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Are romance languages unclassificable? | ||
Tags: Occitan | Germanic Languages | Catalan | Romance Languages | Linguistic relationships | Dialect | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Capsula Diglot Groupie Andorra Joined 5057 days ago 42 posts - 52 votes  Studies: Catalan*, Spanish, English Studies: Italian | Message 9 of 35 04 April 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Cainntear: "There's a growing movement that wants to stop talking about English as a Germanic language. It has been proposed instead that we should be talking about the "Anglic" language family, covering all variations of both Scots and English.
The more I learn about languages, the more I find myself agreeing with this viewpoint, but there's a lot of inertia to overcome before this can gain widespread acceptance." This new Anglic family, should it be closer to Germanic, Romance or just a new branch of the Indo-European languages? jeff lindgvist: " Of course it's still a Germanic language. If I add a lot of curry to whatever I'm cooking - does that make the dish "Indian"?" I'm not going to contradict you, but for example, as Iversen explained, Catalan at first was "Gallo-romance" and now it is Ibero-romance. Occitan has "deviated" towards French, and the Italian languages became "dialects" of Standard Italian, which is based on the Tuscan dialect. Maybe linguists are using different criteria, when they have to classify English or some Romance languages? Just don't know. These groupings such as "Ibero-Gallo-Italo" do they have a linguistic justification, or are they largely based in non-linguistical criteria, such as geography and politics? Which traits do these Italian dialects have in common with standard Italian that they don't share with any other romance language? Or the Ibero-romance, why should it include Catalan, but not Occitan, or even Italian? I think it's impossible to classify romance languages, because they're still a bunch of dialects of the (vulgar) Latin language, it's not like Indo-european, that someone can say English is definitely closer to Catalan than neither of the two are to Chinese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 5917 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 10 of 35 04 April 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I always find this "Origins of English" graph interesting: 
Origins of the English lexicon, based on a computerized survey of roughly 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition), published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973). I think, based on this, English is really a hybrid "Germano-Romance" language. The lower register is Germanic, children and uneducated native speakers use a preponderance of Germanic words. However, the higher register is Latin, French and Greek, sophisticated and educated speech and writing contains many more words derived from these languages. Edited by JW on 04 April 2011 at 6:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5806 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 35 04 April 2011 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Germanic.
They have linguistic justification. But as I tried to explain before, this is mostly based on a divergent model of language, so linguists track back historically and say Modern Xish is descended from Middle Xish, which is in turn descended from Old Xish. Old Xish was a Something-ic language, therefore Modern Xish must also be Something-ic.
Nothing. The Italian "dialects" are considered languages by any serious linguist, because they are markedly different from each other. Whether "dialect" is used in a pejorative sense here (as some Spanish people use the term) or is a historically neutral term in Italy, I do not know. But the term "Italian dialects" cannot be said to mean "dialects of Italian". The only true sense of the term is "dialects that are spoken in Italy".
You have to look at things in terms of isoglosses -- lines on a map that show boundaries between linguistic features. Where lots of isoglosses occur in one place, that's where we draw boundaries between families, groups and languages. The name Ibero-Romance is geographical, certainly, but that just happens to be because several isoglosses historically occurred at the boundary between Catalonia and the Langue D'Oc-speaking areas of southern France. Occitan has certain similarities to Catalan, but there are several significant differences: Occitan's indeterminate past tense doesn't occur in any Ibero-Romance language. Occitan's present tense is formed on both to have and to be. Occitan maintains the original Latin use of "aver" as both auxiliary and lexical "to have". "Tener" maintains the original Latin sense of "to hold". Occitan only has one verb "to be". Is there any Ibero-Romance language with only one? AFAIK, Occitan doesn't have anything like Catalan's "passat perifrastic" (vaig fer etc). And I can't see any evidence of a present continuous in Occitan either, and the present continuous is a pretty good marker of the Ibero-Romance group. The similarities in the forms of words made people consider them more similar than the underlying grammar would indicate. Any change in its classification is due to close examination of the structure of the language, not because the language has "become" Ibero-Romance -- it always was.
I fail to see the difference. Portuguese is far closer to Bable than to Veneto. The borders are fuzzy, but nothing's ever perfect. But as long as we can accept that some languages and/or dialects sit on the border between two families, we can still make useful generalisations 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| CS Groupie United States Joined 4923 days ago 49 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Latin, French | Message 12 of 35 04 April 2011 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Yeah, I don't know why people are so quick to remove English from Germanic. It's not like German or Dutch lack French or Latin influence either. You can't can draw a sharp distinction between the different historical stages of English either. We don't know a lot about any OE dialect besides West Saxon, but there is no doubt that other dialects contributed to standard modern English varieties. Plus the Norse influence which very likely contributed to the decline of OE inflection. I really wish that we knew more about the Norse/English mix that was spoken in the Danelaw. To this day, the basic grammar of English is Germanic as well, albeit with modest influences from other IE families. I've seen the term Anglic used, but only as a subfamily within Germanic, sometimes grouped with Frisian. With regard to Romance, people draw the lines differently because they are looking at different linguistic features. Sometimes politics influences how the varieties are grouped, but that's probably inevitable. Edited by CS on 04 April 2011 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| CS Groupie United States Joined 4923 days ago 49 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Latin, French | Message 13 of 35 04 April 2011 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Not everything is lexicon. Also, as far as the lexicon goes, you really should consider the frequency of use of different words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5806 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 35 04 April 2011 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm not too bothered about that. A) Every word has equal weight in a dictionary, but not all words are equally important in a language. (eg. "Trachyotomy" vs "know".) B) Vocabulary is a very superficial measure of a language. The interesting grammatical points about the Anglic language group are: Heavy use of present progressive and other constructions with the gerund. (Possible Celtic borrowing.) "Going to" future. (Not Germanic AFAIK, probably French borrowing.) Inserted auxiliary "do" in negatives and interrogatives in otherwise simple tenses (postulated Brythonic Celtic origin). Loss of Germanic preference to place infinitives at the end of a clause. Extended use of pre-infinitival particle "to" to compensate for loss of inflection (eg French has structures analogous to "I'm happy to do it" and "I'm going to do it", but mostly uses a bare infinitive -- "I want to do it" has no equivalent to "to" in any of the Romance languages.) General lack of inflection, verbal prefixes and suffixes now being replaced with loosely bound prepositions, adjectives, adverbs etc. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 5917 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 15 of 35 04 April 2011 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Here is a little challenge for you. Write a very short (one or two paragraphs) composition in English using only words derived from Germanic languages. I think you will be shocked at how absurd and "un-English" your composition reads. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| CS Groupie United States Joined 4923 days ago 49 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Latin, French | Message 16 of 35 04 April 2011 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Icelandic seems to have a present continuous construction, somewhat similar to English, although it isn't used as
much. Icelandic and English also both preserve dental fricatives. German and English, unlike Dutch, aspirate voiceless plosives. My main point is that the line can be drawn in different ways. English is certainly unusual, but I don't see why it should be kicked out of Germanic. Edited by CS on 04 April 2011 at 7:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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