Modern-Day Roman Empire on a British Train

Travelling is an exhilarating experience, since it is always refreshing to undergo physical displacement and experience a change in scenery. While I appreciate the powers of technology and the many benefits of remote communication both socially and professionally, I have enjoyed resuming long-haul travels post-COVID and revisiting airports has been the best part. I love airports, which are wonderful hubs of human interaction. As a linguist, I enjoy different types of communication, and travelling via airports is always enjoyable for me as I get to see foreigners in transit, and even if I do not interact with them, I may (and usually do) catch a hint of their native languages. Train rides to and from airports are also interesting, since while airport passengers are usually on the move as they hurry from one place to another before and after their flights, train passengers can afford to have a breather while they are on their way to or from their point of departure, and it is during this transitional phase that we as travellers can sit down and have a chat. I was on the train a few days ago on my way back from a conference trip, and sat behind me were two couples who spoke Spanish and Portuguese. I was able to recognise their speech since I am a Romance linguist, and not only was I thrilled to listen to my beloved Romance languages, I was intrigued to hear these two couples speak their own languages and converse in them. Spanish and Portuguese are contiguous languages spoken in neighbouring countries (Spain and Portugal in the Iberian peninsula/Brazil and its neighbours in Latin America), and as such they share a lot of cultural, historical and linguistic features in common. However, it is generally agreed that Spanish and Portuguese are not mutually intelligible on the oral level, even though their written forms are fairly transparent to the literati, since Portuguese, in contrast to Spanish, is not a phonetic language in that it does not have a regular one-to-one correspondence between written morphemes and spoken phonemes. It is hence widely observed that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish much better than Spanish speakers can understand (spoken) Portuguese, since it is much easier to relate spoken Spanish to its written form, given its phonetic regularity, than it is to process Portuguese. On my train journey home, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the two couples were able to have a proper and sustained conversation while speaking in their respective languages, and it was a cultured and nuanced conversation which was calmly and slowly delivered. This may have facilitated the oral comprehension of Spanish and Portuguese, as both pairs of speakers spoke clearly and enunciated every consonant/vowel to great effect, and the Portuguese couple in particular spoke in a way that was possible for the Spanish couple to recognise the many grammatical and linguistic characteristics shared with their native language. This was truly an amazing encounter, and one that gave me thrills as a Romance linguist. I have mentioned before how I love measuring mutual intelligibility between related languages (which includes my native Chinese dialects), and Romance languages that do share a respectable level of oral transmission are wonderful in this regard as we see their common cultural, historical and linguistic heritage that is inherited from the ancient Roman Empire transcend modern national boundaries. I have always suspected that my Chinese ancestors were traders on the ancient Silk Road who did business and hence interacted regularly with Romans who came from different parts of the Roman Empire. Many centuries later today it is my honour to continue this tradition on a British train in the 21st century.