French is known as the lan­guage of romance, a rep­u­ta­tion that, what­ev­er cul­tur­al sup­port it enjoys, would be dif­fi­cult to defend on pure­ly lin­guis­tic grounds. But it would­n’t be con­tro­ver­sial in the least to call it a Romance lan­guage, which sim­ply refers to its descent from the Latin spo­ken across the Roman Empire. In that cat­e­go­ry, how­ev­er, French does­n’t come out on top: its 77 mil­lion speak­ers put it above Roman­ian (24 mil­lion) and Ital­ian (67 mil­lion), but below Span­ish (489 mil­lion) and Por­tuguese (283 mil­lion). If you know any one of these lan­guages, you can under­stand at least a lit­tle of all the oth­ers, but French stands out for its rel­a­tive lack of fam­i­ly resem­blance.

“Why is acqua just eau?” asks Joshua Rud­der, cre­ator of the Youtube chan­nel NativLang. “How are cam­biar and casa relat­ed to change and chez?” He address­es the caus­es of these dif­fer­ences between mod­ern-day French, Span­ish, and Ital­ian in the video above, which presents the his­tor­i­cal-lin­guis­tic expla­na­tion in the form of a long and tricky recipe.

“Start prepar­ing your ingre­di­ents 2000 years ago. Take a base of Latin,” ide­al­ly at least three cen­turies old. “Com­bine traces of Gaul­ish, because Celtic words will become sources of change.” Then, “grad­u­al­ly incor­po­rate sound shifts, not uni­form­ly: work them in to form a nice con­tin­u­um, where the edges look dis­tinct, but local­ly, it’s sim­i­lar from place to place.”

This cook­ing ses­sion soon becomes a din­ner par­ty. Its most impor­tant atten­dees are the Franks next door, who come not emp­ty-hand­ed but bear­ing a few hun­dred Ger­man­ic words. In the full­ness of time, “you might think that the sound of French would come from a sin­gle dialect in Paris. Instead, observe as it aris­es from social changes and urban­iza­tion, bring­ing togeth­er peo­ple who speak many vari­eties of oïl” — an old word for what Fran­coph­o­nes now know as oui, and which now refers to the dialects spo­ken in the north of the coun­try (as opposed to oc in the south) back then. Even this far into the process, we’ve come only to the point of mak­ing Mid­dle French.

Mod­ern French involves “a thick ganache of king­dom and col­o­niza­tion” spread far and wide. Sub­se­quent “peri­ods of rev­o­lu­tion and Napoleon” put more touch­es on the lan­guages, none of them fin­ish­ing. Stu­dents of French today find them­selves seat­ed at an elab­o­rate feast of unfa­mil­iar sounds and rules gov­ern­ing those sounds, many of which may at first seem unpalat­able or even indi­gestible. Yet some of those stu­dents will devel­op a taste for such lin­guis­tic fare, and even come to pre­fer it to the oth­er Romance lan­guages that go down eas­i­er. French con­tin­ues to change in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least through its incor­po­ra­tion of askew angli­cisms, yet some­how con­tin­ues to remain a lan­guage apart. There­in, per­haps, lies the true mean­ing of vive la dif­fer­ence.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free French Lessons

What Shakespeare’s Eng­lish Sound­ed Like, and How We Know It

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates Speak French Before & After Attend­ing Middlebury’s Immer­sion Pro­gram

Wern­er Her­zog Lists All the Lan­guages He Knows–and Why He Only Speaks French If (Lit­er­al­ly) a Gun’s Point­ed at His Head

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When most of us think of the words “Roset­ta Stone” — or, at least, when those of us past a cer­tain age do — we also think of at-home lan­guage-learn­ing cours­es. This must count as a tri­umph of brand­ing, but not one with­out a gen­uine basis in his­to­ry. For the Roset­ta Stone, the real Roset­ta Stone, did pro­vide human­i­ty with a means of great­ly expand­ing its store of lin­guis­tic knowl­edge. The stone’s text, orig­i­nal­ly carved dur­ing the Hel­lenis­tic peri­od, turned out to be use­ful indeed after the stone’s redis­cov­ery about twen­ty cen­turies lat­er. Its con­tent, and more specif­i­cal­ly its con­tent’s hav­ing been writ­ten three times in three dif­fer­ent scripts, unlocked the mys­tery of Ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs.

But what, exact­ly, is that con­tent? In the video above, you can hear the nature of the Roset­ta Stone’s mes­sage explained by British Muse­um cura­tor Ilona Regul­s­ki. “It was a priest­ly decree that was drawn up on the 22nd of March, 196 BC,” she says. Issued by a coun­cil of priests who’d trav­eled to the ancient cap­i­tal of Mem­phis, it lists “hon­ors that they want to give to the king” Ptole­my V Epiphanes, going so far as “to com­pare him with a god.” These hon­ors include his stat­ue being placed in the tem­ple and car­ried dur­ing pro­ces­sions, his birth­day being cel­e­brat­ed in the tem­ple, and the date of his suc­ces­sion being added to offi­cial doc­u­ments — all of them enu­mer­at­ed in “one big sen­tence.”

The text also stip­u­lates that this decree had to be “writ­ten in stone, in sacred writ­ing, which is hiero­glyphs, in native writ­ing, which is the Demot­ic that we see in the mid­dle, and the writ­ing of the Greeks. And the stele would have to be put up in all impor­tant tem­ples of Egypt,” which means that there would have been many copies all over the coun­try. (And indeed, more have been found since the ini­tial dis­cov­ery in 1799.) Nor is the Roset­ta Stone the only known exam­ple of such a priest­ly decree from Ancient Egypt. More recent research has turned toward the ques­tion of who wrote such texts, as well as who trans­lat­ed them.

“In the time the Roset­ta Stone was inscribed, Egypt was a very mul­ti­cul­tur­al place, with many for­eign­ers and peo­ple who could speak more than one lan­guage,” says Regul­s­ki. “For Egypt­ian priests and scribes, who were work­ing for the cen­tral­ized admin­is­tra­tion for the states, it prob­a­bly would­n’t have been so dif­fi­cult to com­pose the text in Greek and then trans­late it into their own Egypt­ian native lan­guage. In fact, this prob­a­bly would have been eas­i­er for them, because they worked on a dai­ly basis in the Greek lan­guage.” At the time, the task of trans­la­tion would sure­ly have seemed rou­tine, even triv­ial beside the roy­al exal­ta­tion per­formed by the mes­sage itself. But today, when few of us wor­ship kings as gods, we exalt the Roset­ta Stone’s for­got­ten trans­la­tor instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

A 4,000-Year-Old Stu­dent ‘Writ­ing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Cor­rec­tions in Red)

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.