4.8 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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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0:00.0 | Hi everybody, Patrick here. For this week we're re-broadcasting one of my very favorite episodes of |
0:05.4 | Tides of History. How Latin became the Romance languages, from all the way back in November of 2017. |
0:12.8 | In the centuries following the end of the Roman Empire, the various regional flavors of Latin |
0:17.6 | spoken everywhere from North Africa to Gal to Italy to Britain diverged, changed and evolved |
0:23.3 | into what eventually became the Romance languages. How and why did this happen? Well, let's talk about it. |
0:30.3 | Historical linguistics has been a passion of mine for a really, really long time and I absolutely loved |
0:35.5 | doing this episode. Thanks for joining me today and I hope you all enjoy this one as much as I did. |
0:40.0 | In the hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro, kids are playing soccer. They laugh and yell out in Portuguese. |
1:02.3 | Elderly Parisians sitting at sidewalk cafes chattering French. |
1:06.0 | University students in Bucharest absorb lectures and their native remaining. |
1:13.3 | In Mexico City, TV news anchors read out the day's events in Spanish. |
1:19.8 | In the bleachers of the stadium of San Siro in Milan, fans of the city's football clubs chant in Italian. |
1:25.6 | 8 million people around the globe today hear the legacy of Rome every time they speak. |
1:37.8 | The Latin language and its descendants, the Romance languages, are one of the Roman Empire's great |
1:43.4 | legacies to the world. Some of the Romance languages like Spanish and Portuguese have hundreds of |
1:49.6 | millions of speakers. Others like Romance or Gascan have only tens or hundreds of thousands. |
1:57.2 | Whether it's a sunbathe or an eponym of beach, a rice farmer in the Philippines |
2:01.6 | or a shepherd in the Aponine Mountains of Italy, their language ultimately leads back to the |
2:06.9 | tongues spoken in the Italian region of Latium. All these roads lead back to Rome, but those roads take |
2:14.1 | a long and winding path back through hundreds thousands of years. Language change is a glacial slow |
2:22.0 | phenomenon. We have to go back past the works of Voltaire, Sardinthes and Dante. We have to return to |
2:30.0 | the years as and after the Roman Empire fell apart in the West. What happened? How did Latin |
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