![]() ![]() Spanish has the word hierba the h sound is long gone. French and Spanish kept it in the spelling the French spell the word h-e-r-b-e, but the h hasn’t been pronounced for a long time. For example, Latin had herba, which began with an h-but in all five of these languages the h is gone. In French it’s herbe, in Spanish it’s hierba, in Italian it’s erba, in Portuguese it’s erva, and in Romanian it’s iarbã.Īll of these words, even when you just hear them, are clearly related, but they’re different. That same word exists in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, but over the centuries a sound change has created a different rendition of the word in each language. It’s our English word for herb with an a at the end. To understand how Latin transitioned to today’s Romance languages, let’s look at the evolution of one word. Learn more about how the meaning of a word changes over time The Fragile H Great evidence reveals their relation if you learn one, learning one of the others is fairly easy. The big five, as they are known, are French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. That’s how the languages we know as the Romance languages came to exist. Once that process was started, the Latin varieties evolved so differently from each other they became new languages. The big five Romance languages are French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Learn more about how changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin Latin Variations Become the Romance languages As rulers, the Persians accommodated the languages of their subjects. But as far as other parts of their territories, Persian was used only for very official purposes. If subjects were brought to Persia, then they probably learned Persian. It extended westward all the way to the shores of Greece and a considerable degree eastward of present-day Iran. Compared to the Romans, the Persian Empire, now Iran, used to be a major geopolitical player in the world. That has often been the case throughout human history. An empire could prosper without subjects speaking the language. The Roman Empire was relatively unique in that as the Romans spread and conquered beyond their original boundaries, they imposed their language on other people-a relatively new concept at the time. This is a transcript from the video series The Story of Human Language. This Italic variant moved around much more than the typical language did or even does today. It happened that the peoples who created the Roman Empire spoke Latin. Latin, spoken in what is now Italy, was one of many Indo-European languages from a collective group called Italic, and is the only one to have survived. But how does the process of language creation take place? It can be clearly illustrated by taking a look at Latin and its daughters: The Romance languages. By John McWhorter, Ph.D, Columbia University Recent research has shown that all languages may be able to trace their roots back to a common tongue spoken thousands of years ago. ![]()
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