From Latin to Romance

A. This is what happened to Latin as the Romans spread their language from Italy across Europe. In each region, Latin developed into a new language, and these languages today are the ones we know as the Romance languages. These include French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, as well as smaller ones, such as Catalan.

B. One word becomes five. The fate of the Latin word herba for “grass” in the five main Romance languages shows how language changes in many ways and creates new languages.

1. All the languages dropped the h—the spellings in French and Spanish maintain it, just as English spelling maintains the “silent” e.

2. Moderate changes. Italian is one of the closest Romance languages to Latin, and other than the lost h, it preserves the word intact. French goes somewhat further and drops the final -a as well. Spanish keeps this but changes the e to an ie (pronounced “yeh”), while Portuguese instead softens the b to a v.

3. Radical changes. Romanian doesn’t just insert a y sound before the e as Spanish does but has a whole new sound ia (pronounced “yah”), and the symbol over the final -a indicates that this is a new sound, roughly “uh.” Consider that similar changes happen to every word in the language, and it is easy to see how one language becomes several new ones.

C. One sentence becomes five. Consider a Latin sentence like this one:

“I gave it to the woman.”

Here is this sentence in the five main Romance languages:

The words in italics are for woman, the words in bold are for it, and the words underlined are for give.

1. Word order.

a. Over time, word order changes, as we can see from the different places that it goes in each language.

b. Latin had flexible word order because of such endings as -ae on fēminae, which meant “to.” The Romance languages have lost most of these kinds of endings on nouns, replacing them with prepositions. This means that word order is not as flexible in Latin’s descendants.

2. Grammar change. Only the Spanish and Portuguese forms of give are descended directly from Latin’s dedi. The other languages now use a different form of the verb, the participle, used along with a form of the verb have (in the construction famous in French as the passé composé). This is another way that grammar changes over time—languages develop new ways to express the past, the future, the plural, and so on.

a. Word substitution. In many languages, a Latin word has been replaced by another one—only French and Romanian still use a word derived from fēmina to mean “woman” in a neutral sense.

b. New words from old ones. Latin did not have any articles, but all of the Romance languages have them. They developed them by grammaticalization, as Latin words for that shortened and changed their meanings from the concrete to the grammatical. But the shape of the articles came out differently in each language: where French has le, Spanish has el; Italian, il; Portuguese, o; and Romanian has -ul, which it places after the noun instead of before it!