Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages
Tides of History
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The Roman Empire - A Space of Movement
There's evidence that they could shift their speech to accommodate it. This is true if speakers of practically all languages to day. But there's zero indication that the two couldn't have understood each other. Why is that? How in an empire that stretched from britain to the hera and its latin speaking parts, how could everybody understand each other? The answer to that question lies in a term called coinisation. It comes from the greek word coine, which means a standard language or dialect That comes about through the mixing of a bunch of dialects - varieties of that language. During the roman empire, in those first few centuries a d latin was constantly undergoing this
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