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Greek’s relationship to Romance Languages | ||
Tags: Romance Languages | Greek | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 9 of 22 28 July 2010 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Ancient Greek did have an infinite. With connections to Romanian in specific, I studied Romanian for a month or two last year and I have a Romanian friend and as she was teaching me some words, I was very surprised to learn that quite a few of them were identical or very similar to the Greek counterparts. They're probably just loanwords, but it was still interesting. The only ones I can remember off the top of my head right now are ντουλάπι/dulap, φούστα/fustă, and παλτό/palton, but I remember several others, including one I tried to find just now which was a Romanian word which I thought meant "slipper" and was quite close to the Greek παντόφλα.
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| ReachingOut Pentaglot Groupie Greece Joined 5238 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, German, GreekB2, French, Romanian Studies: Italian | Message 10 of 22 29 July 2010 at 9:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know the origin of φούστα/fustă and παλτό/palton, but I rather think that ντουλάπι/dulap is or Turkish origin, both languages have loan words from Turkish. Romanian also has many loan words from Greek, as do a lot of languages. I also think that there are a lot of loan words from French in both languages, so the vocabulary is often very similar.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 22 29 July 2010 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I do of course know that Romanian uses an infinitive in some cases, and that's why I wrote "loss/weakening". So the development has not gone equally far, but in both languages it has resulted in constructions using a subjunctive subordinate phrase instead of one with an infintive - and in both languages this is one of the things that seems strange in the beginning. I have read that Albanian and Bulgarian have the same tendency and that there was a true infinitive in Ancient Greek, but I haven't studied the subject in detail in these languages.
Edited by Iversen on 07 August 2010 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReachingOut Pentaglot Groupie Greece Joined 5238 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, German, GreekB2, French, Romanian Studies: Italian | Message 12 of 22 29 July 2010 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hmmm, I'm curious about that infinitive in Ancient Greek now, I think I'll do some investigating!
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 22 06 August 2010 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Someone once suggested to me that a lot of the difference between written Latin and vulgar Latin could be put down to the fact that the Romans considered Greek to be the language of education and remodelled their writing based on Greek, much as scholars remodelled English to a Latin model in the 17th and 18th centuries (not splitting infinitives, not ending with a preposition etc).
It was a pub conversation, so I've no idea whether it's true or not. I just wondered if anyone else had heard any similar claims...? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5309 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 22 06 August 2010 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
It should all date back to Proto-Indo-European, so it's no wonder similarities are there.
biegam biegasz biega biegamy biegacie biegają 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5339 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 15 of 22 06 August 2010 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ancient Greek actually has not one, but several infinitives. Roughly, it has an aspect system that overlays the tense system and which encodes additional information about the status of the action (whether it is recurring/habitual, completed/one off, future to the events you are discussing, or completed with a bearing on the events you are discussing). Each of these four aspects (present, aorist, future, perfect) has its own infinitive and each of these infinitives has an active, middle, and passive form. Fortunately, for two of the aspects, the middle and passive voices are the same, leaving you, the learner, with a mere 10 infinitive to memorize and apply : )
As to what you heard, Cainntear, it strikes me as implausible. I think the current scholarly consensus is that classical Latin developed from the speech of the aristocracy of the Republic and while there were undoubtedly numerous significant Greek influences (including the very idea of developing a standard form of the language with a canon of classical authors), it's quite a stretch to say that these influences were of primary importance in the evolution of classical Latin as a distinct form of the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 22 07 August 2010 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Two comments: the aspect system is still there in a simplified form in Modern Greek, but I read something about Bulgarian after a trip there two years ago, and as far as I could understand Bulgarian had an aspect system that was based on the common Slavic one, but supplemented with elements that had some ressemblance with the Greek system (with an aorist). This must have happened fairly early. But I must say that I still don't quite understand the difference between the current two-aspect system of Dhimotiki and aspect in the Slavic languages.
As for the theory of Cainntear I would not dismiss it totally. As far as I know a poet like Vergilius tried to reconcile demands posed by Latin and Greek in his works, and he even visited Greece to learn more. Most doctors in Rome were Greek and a lot of other 'academic' professions had a disproportionally large number of Greeks in their ranks. There certainly was a large intake of Greek words and probably also a basis for some grammatical influence from Greek on Latin, for instance in the extensive use of infinite constructions and rhetorical figures. But 'classical' Latin and 'vulgar' Latin were not two distinct languages, and 'classical' Latin was not invented in the way Esperanto or Volapük were invented. Edited by Iversen on 07 August 2010 at 3:39pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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