This is no small question but it's going to receive a relatively small
answer. Every language that is spoken and written by a sizable and
wide-spread population is going to have considerable fluctuations in levels
of formal grammatical usage depending upon how well-educated the speaker or
writer is, the social class one has grown up in, whether one is writing or
addressing a group formally or speaking casually among friends. That is to
say, there are levels both of formality of diction ("Stilhoehe") and of
conformity to a standard grammar as taught in good schools. Latin did not
"become" 'common' but always was so; i.e. the SERMO VULGARIS was written by
Plautus in 200 BC and was not that different from what one reads in some of
the earlier Latin translations of the NT or even in Jerome; rather it was
the SERMO URBANUS that developed in the course of the 2nd century BC into a
polished linguistic tool of an aristocratic ruling class and came to be a
literary language of considerable grandeur in the works of sparkling poets
and in prose works especially of a non-aristocrat like Cicero. I remember
being shocked when I first learned that Plautus uses verbs like UTOR with
an accusative direct object as does later Vulgar Latin, while the poets and
orators of the late Republic and early Empire always use them with an
instrumental ablative. And then there's the striking difference between the
diction of Catullus's more formal elegiac poems and the studied coarseness
of his hendecasyllabics, where he's moved fromthe language of the salon to
the language of the street. Bearded Bill of Asheville had a great post
sometime back in May, I think it was, on the wide range of what is much too
simply called "Koine" Greek. Koine Greek is the language, basically Ionic
in spelling but Attic in grammar, first of the Athenian naval empires of
the late fifth and earlier fourth centuries, and then of the military
governors and merchants who emigrated in droves to the new colonial cities
established all over the eastern Mediterranean by Alexander and his
generals. Examination of any volume of papyrus material from Egypt from the
early Christian period will reveal a considerable range between the kind of
Greek written in official records of urban or provincial administration and
that in personal correspondence and laundry lists by one of the first
populations where literacy really reached a considerable number of the
lower middle classes (and slaves were often better educated than their
masters because they had to do the writing and reading aloud of documents).
And yes, English is very much a Koine today--but so is French in North
Africa, Spanish in Latin America, and German has been that in central
Europe for centuries--Yiddish ("Juedisch") is, of course, the Jewish
dialect of that central European Koine German--and just like the Greek of
the NT, it is loaded with loan-words from Hebrew and from other vernaculars
of central Europe.
I did say: a "relatively" small answer.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/