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Message:: [QUOTE="GinoLR, post: 8538759, member: 128351"]Under the Roman Empire it seems that a very simple Greek was the lingua franca of most of the Mediterranean, while Aramaic had the same position in the Middle East. The New Testament was written in Greek for a reason... Greek was like English today, a kind of "globish". C. AD 400 saint Augustine who was the bishop of Hippo (today Annaba, Algeria) noticed that the peasants outside the city spoke a curious language, and they said it was "Cananean", that is Phoenician Aramaic in its Punic dialect. The official language of Carthage, razed to the ground in BC 146, was still spoken in North Africa more than 500 years after. These people probably had no problem switching to Arabic in the 7th c., for Arabic is relatively close to Aramaic.In the Byzantine Empire, under Justinian for ex., most people spoke Greek but Latin was still an official language. It was used by judges and lawyers. The Justinian Code, a compendium of Roman law, is in Latin. Latin was also the official language of the army, and the official language used on coin legends, but that does not mean much: after all the obverse legends of the UK coins are still in Latin, like the Byzantine coins, but who speaks Latin today in UK?[/QUOTE]