Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 15 of Truscans, Romans and a modified alphabet.

In this episode, we're going to turn our attention from the Eastern Mediterranean to the

West, specifically to Italy.

And on the past few episodes, I've discussed the significant influence of Greek on English.

And now we start to look at the tremendous influence of Latin.

As I've mentioned in earlier episodes, modern English is pretty much a blend of Germanic

languages and Latin.

And if you look through a modern English dictionary, you actually have to work to find words

that didn't find their way into English through either Latin or their Germanic languages.

I mean, there are obviously words from other sources, but their numbers are tiny in

comparison to the words we get from Old English, Old Norse, Latin, French, and Greek

words that come into English through Latin and French.

Now as I've looked over my notes in preparing this episode, I came to the very quick realization

that I could spend many episodes on Latin and its influences on English.

But for now, I'm going to focus on the basics.

How did Latin emerge from the original Indo-European language?

How did Rome emerge as such a powerful city-state?

How did Latin spread from the Italian peninsula to eventually encompass almost all of continental

Europe west of the Rhine?

Since a lot of Latin influence on English came with the Norman French in 1066, I'll discuss

that part of the story later when we get to the Norman invasion and the period of middle

...