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Date: October 31, 2025
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39 thoughts on “What did Marco Polo speak in China? #linguistics #history #language”
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Buzhing? Beige-ing?
Say “bay GEE-ING”
with low glottal fry on bay,
a hard J like Djinn, and an octave leap ♫ like “Some-where (over the rainbow)”
Persian was actually my first guess, just based on the fact that it's a larger language that I assumed would be known in China. And something Marco would have been likely to learn during or before his journey.
Clearly it was english
My first guess was Mongolian. Knowing a bit of history about the place at the time is helps making informed guesses. Persian also makes sense. Chines… problem with that is there is not one language of Chinese to being with.
"Italian" didn't exist at that time sir
Can you really call the 13th century Florentine language, Italian?
Day 106 asking for Rusyn
Everybody loves Persian bureaucracy
They did not speak italian at that time. Italian was devoloped from the florence dialect around the 19th century. In fact, some people say that the expansion of italian was due to tv around the 50's of the 20th century. In the 19th century there were a nationalist force ti create a common language thru literature, even thru cooking recipes. Marco Polo did no speak a non existent language like Italian . A beautiful but newly artficially unified language.