26: Tides of History: How Latin Became the Romance Languages

The Fall of Rome Podcast

Patrick Wyman / Wondery

Education, Medieval History, Patrick Wyman, Ancient History, Society & Culture, History, Tides Of History, Documentary

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2017

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did Latin splinter into the Romance languages? In this episode, we explore how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on - of related but no longer mutually intelligible tongues.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In the hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro, kids are playing soccer.
0:09.8	They laugh and yell out in Portuguese.
0:16.4	Elderly Parisians sitting at sidewalk cafes chattering French.
0:21.8	University students in Bucharest absorb lectures in their native remaining.
0:27.4	In Mexico City, TV news anchors read out the day's events in Spanish.
0:33.9	In the bleachers of the stadium of San Siro in Milan, fans of the city's football clubs
0:38.5	chant in Italian.
0:43.9	800 million people around the globe today hear the legacy of Rome every time they speak.
0:51.9	The Latin language and its descendants, the Romance languages, are one of the Roman Empire's
0:56.5	great legacies to the world.
1:00.0	Some of the Romance languages like Spanish and Portuguese have hundreds of millions of
1:04.1	speakers.
1:05.9	Others like Romance or Gaskin have only tens or hundreds of thousands.
1:11.4	Whether it's a sunbather on Ipanema Beach, a rice farmer in the Philippines, or a shepherd
1:16.4	in the Aponine Mountains of Italy, their language ultimately leads back to the tongues spoken
1:21.8	in the Italian region of Latian.
1:24.9	All these roads lead back to Rome, but those roads take a long and winding path back through
1:30.4	hundreds, thousands of years.
1:33.9	Language change is a glacially slow phenomenon.
1:37.4	We have to go back past the works of Voltaire, Sardinthes and Dante.
1:43.0	We have to return to the years as and after the Roman Empire fell apart in the West.
1:49.6	What happened?
	...

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