Are romance languages unclassificable? (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Are romance languages unclassificable?
Tags: Occitan \| Germanic Languages \| Catalan \| Romance Languages \| Linguistic relationships \| Dialect \| English
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35 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5

OliSayeed
Triglot
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Message 33 of 35

05 April 2011 at 10:30am | IP Logged

JW wrote:

OliSayeed wrote:

...it would definitely be even harder to create a similar example
using only Romantic vocabulary (and, I suppose, grammar).

That's why I would call English a Germano-Romance language and not a Romano-Germanic language ;). The
foundation and lower stories of the building are Germanic, but the higher up you go on the edifice, the more
Romance it becomes.

Wouldn't it be called Romano-Germanic (a slightly Romantic bit of the Germanic family) rather than Germano-
Romance (meaning a slightly Germanic bit of the Romance family)?
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JW
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Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew
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Message 34 of 35

05 April 2011 at 5:49pm | IP Logged

OliSayeed wrote:

Wouldn't it be called Romano-Germanic (a slightly Romantic bit of the Germanic family) rather than Germano- Romance (meaning a slightly Germanic bit of the Romance family)?

Yes, I think you are correct. Too much intensive study of Hebrew has my brain working backwards ;)

BartoG wrote:

When I was younger, I came across an older man whose thoughts greatly shaped my own. It is not the things he taught me, but the things that he helped me unlearn, that did the most to make me leave aside my old, unthinking path. As it is sometimes said, it is not what we do not know, but what we know that is not so, that makes us think and do wrongly. Though I only knew the old man for a year or two before his death, in that time he made me ask myself many times if the life I was leading was the one I wanted, or the one that my fellows thought I should have. This gave me a way of seeing unlike that which I had before, and so I grew to be a true man, my own man. Looking back, I cannot help but see that without those times we shared, I would not have led the life I lived, and I would be much less rich for it.

A bit hackneyed, and it's not high art, but I can imagine finding a similar passage in one of the older self-help books that pretended to plainspokenness. Four Romance words in that last sentence, though.

Nice poem. Plainspokenness is certainly a good way to describe English without the non-Germanic loan words.

BartoG wrote:

Edit: Not sure if "rich" is Germanic or Romance.

Yes, the etymology has the footnote that rich is "akin to Latin rēx" but I would say that since the rest of the Germanic languages seem to have a cognate (e.g., German - reich; Dutch - rijk; Frisian - ryk; Luxembourgish - räich; Yiddish רײַך (raykh)) it can be considered Germanic.

However, since French is riche, Italian is ricco, and Spanish is rico, it seems like it may be coming from further back--like the Sanskrit rājan king.

You can always just use the synonym wealthy which is clearly Germanic...

Edited by JW on 05 April 2011 at 5:51pm
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tractor
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Message 35 of 35

05 April 2011 at 9:01pm | IP Logged

According to my dictionaries, Spanish rico, French riche and Catalan ric are all of Germanic origin. The
Germanic word meaning 'wealthy' or 'powerful' and the Latin word rex meaning 'king' most likely share a
common Indo-Euroepean origin.

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