All Questions
Tagged with romance-languages historical-linguistics
35 questions
0
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1
answer
161
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Timeline of future/conditional in Latin and Romance languages
I'm not a linguist - just a linguistics enthusiast - so apologies in advance if this is a stupid question.
I am fascinated by the concept of grammaticalization, and I had heard that the future and ...
- 9
3
votes
1
answer
333
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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By investigating into historical documents like Oaths of Strasbourg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 ...
- 159
5
votes
1
answer
310
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Which is the origin of Romanian /h/?
According to Wikipedia,
Romanian has [...] the glottal fricative /h/.
You can hear it, for instance, in the Romanian word arhaic.
This cannot be of Latin origin because, as explained in the book La ...
- 176
1
vote
1
answer
122
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Is "nea" <- "*nivis" proof that metaphonic diphthongisation occured in Romanian before the loss of intervocalic "v"?
The metaphonic diphthongisation phenomenon is said to have occurred between the 6th and 8th century. But it must have happened before the loss of intervocalic "v", though I have only one ...
- 189
8
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2
answers
1k
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How did Latin "aqua" became Sardinian "abba" and Romanian "apă"?
The way I believe it happened was by the change of "w" into "v" and the fall of the velar "k". Furthermore, betacism caused the change of "v" to "b" ...
- 189
1
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1
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226
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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 ...
- 189
36
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3
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7k
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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 ...
- 535
13
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3
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1k
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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 ...
- 558
11
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1
answer
332
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What is the origin of the "redundant" pronouns in the Venetian language?
From the examples taken from Wikipedia:
• Venetian: (Ti) te jèra onto or even Ti te jèri/xeri onto (lit. "(You) you were dirty").
• Venetian: El can el jèra onto (lit. "The dog he was dirty").
It ...
- 1,456
3
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0
answers
115
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(proto-)Germanic evidence for Late Latin vowel length
I would like to find a list of borrowings illustrating the reflexes in (proto-)Germanic of Latin long and short vowels. In particular I would like to find substantiation to the standard claim that it ...
- 421
3
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2
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275
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What can we say about Classical Nahuatl <z>?
Nahuatl has two sibilant fricatives, now pronounced something like [s] and [ʃ]. The standard orthography was developed by Spanish colonizers, who wrote /ʃ/ as x, and /s/ as c before a front vowel, z ...
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4
votes
2
answers
362
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Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension
Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones. But what happened to 3rd declension nouns?
It looks like for the majority ...
- 364
1
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0
answers
149
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Did Romance languages evolve in Pannonia?
As a sister question of Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?, I would like to ask what was the situation in Pannonia was there a Pannonian Romance Language and what research is there to it's ...
4
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2
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945
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How does Metathesis work?
How does it happen? What motivated latin "parabola" to change into Spanish "palabra" and why does english "ask" is often changed to "aks"?
- 1,456
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2
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Which Romance Language retains the most words from Celtic?
It is known that they were once the same language, Proto Italo-Celtic, however with the descendants of Latin and the remaining Celtic languages, which Romance Language retains the most influence from ...
- 189
8
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2
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246
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Catalan assimilation of 's' /s/ → [ʃ] after palatal consonants 'ny' /ɲ/ and 'll' /ʎ/
Question
I've noticed a phenomenon in (Central) Catalan speech that I had seen no mention of when studying the language. In words with a final -nys or -lls, the s is assimilated and becomes palatal [ʃ]...
- 3,132
11
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3
answers
870
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Where did the use of the two auxiliaries in the Romance languages come from?
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French all have a (compound) perfect tense, which I find curious, given that Latin did not. (You can alternatively perhaps say that it is either united with the ...
- 496
17
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2
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6k
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When and where did the guttural 'r' originate?
I have often wondered why French is (almost) unique in the Romance languages in using the guttural 'r' – in particular, the uvular fricative. Apart from Piedmontese / Piedmontese Italian (and even ...
- 496
5
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2
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193
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Is there a name for the tense some Romance languages used to use for stories?
I've seen it before, but I don't know what it would be called. I know that some of the Romance languages used to have a specific tense used only for stories (at least, fictional ones). They're no ...
user19661
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2
answers
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Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?
So, I know that the dialects of Vulgar Latin evolved into the Romance languages in the Western Roman Empire, but I've always wondered why they only formed in Europe instead of in North Africa. Does ...
6
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1
answer
807
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Derivatives of Latin *mulier* in French
It is well known that the derivatives of Latin mulier and fēmina competed in Romance languages as the main word for `woman'. For instance, the former remained as Spanish mujer and Portuguese mulher (...
- 558
7
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1
answer
574
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Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related
I don't know if this is a question for this Stack Exchange or for the History Stack Exchange, but I would like to know when people first understood that the Romance languages were related. I have ...
- 238
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2
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682
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Why does French "cheveu(x)" have "eu" and not "eau"?
Many French words have lost etymological /l/. I have read that this occured due to a process of l-vocalization around the 10th-12th centuries which turned pre-consonantal l to u after any vowel aside ...
- 18.7k
4
votes
2
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819
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History of "have", "avoir", "haben", etc. as auxiliary
In Geoff Pullum's recent post Being an Auxiliary on the Lingua Franca blog, he states that the sense of "have" as an auxiliary (forming the perfect tense) evolved from the possession sense, "but the ...
- 143
8
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3
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Is there something deeper behind the “verb classes swapping” of the subjunctive endings in Romance languages?
I first asked this question in https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155
However the Spanish community has not found any answer yet and the phenomenon is observable in many Romance languages. I ...
- 899
4
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0
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2k
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Why is the French accent so different from other Romance accents? [closed]
In terms of pronounciation, the general French accent is very different from the Italian, Spanish or Romanian ones.
For example: many conventional sounds in Romance langauges (i.e. /r/ or /j/) are ...
- 41
9
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5
answers
11k
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Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?
As far as I know, the French language is considered as a Romance language, which is derived, in its turn, from the Latin language. The last one has a rich grammatical cases system.
I am interested to ...
- 191
10
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1
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517
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Where do the spelling rules for French imperatives come from?
French verbs are, for historical reasons, typically grouped into three classes. The loss of final consonants in French has resulted in a serious divergence, wherein the verb conjugation system of the ...
- 792
17
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1
answer
3k
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Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French number words from eleven to nineteen - history of a bizarre, inconsistent construction
Following Sklivvz's advice, I propose here a question I made in Italian Language. Because I am not sure how I should do this, I will just copy/paste the whole lot.
Let's count in Latin from one to ...
- 271
16
votes
2
answers
3k
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Is there a diagram showing the history of sound changes from Latin to the Romance languages?
We have had a number of questions about sound changes, asking for the history of specific changes. See this one, for example: asking about the change from Latin benedictionem to French beneiçon. Often,...
- 8,228
16
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2
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3k
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Where did the nasal sound in the Portuguese word "sim" come from?
Among the descendants of the Latin word sic ("thus, so, or just like that"), only the Portuguese word sim ends with a nasal consonant. Actually, in modern Portuguese, it ends with a nasal vowel, [sĩ], ...
- 8,228
9
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1
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261
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Is it possible to determine genetic relations without external historical data?
Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are very similar languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin over the past two thousand years or so. We know a great deal about their histories, the occupation of the ...
18
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5
answers
5k
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When and how did French become a non-null-subject language?
First of all, what does "null-subject" mean? Taken from the Wikipedia page for "Null-subject languages":
[…] a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an ...
- 9,493
18
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2
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1k
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Why is it that Latin was more "successful" in the western part of the Empire than in the eastern part?
The Roman empire ruled over the lands around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, and I imagine imposed its language on its subjects.
But why is it that the western part of the empire (France, ...
- 8,571
25
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5
answers
2k
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Which Romance languages have reflexes of the Latin nominative in nouns?
It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin accusative rather than the nominative. (This is even true for those languages that have ...
- 2,215