Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages
Tides of History
00:00
Language Change Is a Glacial Process
When we compare languages, we can work backwards and find the features their common ancestors shared. This comparative method is how we can split languages up into families. For, say, french and spanish, we know the common ancestor was latin. But what about english and german? Or irish and greek? Or russian and hindi? We don't have texts that represent their common ancestor. All these languages belong to the indo european language family. They share a common ancestor called proto Indo-Germanic which was spoken thousands of years ago. Within the indo European family there are sub families like Celtic, with irish and welsh, along with extinct languages
Transcript
Play full episode
