Download Spanish And The Other Roman Languanges

Spanish And The Other Roman Languanges
The family of ‘Roman languages’ is the group of existing languages which
have developed from the Latin that the Romans spread all over the
Mediterranean region and parts of Northern Europe.
The Roman languages are Spanish, Italian, Rumanean, Portuguese and
French. The parent languange, Latin, managed to grow into a fairly
homogenous entity in spite of influence from other languages, especially
Greek.
For more than a thousand years it went from strength to strength as the
official language of the Roman Empire in the ‘known’ world comprising the
whole Mediterranean area including North Africa and the Middle East,
France, a bit of Germany and most of Great Britain. At around 100 AD
Rumania was also encorporated into the Roman Empire.
The golden age of the Roman Empire lasted some 200 years from year 1
AD. Latin was the most used written language in this area and it is
assumed that at least in Italy the language was spoken by the whole
population, although it obviously developed and changed a lot during the
centuries.
Another assumption is that the populations of Northern Africa, the
Middle East, Germania, the Slavic countries and Great Britain did not
start speaking latin – in these areas the language was only used by the
‘elite’ – which explains that they changed to other languages soon after
the collapse of the Roman Empire shortly after 400 AD.
In Greece people carried on speaking the same Greek that they had been
using for a long time before the arrival of the Romans.
On the other hand, the populations of France, Spain, Portugal and Rumania
had changed to a kind of Latin – which they have conserved until today in
the form of their present Roman languages. This is partly due to the fact
that many Italians emigrated to these areas.
In the golden age of the Roman Empire, Italy was a wealthy but also
overpopulated country. The Roman legionaires typically served for 16
years from they were 18 to 34 – and were then given a plot of land and a
bag of money to make a life for themselves.
As the centuries passed, land became unavailable in Italy, so the majority
of the legionaires were allotted land and established their families mainly
in France and Spain.
Another explanation of the success of Latin could be that the Roman
culture and social structure were so superior that the celtic populace
realised that Latin was the language of the future – a language you had to
learn if you wanted to be part of progress.
Today Italian is the language which is closest to Latin, and French is the
furthest away as far as pronunciation is concerned.
As opposed to the other Romanian languages, Spanish was influenced by
Arabic for centuries. You can hear this for example in the ‘guttural h’ –
sound of ‘j’ and occassionally of ‘g’, and in a great number of words and
expressions, and in the article ‘el’ and the contraction ‘al’.
Nowadays, some 400 million people all over the world speak Spanish,
turning it into the most extensive of the Roman languages.