As a child, one of the first things about language differences I noticed is that ie and ue diphtongs in Spanish corresponded with /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ in my first language, Catalan, which apparently mantained the Late Latin seven-vowel tonic system (but in some dialects reduced unstressed vowels to THREE vowels).

Now Portuguese looks like a nasalized old Castilian to me

As a native Spanish speaker, this video was awesome! Especially with the verbs. I always think that verbal conjugation irregularities have most of the time a pattern, and that it's not random. Really, there are few irregularities that are so savage ("ser" and "ir" being the kings of them), but the many other irregularities of verbs ara actually more predictable. And I think this doesn't happen only with Spanish. That being said, it's interesting how Portuguese (a language I studied a bit) is more regular in its verbal conjugation precisely because they conserved some Latin vowels.

Your explanation from classical Latin to Spanish is very beautiful. Old Latin had more unstressed and stressed vowels than Classical Latin Old Latin: ā(continues), ă (rising tonic),a (unstressed). In this system there were 15 phonetic vowels. This scheme applies to all vowels. Classical Latin preserves only the continuous and unstressed vowels ā and a, in this scheme 10 phonetic vowels. In popular and Romance Latin, only unstressed vowels are preserved, leaving 5 vowels. When Romance languages are born from Romance they have a-unstressed, â-tonic circumflex, á-crase, á-acute, depending on the language you have 20 phonetic vowels. The Romance languages in terms of vowelization/vocalization only preserved from Latin the unstressed a and unstressed vowels, the ascending stressed ă and the continuous ā was lost. That's why, for a person to master the backseat à and the acute á well, as well as the vowels similar to it, the person must understand that the 2 are derived from the ascending tonic ă which is both backseed and acute at the same time. Latin's vowel scheme with 15 phonetic vowels is much easier than ours with 20 phonetic vowels, that's all. Looking from a linguistic angle, Romance languages are more complicated/complex than Old Latin in the use of vowel diacritics in vowel sounds known as vowelization/vocalization. This is already a case of linguistic complication and not improvement as the layman thinks. Hugs dear, beautiful explanation.

Damn this video is actually REALLY good

Excellent series. This is really great stuff.

8:45 It seems Laite for Milk is close to the Portuguese word for milk.

Btw, a way to simplify the later latin vowel shift in your head would be: 1. The high-mid vowels that you find in Germanic languages but not in any romance language that I know disappear 2. Short i and u > e and o 3. Short e and o > to "open" e and o* *only when stressed If you look at the ipa vowel chart, each vowel simply lowers once

If I could only give a thousand likes!

What's rather interesting about the integru example is in Classical Latin accentuation, the accent would have been in the first syllable (íntegrum) since the gr was interpreted as a single sound, but eventually the g was reanalyzed as part of the preceding syllable, so the accent shifted, them you get the g vocalized.

In Castilian Spanish, 'ch' is pronounced like 'tsj' which makes the "ct -> it -> ch" make a bit more sense. The i palatalizes the t and then later that became ch

Very interesting. Thank you for this detailed overview. One suggestion to help explain this would be to give some pronunciation examples for those of us who don’t know IPA.

You are amazing. Thank you!

Love it! Have been looking for stuff like this for a long time. Fortunately I ran into it. Love speaking other languages (amongst them Spanish), and understanding (the evolution of) languages at a meta level globally rather then locally. Now I can commence studying linguistics. Thanks for your contribution &-). TJ

Hate that I’m late for this one. Awesome content as always!!

Very great stuff. Thank you and keep going!!

Thank you so much ! that was great.

another Banger!!🔥🔥

Well, that was surprisingly interesting :-)

Sublime.

A KZfaq with a series on how Latin became Spanish, don’t mind if I do 2:11 I always thought they the only differing quality was length, not “ATR”. I was actually surprised when I went to Wikipedia page for Latin about a week ago and saw the vowels written as seen shortly after the above timestamp. The source of this may have been how the seven vowels came from the five vowels were displayed in a video, iirc it was NativLang’s video on how Latin became French. Tbh I am a bit hesitant to accept it, because of Corsican. 2:49 Not to mention that English hasn’t had a short-long vowel distinction for about 500 years

Oh my god. Do you know how long it took to find something explaining the process of stem changing verbs existing! Thank you. You made it make sense.

That's amazing, greetings from argentina🇦🇷🇦🇷

Latin writers used the apex to mark long vowels on stone and on paper.

as a native spanish speaker i love this video. i have always wondered how latin changed to spanish

10:18 Is there evidence for the /l/ becoming /u/? How do we know it didn’t go directly to [i], which happened a lot in Italian (though in different positions e.g. Latin clārus to Italian chiaro)? 15:24 I think piden has one n. That said, I’ve always wondered where the e->i verbs came from, and I didn’t know that metaphony had happened at all in Spanish, so thank you!

Did Vulgar Latin have the same allophones of voiced stops as Spanish? I thought that pattern (especially the /b/ and /v/ merger) was unique to Spanish, but I'd love to know how much of it was thought to be in Vulgar Latin! Very cool series by the way! I love that this channel is linguistically rigorous, while still being approachable enough that I can share it with friends.

As a portuguese speaker this makes so much sense

Hey love your videos. I was wondering if you could analyze my pronunciation. I started learning Spanish when i was 25 and have been learning for 3 and a half years now. I love practicing pronunciation its like one of the funnest things to do. People regularly say i sound like a second generation immigrant. But not native native native like grew up in Mexico native 😢 😭 I was wondering if you could help me figure out where i fall short. And where to go from here. Anytime i ask natives they say my accent is good don't worry about it so they are often not very helpful when really getting into the finer details of an accent.

This should be called 'Evolution of Spanish from Latin: Portuguese'.

Interesting that most words, where spanish evolved further, didn't evolve in Portuguese.

How did Spanish lose Latin cases?

There was a huge mistake in the video. Romans DID use Macromms while writing. Always.

Português parece na verdade a fase anterior do castelhano...

Look at your timeline. Are you sure late proto-Romance lasted only 11 years?

This man got me interested in Spanish by just having the nicest English voice I’ve ever heard 😭 אַ שיינעם דאַנק, חבֿר!