Questions tagged [latin]
For linguistic questions concerning the Latin language, a dead Indo-European language of the Roman Empire and ancestor of modern Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and a few others. For questions specific to Latin only, please visit our sister site Latin Language Stack Exchange.
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The Origin of the Word 'Mammoth' [closed]
As per the Wiktionary article the origin of the world is Russian:
From obsolete Russian ма́мант (mámant), modern ма́монт (mámont), probably from a Uralic language, such as Proto-Mansi *mē̮ŋ-ońt (“...
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How certain is the Latin origin of Albanian ”gënjej” (to lie) from Latin (ingannō<ganniō)?
Albanian word gënjej ("to lie") is considered to be of Latin origin — from Vulgar Latin ingannō, from Latin ganniō... These are the only details I could find. Wiktionary gives no scholarly ...
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What differences are between Ablative of Manner and Ablative of Means/Instrument? [closed]
Keller's Learn to Read Latin says on p42
Association/Instrument
In the sentence "The farmer came to the party with a poet", the phrase
"with a poet" indicates that the farmer was ...
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How can a language-learner determine the root, prefix, and suffix of a word in English, if they know its language of origin?
Many English vocabulary-building books (for example, Merriam-Webster Vocabulary Builder, Word Power Made Easy) break the meaning of words down into three pieces: prefix + root + suffix.
On the website ...
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Why are there so few Hellenic languages when there are so many Romance languages? [duplicate]
Both Greece and Rome had huge empires and Greek was even used to administer the Eastern Roman Empire. Christian scriptures are even primarily written in Greek.
So why are there so many Romance ...
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Is the name "Melisande" related to the Latin for "honey", "Mel"?
Some people say "Melisande" is just French Melissa, which ''is'' clearly derived from "mel", but Wikipedia doesn't mention any such thing for Melisande, instead saying that the ...
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History and Reason of Portuguese accentuation marks
What is the background of having rules for marking the accentuated syllables in Portuguese? For example the word "tecnológica" is a proparoxytone, and all of these words must have a graphic ...
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When did people realize French has its root in Latin?
By investigating into historical documents like Oaths of Strasbourg
and applying the comparative method, modern linguists are able to know French is a Romance language. When the components of ...
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Greek root in Latin: Greek ekleiptikos became Latin eclīpticus
How come it's lip and not leip? The English word eclipsis is derived from the Latin eclīpticus, of an eclipse, which is in turn from Greek ekleiptikos, from ekleipein, to fail to appear; Ancient Greek ...
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How did the generic masculine emerge?
In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this ...
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Is PIE weyh₁ (to hunt, persecute) somehow related to PIE weyk (to separate, to select for sacrifice)
I am amateurishly passionate about etymologies (especially of my native Romanian) but more seriously interested in the anthropological theories of René Girard and Walter Burkert, which both ...
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Does French retain more Celtic words than English does?
English has very few words left from the Ancient British. I am wondering if the language of the Gauls suffered much the same fate, or whether there are significantly more Celtic substrate words ...
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Origin of Latin Non-Finite Verbal Endings
I'm wondering about the origins of the various non-finite verbal endings in Latin.
My understanding so far of their PIE origins:
Infinitives:
Present Active: -s-ey (dative of an s-stem verbal noun)
...
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How did ⟨x⟩ become /ʃ/ in Iberian Romance?
In Latin, ⟨x⟩ stood for /ks/. I'm a native Portuguese speaker and nowadays in my language this letter can also have the sounds /gz/, /s/, /z/ and /ʃ/. It seems relatively straightforward for me that /...
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How Italian "dito" was derived from Latin DĬGĬTU(M)?
I'm trying to figure out which phenomena may be involved in the development of Italian "dito" from Latin DĬGĬTU(M).
I think one of them may be a loss of intervocalic -G-, as explained in ...
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What is the name of the thing that the tongue does on the syllable pri in Classical Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese? [duplicate]
What is the name of the thing that the tongue does on the syllable pri in Classical Latin, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and possibility other Romance languages?
Since Classical Latin has ...
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What is the name of the category for the vibrations that the tongue does in linguistics?
There are guttural sounds such as the French R so I'm guessing that there is name for the category of speech sound in which the tongue vibrates! For example, in the words pater, et rubente http://www....
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What does "torido chaumate" mean? [closed]
What does "torido chaumate" mean?
I didn't find these words in Latin.
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Why did the Latin word marmor became French marbre (which is in present day English marble)?
I would like to know what process suffered the Latin word marmor when it was borrowed in French and became marbre. I know that the process from French marbre to English marble is dissimilation, i.e. ...
user36925
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Why is feeling and hearing are the same in Italian?
Sentire means hearing, and at the same time feeling, in Italian and it's used passively in both senses.
Mi sento male - I feel bad
Ho sentito il tuo nome - I heard your name
Why among all senses ...
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Do we have evidence of the transition from -mentum to -ment?
Several English words end in -ment: augment, document, movement, moment, segment, etc.
According to several dictionaries, the English -ment suffix is in many cases traced to the French -ment, which in ...
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Credible sources for Rho-Rotation?
A teacher of mine recently mentioned a phenomenon in linguistics called "rho-rotation". Across eons and languages if a r/rho sound was next to a vowel it tended to switch postitions and &...
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Are "brat" and "frater" cognates?
Both the Slavic brat (Брат) and the Latin frater mean brother.
Are they cognates? Or is their phonetic "proximity" a red herring?
Related: How were “bratrъ/bratъ” and “sestra” formed in ...
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Latin -vus/-uus and PIE -wos
What is the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, if there is one, of the Latin suffixes -tivus (many examples) and -vus/-uus/-ivus (arvus, residuus, cadivus)?
I read in a non-reliable source once that ...
user36730
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Pronunciation of "ll" in the Romance languages
I have noticed that all the Romance languages (Spanish, Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, and French) usually pronounce the "ll" like the "y" in "yacht". ...
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Origin of بطريق
I read here that the Arabic word بطريق (penguin) ultimately derives from Latin patricius (patrician), through Greek and Aramaic, but I couldn't find any explanation of how and why the shift in meaning ...
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V-Bar Syntax in Latin
I am reading Devine and Stephens Latin Word Order, but without the requisite grounding in formal linguistics. They use the term V-bar syntax, and I am not sure what they mean by this and would like ...
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Is the Romanian verb "pișca" etymologically related to Spanish "pellizcar" ( to pinch )?
From wiktioanry: "pellizcar (Spain) /peʝiθˈkaɾ/, [pe.ʝiθˈkaɾ]
(Latin America) /peʝisˈkaɾ/, [pe.ʝisˈkaɾ]- From Vulgar Latin *vellicicāre, from Latin vellicāre, most likely ultimately from vellus (...
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How did Gothic "𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌱𐌰𐌷𐍄𐌹" (andbahti) become Medieval Latin "ambasiator"?
I found the following etymology of the word "ambassador" on Wiktionary.
From Middle English ambassadore, from Anglo-Norman ambassadeur, ambassateur, from Old Italian ambassatore, ...
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How did latin "de post" become Romanian "după"?
Wouldn't the expected result be: "dopă"? I understand that the short "e" was assimilated by the long "o" from the next word, and then /o/ -> /ə/, but why o -> u ?
...
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Is there a rule which accounts for a d in PIE becoming a b in Latin?
According to Wikitionary, the Latin word verb is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *werdʰh₁om which is the etonym of the English word word and the German wort. I am familiar with Grimm's Law ...
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Why is fucus reconstructed as *bhoiko-?
Why is fucus reconstructed as *bhoiko-?
Not *bhoikos or *bhoikon?
Is "cus" a suffix like in raucus > ravis?
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Is there a common ancestor between the Hebrew לבן ("lavan", white) and the English "albino"?
I noticed these two words share the same central consonants, and wouldn't it be fascinating if the l-b-n semitic root has a common source to the English "albin-" as in albino and albinism?
I ...
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Which Romance languages have three verbs for, and preserved the differences between, Latin's esse, sedere, stare?
Yoïn van Spijk's diagram substantiates that French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish merged at least two of Latin's esse, sedere, stare.
Are there any Romance languages which still feature direct ...
user5306
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Are Latin causative verb ending -eō and Old Slavic -ити from verbs eō and ити ("to go")?
Are Latin causative verb ending -eō and Old Slavic -ити from verbs eō and ити ("to go")?
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Why is the proto-italic reconstruction of "corpora" "*korpezā"?
I was studying rhotacism and I came across the word corpora (plural of corpus). I would reconstruct the proto-italic form as *korpoza, but I saw the entry on Wiktionary and it says that the actual ...
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Percentage of Latin loanwords in northern Germanic languages
What is the percentage of Latin loanwords or words that are of ultimate Latin origin even from intermediate languages in each of the northern Germanic languages? I have noticed that there seem to be ...
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Was the word "Jew" originally a racial slur?
The English ethnonyms "Jew" and "Jewish" originate from the Biblical Hebrew "Yehudi" (יהודי, meaning "Judahite," "Judean," or "one from the ...
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Did Classical Latin lack tenseness contrast in long and short vowels?
Contrary to the traditional supposition of /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ/ vs /iː uː eː oː/, the idea that Classical Latin contrasted the short and long versions of high and mid (or just mid) vowels only quantitatively, ...
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How could Vulgar Latin divide in so many branches in the Balkans in a such small timespan?
From the literature I've read ( Al.Rosetti History of Romanian for example ) it looks like we can talk about Vulgar Latin until the 4th or 5th century in the Balkans, and further than that many ...
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The outcome of *woid- in Latin/Italic
The IE root * weid- seems to have meant “to see” and, in its perfective stem * woid-, “to know”.
The “know”-semantics of this root are well attested in all the main branches of IE (English wot, Greek ...
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Why do verbs use 1st singular present active indicative instead of infinitive as the "canonical" or "representative" form in Latin?
I see many dictionaries use the 1st person singular present active indicative form as the "canonical" or dictionary entry for verbs in Latin. For example, a typical dictionary would show ...
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Origin of Italian plurals
Some sources say that italian plurals come from the nominative case, so "italiano" has the plural "italiani", and "italiana" has the plural "italiane".
However ...
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Why is the word "war" in Romance languages predominantly of Germanic origin instead of Latin?
I wonder why in all Romance languages the word "war" ("guerra", with their multiple intonations) is a term that comes from Germanic languages, and that no modern language resembles ...
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Does the root word mus- in Latin mean "thief"'? Mouse=thief, Moses=Extractor etc
I first got the idea of Latin mus- = mouse = thief from this list
My primary question here is whether someone can confirm this, because I have not found any direct words in Latin that indicates that ...
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Why are PIE oi changes to ī in Latin and Proto-Slavic?
Why are PIE oe changes to ī in Latin and Old Slavic?
English PIE Latin Old Slavic
wolves *wĺ̥kʷoes lupi vlĭci
Is it a result of short u singular ending in place of PIE o?
English PIE Latin Old ...
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Pronunciation of P in Latin, versus Ph in Greek
In Latin, it seems some sounds that are pronounced like an "F" in Greek, are pronounced like a "P", why is this?
For example, we have the Greek word Phoenicians, and this word ...
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Is there a form descending from Latin genitive plural somewhere in modern Romance languages?
The Latin genitive plurals in -rum are very noticeable in the paradigm. Be it first declension in -ārum, second in -ōrum, or fifth in -ērum, they are heavyweight, attract accent and basicall stand out ...
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Words with "hybrid" declension (in Latin, or borrowed by English from Latin)?
There is a recently-coined technical usage (in mathematics) of the word "anima", borrowed from Latin to English. The funny thing about this coinage is that the coin-ers of the term insist on ...
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