During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Latin, Linguistics

Yup.

Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek/Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek is a paper on that. And Are there any accounts of the Romans realizing linguistic similarity between Latin and Germanic languages? • /r/AskHistorians is a Reddit thread of it.

The locus classicus is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but the idea was doing the rounds:

LacusCurtius • Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities

The language spoken by the Romans is neither utterly barbarous nor absolutely Greek, but a mixture, as it were, of both, the greater part of which is Aeolic; and the only disadvantage they have experienced from their intermingling with these various nations is that they do not pronounce all their sounds properly.

Answered 2017-01-20 · Upvoted by

Steve Rapaport, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.

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