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Latin & today’s Romance languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| manny Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6138 days ago 248 posts - 240 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Tagalog Studies: French, German | Message 9 of 15 14 December 2007 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a slight change in topic, but the experts are here. :-)
Q: What's the correlation of masculine and feminine words among the different Romance languages? With traditional words, water, soil, food, etc, I assume they are very consistent. Q: What about newer words like airplane, cameras, computers? Thanks in advance. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6377 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 10 of 15 14 December 2007 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does this thread partly answer your question?
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| manny Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6138 days ago 248 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Tagalog Studies: French, German | Message 11 of 15 14 December 2007 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes it does - partly. I'm surprised at the variety of genders with the word for milk since it has been around forever. I just expected differences in words for newer technical concepts. Thanks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6052 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 12 of 15 21 December 2007 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Vulgar Latin is poorly documented, unlike its Classical form. It is possible that features present in Romance languages like Italian were foreshadowed in the Vulgar form long before the Empire fell, but it is not recorded.
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| Alas Oscuras Diglot Newbie Mexico Joined 6640 days ago 38 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Japanese | Message 13 of 15 25 December 2007 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that what Iversen posted is very clear, I'm no proffessional linguist, certainly, but I've noticed in my
own experience several of the distinctive features and correlations between romance languages he mentions. Because of all this I suspect Italian is phonetically very close to let's say, "standard" latin, at least standard vulgar latin if such thing could exist at a certain time, maybe around the collpase of the empire, I don't know. Anyway, the point is that I'm not sure how different, phonetically, would the iberoromance languages be from a more standard latin. For example, the vulgar latin spoken in the southern region of Iberia, from what I understand, was rather conservative, and could be kept alive even during the moorish colonization because their politics allowed vulgar latin to continue being spoken. But several centuries later the dialects of the north could have, if not precisely erased, absorbed this mozárabe dialect, so we are left with no contemporary full continuity of it. But I wonder, how close to Latin was, again phonetically, at least, the mozarab dialect? And then, paralelly, is also Spanish really so distant from it? I've seen that at least one of the main phonetic particularities of Spanish when compared to either Latin or modern Italian is the lenition. Frequently, where Latin and Italian have a P, Spanish has a B. Where there is a K sound, sometimes we find a G sound in Spanish as in the English word "gate", or "goat". And also frequently, a D, instead of a T. So I guess that sometimes makes Spanish softer. But besides from this lenition, is there any really worthful difference? wouldn't the rest of sounds be very paralel? What do you think? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6483 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 14 of 15 26 December 2007 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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The texts from 800-1000 that I quoted already show how the proto-Romance languages drifted apart while still being fairly close to Latin. However I don't know much about the linguistical situation around say 400-500, because those few ecclesiastical people who knew how to write at that time did their utmost to write in pure Latin. Maybe there are people here who know enough about Vulgar Latin to describe its regional differences during that period, but it's beyond me. As for the sound developments it is clear that Castilian and Portuguese in each their own way have been 'softening up' the language. It is tempting to see an influence from Arabic through the Mozarabic dialect, but this is also beyond me (partly because I don't know Arabic). However I have checked some of the sound shifts, and there is apparently evidence that both f->h and the softening of p,t,k began up North around Burgos, which was founded around 800 by the Castilian kings. If that is true then the Mozarabic dialect can't be blamed for some of the most conspicuous sound changes from Vulgar Latin to Modern Spanish. Besides, the bilabial sound that derived from p didn't coalesce with 'pure' b before around 1500, so the process ended long after the heyday of the Mozarabs. But I have to say that I haven't studied these questions in detail, and because there is very scant evidence it is difficult to prove anything.
Edited by Iversen on 26 December 2007 at 3:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alas Oscuras Diglot Newbie Mexico Joined 6640 days ago 38 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Japanese | Message 15 of 15 27 December 2007 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Actually I wouldn't expect the Mozarab Latin to have had a sensible influence on other iberic languages,
because of what I mentioned in my last post, about how the northern dialects absorbed at least much of the southern ones. But what I still suspect is that the Mozarab dialect was, before it disappeared, more conservative and close to standard Latin. In the end I think, but I'm not sure, the southern part of Iberia was the most itensely colonized by Romans. Then, migrations could have shifted the distribution according to intensity of Roman culture, but I would expect the south of Iberia to retain its more colonized situation. I mean, the south would have been more Roman, maybe. And speaking of sound shifts, another romance language that has "softened" the sounds a lot is French, evidently. It is one of the most original romance languages in terms of sound. As I was saying, besides from lenition, and a few other traits, the sound of Spanish is very similar to Italian. This also sparkles my attention... why do they sound similar? For example, Portuguese drifts phonetically from Italian more than Spanish does, similarly as French. Maybe the answer is in the prerroman languages, or in romanization itself. French has more similarities with Italian, not phonetically, but gramatically and in terms of vocabulary, form what I've seen. But today's dominant French, the Paris one, is so to the north. I guess provençal sounded more similar to Italian and Spanish and Catalan than today's northern French, because of the degree of colonization. Edited by Alas Oscuras on 05 January 2008 at 12:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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