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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Two counterpoints:

- They were no longer properly Roman after they stopped speaking Latin, which they did almost immediately because majority of territories remaining under their control after initial Arab conquest were Greek-speaking.

- Written cultural heritage of Byzantine, unlike Roman, is negligible, mainly because they intentionally tried to be as un-original as possible, which is a paradox: they valued not writers or poets who could write new stuff that sounded fresh, but those who could imitate particular ancient authors's style as precisely as possible.

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You could say that the Latin-speaking Romans tried to be as unoriginal as possible. Most "Golden Age" Latin literature is a deliberate copy of something that exists in Greek.

Many educated Romans spoke both Greek and Latin. Greek had always remained the spoken language in the Greek islands, though it looked quite a bit different than the Greek used today. Egypt spoke Coptic. Punic was the other language.

"Properly Roman" according to what formal certifying authority of "proper Romans?"

They considered themselves Roman up until Constantinople fell to Mehmed II. And even then, the Ottoman Turks took the title Kayser-e-Rum, literally "Caesar of Rome." And even before them, as the Muslims first expanded out of Mecca and Medina, they referred to the Byzantines as "Rum" or "Rome."

Would you say the Holy Roman Empire was really Roman?

In the words of Voltaire it wasn’t Holy, it wasn’t Roman, and it wasn’t an empire.

>They considered themselves Roman up until Constantinople fell to Mehmed II.

Not as much, especially after the first 4 centuries. They claimed a different heritage then (the local one).

Besides the western barbarians that took down Rome proper also called themselves Roman ("the Holy Roman empire") for "legitimacy" purposes (as a claim to the expanses of the empire). The same reason Mohamed the conqueror adopted the "Ceasar of Rome" title.

stopped speaking?

The Eastern Empire never spoke Latin. There was always a cultural divide.

Eastern?

Basically all the Mediterranean east of the Adriatic was either a Greek speaking colony or conquest, especially after Alexander had marched across it.

In Egypt for example the Ptolemaic dynasty spoke Greek (Cleopatra was the first to even learn Egyptian) and it was still widely used in Roman times.

They edited the comment it used to say.

"The Western Empire never spoke Latin."

What about Romania? That's a Romance language, which presumably means it's derived from Latin. I have no idea how it ended up that far east, but it being a Latin-speaking part of the Eastern Roman Empire sounds plausible to me.

Not to mention that according to the article, that eastern Roman Empire also called itself Romania.

Yeah, it is significantly more complicated than the parent post implies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jire%C4%8Dek_Line

Every time some peoples came from the east to trample Europe, they came trough this patch of land and scorched it.

Romania's longing to Roman history is mostly a nation building effort. Romania was a buffer territory between the Ottomans, Habsburgs (austria-hungary) and Huns for many centuries. It was so hard to get people to live there, because there would always come an army to torch everything to the ground. They lured Germans to live there and civilize the country in return for city rights.

That's all fine and good, but a population of 25 million that speaks a Romance language still popped out of somewhere.

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