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Tides of History

Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.86.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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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