On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:39:22 +0000 (UTC), David Hatunen
wrote:

I have been led to understand that Italian is pretty close to the vulgate
Latin spoken by most people at the time of the Roman Empire and the
vulgate had, at that time, already drifted toward being a different
language than classical Latin. Was there a similar "vulgate" Greek spoken
in ancient times, but all we usually see in ancient texts is the
classical Greek?

Yes, it's called Koine ("common") Greek, the language of the New
Testament. When Alexander the Great and his successors conquered the
diverse peoples of the Near East, and Hellenized them, they needed a
simplified form of the language that could be read and pronounced from
texts. So, Classical Greek was reformed by adding punctuation marks
and guides to pronunciation (accent marks and "breathings"). This
became the "lingua franca" of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.
(Written Classical Greek, in its pure form, did not separate the words
by spaces and did not have punctuation marks, accents, or breathings.
The native speakers simply knew by habit how to pronounce it, just as
the Chinese today know how to pronounce their ideograms. As the
Chinese have many local oral dialects, that are not reflected in the
written Chinese language, so too did the ancient Greeks have local
dialects and variations in pronunciation. These tended to become
standardized with the advent of Koine.)