# Spanish is spoken Latin, not written Latin

> id: origins.latin.vulgar-latin-base · category: origins · depth: standard · levels: A2 · review: internally_reviewed

**Summary.** Spanish descends from the everyday Latin of soldiers, traders and settlers in Hispania from 218 BC — which is why it says caballo and not equus, boca and not os.

Rome landed at Empúries in 218 BC and needed two centuries to finish conquering the peninsula, but Latin spread faster than the legions did. What took root was sermo vulgaris — the spoken register of soldiers, merchants, administrators and colonists — not the literary language of Cicero and Virgil that Europe would later teach in schools. Roughly three quarters of ordinary Spanish vocabulary comes down from that spoken Latin in an unbroken chain, speaker to speaker, with no book in between.

You can see the difference in which words survived. Where classical Latin wrote equus 'horse', everyday speech preferred caballus 'nag, workhorse' → caballo. Classical os 'mouth' lost out to bucca 'cheek' → boca; ignis 'fire' to focus 'hearth' → fuego; domus 'house' to casa 'hut' → casa; edere 'to eat' to comedere → comer; magnus 'big' to grandis → grande. French cheval, bouche, feu and Italian cavallo, bocca, fuoco tell the same story: every Romance language inherited the colloquial member of the pair.

This has consequences for learners. The oldest and most frequent words went through the most sound change, so they look the least Latin and behave the most irregularly — which is why ser, ir, hacer and tener are a mess while words coined last century are perfectly regular. It also means a speaker of French, Italian, Portuguese or Romanian starts out with thousands of words already half-known, and that school Latin gives you the key to the formal written register rather than to the street.

## Examples
- El caballo bebe agua en el río. — The horse drinks water in the river. *(caballo < Vulgar Latin caballus 'workhorse'; classical equus survives only in the learned equino.)*
- Cierra la boca y come despacio. — Close your mouth and eat slowly. *(boca < bucca 'cheek', which beat classical os; comer < comedere, which beat edere.)*
- En casa encendemos el fuego cuando hace frío. — At home we light the fire when it's cold. *(casa < casa 'hut' (classical domus is gone); fuego < focus 'hearth', not ignis (kept only in ígneo).)*

Related: origins.latin.romance-family, origins.latin.sound-changes, origins.latin.timeline

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Spanish Rules Library — spanishruleslibrary.com