Languages have a certain resemblance to living beings, since they are born at a certain time and over time they develop and evolve. In this process of transformation, some languages are extinct or they are transformed. Romance Languages
Latin is the origin of the various Romance languages
Romance languages, also called neo-Latin or Latin languages, form a linguistic family , as they all have the same origin, Latin. The main languages belonging to this family are the following: Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian.
The grammatical structures of each have remarkable similarities, as they are derived from Latin.
- – The word januarius means January in Portuguese; gennaio in Italian; janvier in French and enero in Spanish.
- – The adjective bonum in Latin is equivalent to bueno in Spanish; buono in Italian and bon in Catalan.
- – The word neighbor in Portuguese means voison in French, vecino in Spanish and veí in Catalan. Romance Languages
The similarities between the Romance languages are of every kind, as they share the alphabet, the lexical similarities and the grammatical characteristics (the grammatical agreement between nouns and adjectives is another characteristic shared between the Romance languages).
Most of the etymologies of the Romance languages come from Latin and, to a lesser extent, from Greek. In this sense, it should be taken into account that Roman civilization was founded on the values and traditions of Greek culture.
From the expansion of Latin to the emergence of Romance languages
Roman civilization extended its vast domains across the Mediterranean. The military presence was accompanied by cultural expansion in several and large territories. In this way, Latin became the main vehicle of communication in the Mediterranean basin.
When the Romans mixed with the native peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, there was a process of domination and, at the same time, of cultural exchange . The inhabitants of Hispania were learning the language of the dominant civilization, Latin.
However, his way of speaking was peculiar , as there was a fusion between the original native languages and Latin. This way of speaking was known as Vulgar Latin and spread throughout Hispania. Thus, Latin in its vulgar version is the remote origin of Spanish and the different Romance languages.
While submissive peoples communicated in Vulgar Latin, a minority of the population used learned Latin. This version was also used in writing, but when the Roman Empire ended, it began a slow process of decline in learned Latin. In this way, around the year 1000, in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish was already spoken and written in its old version.
