The modern Romance languages are those which have descended from the Latin of Ancient Rome. The major varieties are Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian, Sardinian, Romansch, and Rumanian, but there are many more, depending on what you are willing to count as a language.
All of them are contemporary versions of the language which started life as the speech of Ancient Rome. The close linguistic relationship between these languages resulting from this common ancestry is not difficult to illustrate. The Latin numeral for “seven” septem has become Portuguese sete, Spanish siete, Catalan set, Occitan sèt, French sept, Italian sette and Rumanian şapte. Hundreds of other examples could be given.
But it is instructive to observe that there are also a good few modern Romance-language words which seem to have little or no connection with their Classical Latin equivalents. For example, the Latin word for “house” was domus, but this does not appear in modern Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Rumanian and Italian, which all have instead the word casa; French chez “at the house of” also has the same origin. Clearly these forms have nothing to do with domus.
In fact, however, casa really was a Latin word, though the interesting point for us is that it did not actually mean “house” but “hut”.
In the same vein, the Italian, Occitan and French words for “head” are testa, tèsta, and tête respectively, but these obviously have not descended from the Latin word for head, which was caput. They do, however, come from a genuinely Latin word, namely testa, which meant “pot”. (Caput does live on in Romanian cap, Corsican capu and Catalan cap).
The survival of testa and casa shows that in many of the Romance languages, it could be the slang vocabulary of the Roman soldiers and other proletarian types which survived. Words which fell into the same kind of category as English bonce, nut and noggin won out at the expense of the more refined classical lexicon of Cicero and Virgil.
Similar lower-class and colloquial Latin survivals included the disappearance of the classical word equus “horse” and its replacement by the word caballus, which originally meant something like “old nag, workhorse” and has come down to us as modern French cheval, Italian cavallo, Spanish caballo, and Catalan cavall.
There is also the case of Latin vetus “old”, which has been replaced by words descended from Latin vetulus “doddery old bloke”. These include French vieux, Rumanian vechi and Spanish viejo, which today all simply mean “old” without any evaluative content.
Another modern Romance word which must surely be of slang origin is French manger “to eat” which, alongside Italian mangiare, comes from Latin manducare “to chew”, replacing the original posh Latin edere “to eat”. We can perhaps imagine one Roman centurion throwing a pork chop to another across the cooking fire with the instruction to “have a good chew on that”.
It is instructive to learn that it is not always posh, upper-class words which live on. Very often, it is the everyday language of ordinary people – who of course outnumber the elite – which endures. Majority words can gradually shed their lower-class associations and make their way to the top of the linguistic pile.
POSH
The origin of the word posh is uncertain, though one thing we are rather sure about is that it is not an acronym formed from “Port Out Starboard Home”, supposedly the label placed on the luggage of wealthy passengers sailing to India and paying extra for shady cabins on board. Rather, it was very probably a Romany word signifying “money” or “wealthy”.
