyptian population into the early Mamluk era. But I suppose emphasizing the Christian element in the premodern Islamic world is good (for different reasons) for several different modern ideologies.
 
But I suppose emphasizing the Christian element in the premodern Islamic world is good (for different reasons) for several different modern ideologies.

Funnily enough, it's exactly this that made me suspicious, but in reverse - that having a figure as high as possible is good for certain modern ideologies.

A great example of how left and right both have a vested interest in historical data 'confirming' their political views. I think everybody reading this can see the subtext for what this is really about.

Also, I think the 91% is almost certainly bullshit, because the Muslim population of the entire ottoman empire in 1914 was less than 84%. If we consider Anatolia only, I'd expect that figure to be lower. And if we then go 400 years further back, it should be even lower.

The elephant is in the room, to speak metaphorically, and we can all see it.
 
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Also, I think the 91% is almost certainly bullshit, because the Muslim population of the entire ottoman empire in 1914 was less than 84%. If we consider Anatolia only, I'd expect that figure to be lower. And if we then go 400 years further back, it should be even lower.
It's extremely bad form to disregard the most important historical evidence for the period, plus the most important English-language scholar in the field, just because "it feels wrong." The Ottoman hearth censuses are taken as generally reliable for everywhere, including the Balkans, which suggests an overwhelming (>80%) Christian majority corroborated by every other source, or Constantinople (58.2% Muslim, 31.6% Christian), which corresponds almost exactly to what more literary sources imply.

If you'd done more research, you'd realize that things aren't nearly as clear-cut as you make it out. It's well-known that the Christian population of many areas of Anatolia increased under the Ottomans. Smyrna/Izmir, for example, was 86% Muslim in the 1520s. It became Greek-majority due to large-scale immigration from the early seventeenth to the nineteenth century (and, one assumes, the fact that the Greeks were richer and possessed an enviable economic position due to their European connections).

But sure, ignore historical evidence based on flawed assumptions.

Some more evidence:
  • The Muslim proportion of Crete fell from around 50% to around 30% in the nineteenth century (Doumanis, Before the Nation)
  • "By 1914 the ratio of Christians to the general population of Palestine had risen... [to] the highest proportion since the Crusades" (Newberg, The Pentecostal Mission of Palestine)
  • "The nineteenth century saw a different trend in urban population expansion... We find an obviously disproportionate increase in Christian citizens" (Sahara, "The Ottoman City Council")
  • "During the period between 1831 and 1881, the Greek population grew by 2 percent per year, whereas during the same period the Muslim population remained roughly the same... In the city of Izmir, the Greek population grew from 20,000 in 1830 to 200,000 in 1910." (Chenoweth, Rethinking Violence)
  • "The rate of growth among Christian and Muslim groups showed considerable variation in the 19th century. The Christian groups, especially the Greeks, followed by Bulgarians, Serbians, and Armenians showed a far more rapid rate of increase than the Muslims... [because of] the establishment of a quasi-capitalist system, imposed by Europe, which turned a substantial part of the Muslim population into an exploited rural class... [that had to] sustain economically a non-Muslim middle class which acquired rapidly wealth, education, and political consciousness." (Karpat, "The Ottoman Demography in the Nineteenth Century")
You see how the 1914 demographics are hardly representative of Ottoman history.
 
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It's extremely bad form to disregard the most important historical evidence for the period, plus the most important English-language scholar in the field, just because "it feels wrong." The Ottoman hearth censuses are taken as generally reliable for everywhere, including the Balkans, which suggests an overwhelming (>80%) Christian majority corroborated by every other source, or Constantinople (58.2% Muslim, 31.6% Christian), which corresponds almost exactly to what more literary sources imply.

If you'd done more research, you'd realize that things aren't nearly as clear-cut as you make it out. It's well-known that the Christian population of many areas of Anatolia increased under the Ottomans. Smyrna/Izmir, for example, was 86% Muslim in the 1520s. It became Greek-majority due to large-scale immigration from the early seventeenth to the nineteenth century (and, one assumes, the fact that the Greeks were richer and possessed an enviable economic position due to their European connections).

But sure, ignore historical evidence based on flawed assumptions.
Izmir was also pretty small in 1520 so even a non large migration could have changed the demographics, in any I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Christians might have been under-counted even if not by that much.
 
You could just as easily make the argument that Muslims were undercounted because all Yörükler, who are understandably hard to count, were Muslim.
AFAIK(as I didn't read the censuses directly) the Ottomans census still detect a large nomadic component in both Anatolia and the Muslim population of the Balkans, around 20%, could that still entail an undercount?
 
There's possibly a window of opportunity in Late Antiquity. The ERE takes a beating in the 4th/5th centuries, which weakens them immensely against the later invasions of the 6th-8th centuries. A Justinian like figure emerges but is vastly less successful while he and his successors cripple the treasury and make tons of enemies. Persians and Avars roll in and sack Constantinople in the 7th century. The remnants of Byzantium in Greece and the Mediterranean islands are overrun by the Slavs no later than the 9th century.

The last holdouts of the Greek language are on said islands, but from the 10th to 15th they are conquered by various nearby countries, including a Turkish (they still settled in Anatolia in the middle ages) shahdom, Venice/some Italian power, and for Crete, the Coptic Egyptians. Cyprus ends up speaking Aramaic due to settlers from Syria (ruled by Aramaicised Arabs). The last speakers of Greek die out on some small Mediterranean island in the 19th-20th century.

The main proponent of Greek culture is the Kingdom of Greece, a Slavic speaking nation which has attempted to revive the use of Ancient Greek to some extent. Modern Greek is very influenced by Greek, and perhaps most similar to OTL Greek dialects of Macedonian/Bulgarian. The Greek islands speak Venetian, Coptic, or Turkish depending on where you are, but Cyprus speaks Aramaic. Anatolia is wholly Turkicised except the parts which shifted to Armenian, Kurdish, or even Aramaic (Cilicia). Other Greek communities around the Mediterranean or Black Sea have long since assimilated into their neighboring populations.

I like this, and I think it's plausible on the whole (though I'm a bit sceptical about coptic surviving and even expanding, nice idea though a coptic-speaking Crete is). But I suggest the last holdout of Hellenic speech into the 19th century, rather than a Mediterranean island, would be an obscure dialect in central Morea called Tsakonian. If the slavonic 'Greeks' are interested in recovering the past, antiquarians will make an intensive study of this language and its last speakers, and thus get a very distorted view of what spoken Greek was actually like.
 
I like this, and I think it's plausible on the whole (though I'm a bit sceptical about coptic surviving and even expanding, nice idea though a coptic-speaking Crete is). But I suggest the last holdout of Hellenic speech into the 19th century, rather than a Mediterranean island, would be an obscure dialect in central Morea called Tsakonian. If the slavonic 'Greeks' are interested in recovering the past, antiquarians will make an intensive study of this language and its last speakers, and thus get a very distorted view of what spoken Greek was actually like.

It would be interesting to see historians and linguists debating about how the greek language was pronounced.

"Your fool! The tsakonian theory is completely wrong, as the best way to discover how greek sounded in medieval and ancient era is by greek-derived words in other languages, llike eastern romance languages."
"Not exactly. We don't know how greek was pronounced, and so many of the greek-derived words in another languages may have suffered radical changes to adequate in the vocabulary. Besides it, the tsakonian dialect may be a good indicator about how greek was spoken, specially in the daily life."
 
It's extremely bad form to disregard the most important historical evidence for the period, plus the most important English-language scholar in the field, just because "it feels wrong." The Ottoman hearth censuses are taken as generally reliable for everywhere, including the Balkans, which suggests an overwhelming (>80%) Christian majority corroborated by every other source, or Constantinople (58.2% Muslim, 31.6% Christian), which corresponds almost exactly to what more literary sources imply.

If you'd done more research, you'd realize that things aren't nearly as clear-cut as you make it out. It's well-known that the Christian population of many areas of Anatolia increased under the Ottomans. Smyrna/Izmir, for example, was 86% Muslim in the 1520s. It became Greek-majority due to large-scale immigration from the early seventeenth to the nineteenth century (and, one assumes, the fact that the Greeks were richer and possessed an enviable economic position due to their European connections).

But sure, ignore historical evidence based on flawed assumptions.

Some more evidence:
  • The Muslim proportion of Crete fell from around 50% to around 30% in the nineteenth century (Doumanis, Before the Nation)
  • "By 1914 the ratio of Christians to the general population of Palestine had risen... [to] the highest proportion since the Crusades" (Newberg, The Pentecostal Mission of Palestine)
  • "The nineteenth century saw a different trend in urban population expansion... We find an obviously disproportionate increase in Christian citizens" (Sahara, "The Ottoman City Council")
  • "During the period between 1831 and 1881, the Greek population grew by 2 percent per year, whereas during the same period the Muslim population remained roughly the same... In the city of Izmir, the Greek population grew from 20,000 in 1830 to 200,000 in 1910." (Chenoweth, Rethinking Violence)
  • "The rate of growth among Christian and Muslim groups showed considerable variation in the 19th century. The Christian groups, especially the Greeks, followed by Bulgarians, Serbians, and Armenians showed a far more rapid rate of increase than the Muslims... [because of] the establishment of a quasi-capitalist system, imposed by Europe, which turned a substantial part of the Muslim population into an exploited rural class... [that had to] sustain economically a non-Muslim middle class which acquired rapidly wealth, education, and political consciousness." (Karpat, "The Ottoman Demography in the Nineteenth Century")
You see how the 1914 demographics are hardly representative of Ottoman history.

This is really interesting - I had never known any of this.
 
The easier approach to this very simply is "You're Roman, you speak Latin not Greek."
Not a chance. Greek was already well established in the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took over (unlike the western empire where it was possible to establish Latin as a lingua franca). Also, regardless of whether it's before or after the move to Byzantium, Greek had higher prestige than Latin due to the Roman imitation and adoration of Ancient Greece and its culture. Latin displacing Greek simply because of the Roman Empire is ridiculous--if anything, Rome probably helped make the Greek language even more widespread.
 
Not a chance. Greek was already well established in the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took over (unlike the western empire where it was possible to establish Latin as a lingua franca). Also, regardless of whether it's before or after the move to Byzantium, Greek had higher prestige than Latin due to the Roman imitation and adoration of Ancient Greece and its culture. Latin displacing Greek simply because of the Roman Empire is ridiculous--if anything, Rome probably helped make the Greek language even more widespread.

Yeah without Rome not only would the Thracians have remained un-Hellenized, the Parthians probably would have conquered the Levant and Anatolia.
 
I like this, and I think it's plausible on the whole (though I'm a bit sceptical about coptic surviving and even expanding, nice idea though a coptic-speaking Crete is). But I suggest the last holdout of Hellenic speech into the 19th century, rather than a Mediterranean island, would be an obscure dialect in central Morea called Tsakonian. If the slavonic 'Greeks' are interested in recovering the past, antiquarians will make an intensive study of this language and its last speakers, and thus get a very distorted view of what spoken Greek was actually like.

Tsakonian did survive a long time (that part of Morea is very isolated), so it's just as plausible as a remote island. It also throws a wrench into any nationalist movement which can either focus on Classical Greek/Koine or go for the "modern living descendent" of Greek. I think Ancient Greek would win out just because of the prestige.

It would be interesting to see historians and linguists debating about how the greek language was pronounced.

"Your fool! The tsakonian theory is completely wrong, as the best way to discover how greek sounded in medieval and ancient era is by greek-derived words in other languages, llike eastern romance languages."
"Not exactly. We don't know how greek was pronounced, and so many of the greek-derived words in another languages may have suffered radical changes to adequate in the vocabulary. Besides it, the tsakonian dialect may be a good indicator about how greek was spoken, specially in the daily life."

Isn't it possible to reconstruct Ancient-Medieval (cutting off TTL I guess at the fall of Constantinople by the Avars and Persians) Greek's phonology to a great degree of accuracy based on analyzing the wealth of texts and sources available and you don't even need modern Greek to help? Wouldn't seem hard to discern Tsakonian is derived from Doric either and thus evolved separately.
 
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