Why did much of the Western Roman Empire adopt Latin, while the Eastern Roman Empire remained Greek speaking even after Roman conquest?

So before the Roman Empire included the east, Greek was the “lingua franca” of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and because the Roman elite respected Greek as a philosophical and literary language, they left it alone in the East and indeed made it one of the two official languages of the Empire. So for a Greek-speaking resident of the East, you could still continue your day-to-day life and even interact with the Roman state, all without having to learn Latin.

The same factors weren’t really there in the west, where there were a lot of different languages, none of which had the prestige and thus utility of Greek. And while the Roman Empire didn’t try to impose Latin on conquered people in the West, because Latin was the only language of administration, law, military, and business, there was an incredibly strong incentive for the children of the provincal elite to be educated in Latin so that they could become Romanized and advance in society.

That being said, it should be noted that bilingualism in elite circles was the rule in both the West and East through the 5th Century CE. Indeed, for a long time, because Latin was considered the “language of power,” there were complaints that the study of Latin by high-status residents of the Eastern Empire was harming the quality of traditional education in Greek rhetoric.

Why do you think the Andal tongue was crucial to your proposed agreement between the Faith and the Citadel?

So here’s my thinking: there’s something really weird about the way that the WOIAF has the Maesters be a pre-Andal instituion but goes back and forth on the First Men having a written language.

So here’s my thinking. I think the runic writing of the First Men was quite complicated and difficult to learn, requring one to learn thousands and thousands of easy-to-confuse runes – and that the pre-Andal maesters thus relied as much more on memorizing oral traditions, similar to the traditions of the Celtic druids and bards.

And then come the Andals, but instead of overthrowing the system and burning the Citadel, they get incorporated into the power structure of the Reach and Oldtown more specifically. And so the maesters encounter these new Andal lords and knights, and there’s cultural sharing and intermingling going on.

Now, my headcanon is that the “Common
Tongue” is so named because it’s a relatively easy language to learn (atonal,
regular conjugations, no complicated system of cases and agreements,
straightforward grammar that doesn’t have the verb at the end of the sentence, etc.)
and a writing system that’s alphabetical rather than character-based, so it’s much easier to read and write and to teach people to read and write.

So early after the Andal incorporation into Oldtown, I think the maesters decided to adopt the Common Tongue and, with the help of the septons of the Faith, write down everything that had previously had been preserved orally, thus why “the tales we have now are the work of septons and maesters writing thousands of years after the fact,” and “the septons who first wrote them down took what details suited them and added others.”

Thus, we have a reason for the Maesters to compromise with the Faith.

So in Storm of Swords when Daenerys is looking to buy the Unsullied, Grazdan (i think that was his name) speaks to her in High Valyrian while Missandei translated to the Common Tongue. Why would he not talk in his native Ghiscari (especially since he was assuming Dany didn’t understand Valyrian anyway)? Is it because Valyrian would be a “language of commerce” in a way similar to English nowadays? (And the fact that he has a polyglot like Missandei with him makes that point moot too). thoughts?

Got it in one: they think Dany doesn’t speak Valyrian (which is partly why the Astapori think of her as a barbarian, because anyone who’s civilized speaks it), so Missandei is there to translate.

High Valyrian is pretty clearly modelled on previous international languages, but in slightly weird ways. On the one hand, because it’s the language of classical scholarship, it’s taught in the Citadel, and educated highborn people like Tyrion learn it as part of being cultured, it’s a lot like how Latin was the international language of the literate in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

And it’s also got that root-language thing; in the same way that Latin gave rise to the Romance languages, High Valyrian has given rise to the dialects of the Free Cities. Thus, Kraznys doesn’t speak particularly good Valyrian, “twisted and thickened by the characteristic growl of Ghis, and flavored here and there with words of slaver argot.” Grazdan is probably better-educated than Kraznys; hence being able to speak Westerosi (although not well), so his Valyrian is better.

On the other hand, trade languages aren’t usually the grammatically complex, sophisticated languages of scholarship. They tend to be simplified pidgins, because they’re being used in inter-cultural communication and you’re primarily interested in buying and selling and things like complex declensions and cases and tenses just get in the way of business. So for example, the original linga franca which emerged in the Mediterranean in the medieval period, used a simplified Italian as its base because of the prominence of Italian merchants, and then added on large numbers of loan words from almost every language group a merchant might encounter in the Mediterranean, from Spanish and French to Turkish.