Compared to the Romans, the Persian Empire, now Iran, used to be a major geopolitical player in the world. It extended westward all the way to the shores of Greece and a considerable degree eastward of present-day Iran. If subjects were brought to Persia, then they probably learned Persian. But as far as other parts of their territories, Persian was used only for very official purposes. As rulers, the Persians accommodated the languages of their subjects. Learn more about how changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin.
The Romans, however, were interested in spreading Roman culture and Latin. As Latin spread to various Western and Eastern European locations, it was imposed upon those who spoke other languages. Suddenly Latin was all over this vast region.
New versions of Latin were developing in different directions across the empire. Once that process was started, the Latin varieties evolved so differently from each other they became new languages.
Great evidence reveals their relation; if you learn one, learning one of the others is fairly easy. Learn more about how the meaning of a word changes over time.
The word for grass in Latin was herba. That same word exists in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, but over the centuries a sound change has created a different rendition of the word in each language. As a result, we have a variety of forms.
For example, Latin had herba , which began with an h —but in all five of these languages the h is gone. Spanish has the word hierba ; the h sound is long gone. H is fragile and has a way of disappearing in languages. The same thing happened to our word. Italian, of the five Romance languages, is closest to Latin. Learn more about how sounds evolve. As the empire grew, so did the number of people who spoke Latin. But once the Roman Empire came to an end in the 5th century, the far-flung territories that once fell under the control of Rome began to form their own governments, as well as distinctly different dialects of their spoken tongue.
After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the language slowly evolved into something more closely resembling the Spanish that we know today. Modern-day Spanish is the official language of 20 countries around the world. When the Roman Empire expanded into the Iberian Peninsula, Latin quickly replaced other languages spoken by locals. Over time, that Latin evolved into two similar but distinct languages: Portuguese and Spanish. When you think of Portuguese, you may immediately think of Portugal and Brazil.
Today Portuguese is spoken in countries around the world, including several in Africa and Asia. At that time, the inhabitants of that land spoke a Celtic language called Gaulish. That quickly changed when the Romans brought their native Latin to that region. Over the years, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, the language slowly evolved: from Old French into Middle French and finally into the French language we know today.
It was known, of course, that French and Spanish were directly descended from vulgar Latin, [1] and there was no mystery about Latin derivatives like trois and madre. By the same token, the historic kinship between German and English accounted for the closeness of Mutter and mother , of drei and three. The other similarities, however, could be explained only on the hypothesis of some common ancestral source, remote in time. Even today, there is some dispute about the geographical origins of these people; but it is widely assumed that their homeland lay to the north of the Black Sea, in what is now southern Russia.
Sometime around 3, BC, they must have begun dispersing in waves of migration—north and west into continental Europe, and east and south into Persia and India. The terminology and system of classification may vary somewhat from one authority to the next, but there is general agreement on all the essential features.
For our present purposes, it is not important to know the details of this complex system, provided we grasp the basic principles and understand the relative positions of Greek, Latin, and English within the vast language family.
Suffice it to say that English is at least distantly related to all these languages. These four branches or subfamilies developed, over many centuries, from four prehistoric proto-languages, which themselves had evolved from the common Indo-European tongue. There has often been contact among the subfamilies, and none of them has been immune to external influence. Still, this does not change the fact that English is a Germanic language, whereas Latin and French are Italic.
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