Have been listening to the “Fall of Rome” podcast, done by Patrick Wyman, a person with an actual doctorate in Roman History…OR SO HE CLAIMS. He’s also got a podcast which is a weird mix of post-roman and medieval/Byzantine/Renaissance history. Anyhoo, his take appears to be: Latin was the lingua franca (ha!) of the small-w western Roman empire. The eastern territories were almost all part of the the Hellenized world, and so the everyday language there was Greek.
Then there was the language spoken by soldiers, who might come from anywhere in the empire (or outside it) and be deployed anywhere from England to Armenia. This multilingual army needed to have a common tongue so that units could communicate amongst themselves and with other units. The “Latin” spoken by soldiers was based on everyday Latin but had a lot of loanwords from other languages and neologisms, and was not entirely intelligible to Latin speakers, no doubt partly on purpose.
The UN charter, which established the UN security council and who the permanent members were, was ratified on October 24, 1945. At that time only the US had nuclear weapons. Russia/USSR didn’t conduct a successful test until 1949, the UK until 1952, and France until 1960. China as recognized at the UN founding has never had nuclear weapons, as the UN treated Taiwan (non-nuclear power) as the “China” security council member until 1971, and what is now “China” on the security council didn’t have nuclear weapons until 1964.
Wasn’t it, essentially, the 4 “Great Powers” that were victorious in WWII, plus China (it’s big!!!)? That might be bending the language a bit to accommodate France, but that’s the way it goes.
Yes, the security council is the five great powers that were victorious in WWII - which includes China. In fact, as early as 1942, the US, USSR, the UK and China signed an anti-Axis agreement which called those four nations “the United Nations” Declaration by United Nations - Wikipedia (and shortly afterwards, 22 other nations signed on).
I just recalled that I have a reproduction of a Roman army pay bill from around Hadrian’s Wall, written on Papyrus (!). It’s written in Latin, so I assume that’s the language the soldiers were using – it wouldn’t make sense to write something they were actually using (as opposed to some ceremonial writing) in a language that they weren’t actually speaking.
Really? That tells me that Latin was the language of administration, which should not be surprising. I suspect that few, if anyone, even knew how to write some of the languages spoken by the lowly soldiers.
Even today I suspect official army documents are written in a language very different from the everyday language of the troops, though probably not as different as official Latin and vulgar Latin or army Latin.