![\"Scrabble](\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/SerEstarScrabble.jpg\" "\\"Photo:")
<\/a>Photo: Julie Barlow<\/p><\/div>The question torments just about everyone trying to learn Spanish. The answer comes from the early history of Spanish.<\/p>\n
The origins of Spanish are, of course, Latin, but not Classical Latin, as most people probably assume.<\/p>\n
Many empires passed through ancient Iberia before the Romans conquered it in 197 BC. The Romans were the first to get the inhabitants to speak their language. In about 250 years, they managed to get most of Iberia speaking Latin.<\/p>\n
Yet, the Romans didn\u2019t spread Classical Latin. The Roman soldiers themselves communicated in a popular version of Latin, known as Vulgar Latin, and it was this language locals picked up.<\/p>\n
By \u201cVulgar,\u201d we do not mean rude, or obscene. The Latin word vulgus <\/i>means <\/i>\u201ccommon people.\u201d Vulgar Latin is just common, spoken Latin. We know very little about it since it was hardly ever written down, so there are few traces of it.<\/p>\n
But we do know that from roughly the beginning of the Roman Empire until the 9th\u00a0century, Vulgar Latin was the lingua franca <\/i>(common language)\u00a0spoken throughout the Roman Empire, from Hispania to Dacia (Romania), and from Napoli (Naples) to Londinum <\/i>(London). Until the 9th\u00a0century, Vulgar Latin speakers in all the Roman provinces could understand one another.<\/p>\n
Then, around the 9th\u00a0century, the languages in each area of the former Roman Empire \u2013 including Spanish \u2013 started to develop into distinct languages.<\/p>\n
The inhabitants of Hispania had been adapting Vulgar Latin to their own needs over the centuries, just like the inhabitants of what would later become France and Italy. They did this mostly to make the language more useful in daily life. Like in Italy and France, speakers in Hispania added new features like articles and prepositions, made up new words, simplified the Latin genders and added tones of familiarity and humor to make Latin more accessible.<\/p>\n
However, in Hispania, the language acquired a few distinctive twists. One was to add a vowel (called an epenthetic vowel) to the beginning of words that started with \u201cs.\u201d Latin words like sperare<\/i>, spiritus <\/i>and spatha <\/i>acquired an -e at the beginning, and became esperar <\/i>(to wait), espiritu <\/i>(spirit) and espada <\/i>(sword) in Spanish.<\/p>\n
It was during this period that Iberians developed two different verbs for \u201cto be.\u201d Classical Latin has only one verb for \u201cto be,\u201d\u00a0esse<\/i>. This became essere <\/i>in Vulgar Latin, and went on to be ser <\/i>in Spanish. But in Hispania, for reasons no one fully understands, speakers created a second verb for \u201cto be,\u201d\u00a0stare<\/i>, which had the sense of \u201cto stand.\u201d So Spanish has ser <\/i>(to be, in essence) and estar <\/i>(to be, in state).<\/p>\n