Timeline for Which Romance Language is the least similar to Latin?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 14, 2023 at 1:27 | history | notice added | curiousdannii♦ | Needs detailed answers | |
| Feb 10, 2019 at 18:46 | comment | added | abarnert | @ArnaudFournet Of course many Haitians (until recently, including everyone who went to elementary school) speak Haitian French (which is just a dialect of French) as well as Haitian Creole, but those aren't the same language. | |
| Feb 10, 2019 at 18:45 | comment | added | abarnert | @ArnaudFournet The basic structure and syntax don't seem very French-like. Take the first example on the Wikipedia page: "my bikes" is "mes bécanes" in French, "bekann mwen yo" in Haitian. The possessive is postnominal. The plural attaches to the phrase rather than attaching to the noun and then triggering agreement on the possessive. Haitian has no inflection, can use adjectives as stative verbs, negates like English creoles… other than being SVO, how is it like French? | |
| Feb 10, 2019 at 8:22 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | @ArnaudFournet Well then, if you consider Haitian to be Romance, then Haitian beats French as the "Romance language... least similar to Latin". | |
| Feb 9, 2019 at 20:44 | comment | added | user23769 | My personal assessment is that Haitian is basically a dialect of modern French. The structure, basic syntax and vocabulary is French-based. Of course, it's nevertheless not standard French, but, still, nothing justifies a classification as a separate, let alone non-Romance, language. | |
| Feb 9, 2019 at 20:17 | comment | added | abarnert | @AdamBittlingmayer Any classification into "families" is going to be somewhat arbitrary, but it's nowhere near completely arbitrary. It's clear that Italian is a Romance language, while German is not; it's clear that the lexifier of Haitian is French. If the koine theory is right, it's also clear that Haitian is a Romance language (as definite as anything gets in linguistics); if Bickerton is right, it's not a Romance language; if Bickerton is right, they're definitely not; if one of the more moderate theories is right, it may be too ambiguous to answer nonarbitrarily. | |
| Feb 9, 2019 at 9:34 | comment | added | user23769 | In the case of France, which was in fact Conquered Gaul at that time, Romance is mostly a topdown process, with the upperclass sending their children to Rome to learn Latin and then the rest gradually turning to Latin. There's no Creole or whatever involved here. | |
| Feb 9, 2019 at 0:36 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | @abarnert Let's assume that among the world's language, all of the possibilities you mention exist. In any case, I think it's hard to argue a language is absolutely not a Romance language if it exists on some kind of continuum with a Romance language. | |
| Feb 8, 2019 at 23:05 | comment | added | abarnert | @AdamBittlingmayer But are those Romance languages at all, or are they languages that effectively started their evolution over (usually from a defectively-grammatical pidgin) and just borrowed most of their vocabulary? (And the answer depends in part on which theory of creolization you find most compelling—the "koine genesis" theory would presumably lead you to say they're definitely Romance, while Bickerton's "universal bioprogram" definitely not, with the others all somewhere between.) | |
| Feb 6, 2019 at 17:26 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | What about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French-based_creole_languages? | |
| Feb 6, 2019 at 16:12 | history | answered | user23769 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |