Romance

This week, I am focusing on the word romance.
Wait!--before you turn on the Barry White theme music, know that this is a commentary on the diversity and commonality of language. In fact, the fact that many readers would simply assume I'm about to talk about peoples' love lives is a testament to the point I will attempt to make: as one word (like "romance") can sometimes demonstrate, the umbrella of new meaning, significance, and societal and cultural history--that languages demonstrate simply by existing as they are--is a testament to how seriously we ought to take the study of language and how intrinsically it is linked to the developments of our collective history.

Alright, back to romance. Well, this may be cheating, but it all began with the word romanz, the name of the language spoken in France (and, due to conquests made by Frankish King Clovis, parts of northern Italy and Spain)as priests responded to the increasingly spoken language of the people, "Roman"--not Latin. This language, "Romance", would not only develop the proto-French that would spawn the langues d'oil (North and Western France and Belgian Wallonia) and langues d'oc (Southern & Southeastern France)--named as such for their different ways of pronouncing Latin "hoc", meaning "yes" in that era--that would entually give birth to modern French, but would also, in its reunion with Nordic languages (that would become Norman, the original language of a very famous Normandie, France) irreversibly change the history of English.

No, English is today not a Romance Language. BUT--linguists still argue today as to whether it is closer to a quarter or a half of English vocabulary words are loaned from the Normans (and, thus, French). (By the way, all these statistics can be found in the fascinating book "The Story of French", by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow). Famous English writer Chaucer is the descendent of chaussiers (shoemakers); the Norman-English of Old England spoken by kings and, soon, court jesters would actaully give France some of its earlier anglicisms (e.g., the cardinal directions of the compass). Perhaps the only system of language not mutually saturated by each others' tongues was that of the days of the week: English retained its profoundly Norse religious term-influence (e.g., Thursday is Thor's day, Wednesday is Woden's/Odin's day http://www.crowl.org/lawrence/time/days.html). And that's only a few of the seven mostly Norse-related days per week! There is no doubt that with very little exception, Romanz and its linguistic compatriots had a tremendous, ingrained effect on the way the rest of Western Europe describes itself, both linguistically and historically, post-Roman Empire. The very word itself has come to symbolize its orignial meaning and more, displaying the essence of what it is for a word to weave itself through the linguistic and cultural adaptations of various peoples until it becomes a multi-faceted, ineffaceable parola franca.

The word "romance" has come to modify the noun, "language", implying a southwestern European origin; to describe a specific language that developed into the international French of today's world; and to imply love-and-affection-centered stories, movies, music, and certain amiable but hopeless people (no, I don't mean all people of romantic mindsets, but rather the specifically "hopeless romantic" types). And, essentially, the number of meanings to Romance's name are a testament to the utter permeability of our history to the mechanisms and growth of language. In the end, the transformation and retranslation of the word "romance" shows us that one can learn history witout necessarily studying linguistics and the history of communication, but in studying said story of contact and communication, one necessarily hits two birds with the proverbial stone--or, rather, the "pierre", both stone and a well-known French name. Why? Look it up!