LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5752 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 1 of 7 08 September 2010 at 12:43pm | IP Logged |
First of all, please forgive me for posting this. I know what I'm looking for has been discussed before - although I don't know how long ago - this thread is basically just about my total inability to use the search function properly.
A while ago - I am not sure if it was a few months or a even a few years, because I do go that far back to look around sometimes - someone posted the name of a book which compared the makeup of words (I specifically remember noun suffixes although it must have more than that) in the Romance languages. To take one example -
If in Italian a word ends in -zione, then in Spanish it would probably end in -ción (if I remember my pathetic Spanish) and in French it would end in -tion. And it seems that in Portuguese it would end in -ção - it probably being no coincidence that these suffixes are all feminine.
Someone posted a lot of these comparisons and it interested me, but for some reason I didn't write the book's name down and I thoroughly regret it now. Could anyone point me to it or something like it?
Again, I apologise for having to even write this in the first place, and thank you very much for anything you may be able to dig up.
Jack
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5306 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 2 of 7 08 September 2010 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
LanguageSponge wrote:
A while ago - I am not sure if it was a few months or a even a few years, because I do go that far back to look around sometimes - someone posted the name of a book which compared the makeup of words
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One of the best comparisons can be found in the classic The Loom of Language. A more recent book is EuroComRom's The Seven Sieves. Most of the content from this book is also available at their web site.
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daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7130 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek
| Message 3 of 7 08 September 2010 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
While various books on historical Romance linguistics would have such information, I think the one you're thinking of just might be:
"From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts" by Peter Boyd-Bowman
The Amazon site has a couple of reviews which describe it, and note the absence of coverage of Romanian:
http://www.amazon.com/Latin-Romance-Sound-Charts/dp/08784007 7X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283944467&sr=8-2
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5306 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 4 of 7 08 September 2010 at 1:52pm | IP Logged |
daristani wrote:
The Amazon site has a couple of reviews which describe it, and note the absence of coverage of Romanian: |
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If you're interested in Romanian, the free EuroComRom web site has some Romanian examples and other information about the connections between Romanian and the other Romance languages.
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JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6108 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian
| Message 5 of 7 08 September 2010 at 2:47pm | IP Logged |
This one is excellent if you can read French. There are also versions in the other Romance languages:
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL19241303M/Comprendre_les_lang ues_romanes
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alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7207 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 6 of 7 09 September 2010 at 12:44am | IP Logged |
This is probably the thread . The book in French is great, as I showed it to my Spanish professor. Although limited to the big Romance languages.
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LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5752 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 7 of 7 09 September 2010 at 4:10pm | IP Logged |
Thank you very much, all of you, for your help. When looking into this, I didn't expect to have such a wide choice - completely spoilt for choice actually - so now I have to agonise over which one to buy as my university library will undoubtedly have none of them. Thank you for the link, alang, that is indeed the thread I was talking about. I see that The Loom of Language also covers Teutonic languages to some extent, which will be useful to me later on, no doubt. Thanks again,
Jack
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