Transcript of “How is “Romantic” Love Related to “Romance” Languages?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello.
Hi, who is this?
This is Mrs. Margison, and I am a 7th grade teacher at Robinson Middle School in Kingsport, Tennessee.
I have some of my class with me.
And we have a question for you.
You have a question. All of you together have a question.
Well, I thought I would ask it just for simplicity.
Okay.
Okay, so here’s our question.
We were learning about the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, and we learned how Latin mixed with the local languages to become the romance languages, you know, Spanish and French and Italian, etc.
And what we wondered is when the word romance came to be associated with love or dating.
Okay, great. Yeah, well, you’ve got half the story right there already.
When you talk about a Romance language, you use a capital R, right?
The Romance languages like you mentioned, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, there are a few others like that.
But originally, what’s super interesting is that in the mid-14th century in English,
The term Romance language referred specifically to French, you know, that language of those people across the English Channel
Who spoke a language descended from the people of ancient Rome.
And that was different from English, which came from a Germanic source, which also gave us German and Dutch and Scandinavian.
And here’s the key. In the Middle Ages, we see the rise of stories that are told purely for entertainment.
You know, they’re not for religious education. They’re not in the language of the church, which was still Latin.
And there are these medieval tales that I’m sure all of you have heard about.
Knights in shining armor and fair maidens and the noble ideals of chivalry. And a lot of these came
From Old French, where the word for this kind of verse narrative was a romance, that is, a story
That’s told in the language of the common people there. And one of the most famous of these, of
Course, was about Sir Lancelot. And you all may remember the story of this noble knight who rescues
King Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, after she’s been abducted. But the problem is that Lancelot falls
For her. And that’s a big difficulty because she happens to be married to his king, King Arthur.
Problems ensue. And it gets even worse because Guinevere eventually falls for him too. And so
You have lots of different versions of this story. But by the 17th century, this word romance in
English came to mean any kind of love story.
It didn’t have to involve knights in shining armor,
But it came to mean, you know, a love story,
The kind of thing that involves those butterflies
When you get special feelings about somebody.
Oh, very interesting. Very interesting. Thank you.
That makes sense?
That does. I appreciate that.
Thank you all so much.
Thank you, Mrs. Mogerson. We appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
