Latin → Spanish
This is the ladder this app is built to walk you down: a language followed through its own history, with branches taken at the point where they actually happened. Because a language is the largest thing you can learn at once, the roots pay you back several times over.
Spanish is Latin after fifteen hundred years of drift. Roughly four fifths of the running text of ordinary Spanish is Latin material, some identical, some worn down (Latin causa to cosa, oculus to ojo). It is the shallowest root-to-descendant drop of the three.| Stage | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Latin | the root, and the language of law, medicine and the sciences ever after | attested |
| Vulgar Latin | the spoken Latin the written record ignored | reconstructed from outcomes |
| Old Spanish | the language of the Cantar de Mio Cid | attested |
| Spanish today | what this app can feed you now, from news text | living |
You can read the root itself
Latin is not just a name at the top of this table: this app can feed it to you now, from the Vulgate, Vergil, Caesar and Cicero. Reading it is the cheapest way into every language below it. Read Latin →
What is built, and what is not
Built now: modern Spanish news text, scored against your own words, with the letters you cannot yet read called out. That is the end of the ladder above and it is real.
Not built: the historical rungs. Reading the Rig Veda, or the Cantar de Mio Cid, or a Tang-era text, needs those corpora prepared the way the modern one is — segmented, ranked, and measured against a reader's words. The corpora are catalogued (GRETIL for Sanskrit, PHI for Latin, Kanseki and CTEXT for Chinese) but the work is not done, so there are no pages for them. When they exist, the ladder above is the order you would climb it in.
One honest caveat about the root: a root is not a shortcut to fluency in one descendant. It is the cheapest route into a whole family, and it is the difference between learning three related languages and learning one language three times. If you only ever want Spanish, going straight at Spanish beats Latin.