The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Romance Languages

French is a romance language, because the French are, by definition, romantic.

Once upon a time there was a thing called the Roman empire that was ruled by Romans in Rome. However, the language they spoke was not called Roman; it was called Latin.

The Roman empire was a grand affair. They had lots of great authors, like Virgil and Ovid, who wrote books in Latin. They also had a frighteningly efficient army that spread death and Latin to every part of the known world.

But empires fall and languages change. Six hundred years ago, Chaucer could write ‘al besmotered with his habergeon’, but it’s difficult today to make out what he meant, unless you’ve studied Chaucerian English.

The same thing happened to the Romans and their Latin. There was no sudden break, but little by little their language changed, until nobody in Rome could understand the great Roman authors any more, unless they had studied Latin at school. Slowly, people had to start distinguishing the old Latin from the language that people were speaking on the streets of Rome, which came to be known as Romanicus.

The Dark Ages darkened and the difference between Latin and Romanicus grew larger and larger. Latin was preserved in a way. Classical Latin, or something very like it, became the language of the Catholic Church and of academic discourse. If you wanted to write something that would be taken seriously by a pope or a professor you had to do so in Latin. Even as late as 1687, Isaac Newton still needed to call his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and publish it in Latin.

Yet in the Middle Ages, most people didn’t want to read books about theoretical theology. They wanted stories about knights in shining armour and beautiful damsels in distress. They wanted fire-breathing dragons, enchanted mountains and fairylands beyond the oceans. So such stories got written by the bucketful, and they were romanice scribere, that is to say they were written in Romanic (the –us had been dropped by this stage).

Not all versions of Romanic were the same. There was the Romanic that had developed in Rome, another one in France, another in Spain, another in Romania. But Romanic became the catch-all term for all these languages and then for all the stories that were written in them.

Then lazy people stopped pronouncing the i in Romanic and the stories and the languages in which they were written stopped being Romanic and started to be romances.

And that’s why, to this day, stories of brave, handsome knights and distressed damsels are called romances; and when somebody tries to reproduce the atmosphere of such a tale by taking moonlit walks, or lighting candles at dinner, or remembering birthdays, they are being romantic or Roman.