Romance Language

A natural language descended from LatinLanguage. The Romance Languages are:

Sometimes a mountain Swiss dialect/language called "Ladino" is added to this list. Beyond that, the distinction between a dialect and a language is very often as much political as it is linguistic. The Sicilian "dialect" in its pure form, for instance, is probably as far from modern mainstream "Tuscan" Italian as Castilian Spanish, but it "must" be considered a dialect because otherwise the Sicilians might be, ah, a people. This is about the same state of affairs that you hit on in the case of Galician "Gallego" Spanish.

I've heard that if you learn Latin, you can pick up other Romance languages in a snap. Every non-Latin-language teacher I've had has stated adamantly that any Romance language will work well for this purpose (except, presumably, your native one).

Well, it's not really a "snap," but reciprocal survivor level communication is relatively easy between, say Italian (my language), Spanish and Portuguese. They do though have very significant grammatical differences and are rich in traps - things that sound very much alike but have wholly different meanings.

Interestingly, the levels of reciprocal comprehension do not seem to be perfectly symmetrical. For instance, the Portuguese seem to understand Spanish better than the Spanish understand Portuguese when neither is a trained speaker of the other language. Something similar appears between Dutch and German, where the Dutch appear to grasp more of the neighboring foreign language than the other way around. Maybe if you're a smaller language you have to try harder?

English is considered a GermanicLanguage. English grammar is primarily derived from the AngloSaxonLanguage, and thus is Germanic; English vocabulary contains many French words (beef, master, castle ~= boeuf, maistre, chasteau).

A circumflex accent in French usually means the word was orginally spelled with an S. Once I grokked this French vocabulary became much simpler.

I wonder how they transitioned from an S to a circumflex...

(The circumflex was originally an 's' that got smaller and smaller. Typical for diacritics: the umlaut was originally an 'e'....)

Nevertheless, English grammar in some respects resembles French grammar more than German grammar. Look at what the verbs do:

The last one is Dutch, in case you wonder. Also see DutchWordOrder

-- TomStambaugh and BetsyHanesPerry, who looked it up in the EncyclopaediaBritannica.

I think English used to do that; discussion of what Germanic properties English has lost might be best discussed in the GermanicLanguage page. Besides, Latin used to have a more flexible word order than, for example, Spanish and Latin do now, don't they?

Yes, because case roles once marked by inflection are now marked by word-order and prepositions. This change was already underway during the heyday of the Roman Empire.

The version of Latin spoken by the people as opposed to written in by the poets was "Vulgar Latin"; this was much less flexible than the inflecting poetic kind that it evolved from. RomanceLanguages? were derived from this version.

English is a right bastard of a language, really. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

English is directly derived from Old English, with considerable influences from the Scandinavians, French, and others. Linguists consider Old English a west Germanic language, for various good reasons.

But it is also true that French is in many ways not a very "pure" RomanceLanguage. E.g. Latin doesn't have any particles, but French re-invented them. This follows a common pattern:

This pattern has more recently been documented in interactions between French and some Native American language in Canada (ironically, French now took the role of A). The result was a mixed language consisting of mostly French words, except for the verbs, which were still all original American ones. The reason being that the original language B had very complex ways of inflecting verbs, and French verbs simply couldn't be used for that.

-- StephanHouben

Actually things didn't quite happen that way. Gaul (celtic) was conquered by the Romans. We must assume that the Gauls picked up Latin very well, since the only celtic influence surviving today (apart from placenames) is in Brittany, and the Bretons arrived later on. The Empire was then infiltrated/invaded by Germanic tribes such as the Franks and the Burgundians etc. What is interesting is that the resulting language owes more to the conquered Gallo-Romans rather than to the conquering Germans.

In the same way Greek was far more important than Latin in the Eastern Mediterranean even under Roman domination.

It would seem that 'cultural sophistication' (whatever that might mean) is more important than political dominance.

-- RomanStawski?

The size and duration of population movements matters, too. The Germans that took over Gaul still formed a very small portion of its nobility - they replaced the aristocracy, but not the general populace. Plus they tried to preserve the old Roman administration as much as they could. There was never as much to be gained by learning German as there had been to learning Latin, and within a few centuries the governments were using Romance languages again.

CategoryNaturalLanguage

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