Questions tagged [romance-languages]
Branch of the Indo-European language family including all languages descended from Latin, such as French, Spanish and Italian.
27 questions
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Can the "dialect continuum" phenomenon be recognized from Rome to Lisbon?
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Why does English not have a cognate of words like heter, in Swedish, or llama, in Spanish, etc?
This is something that I think is present in most languages. If I were to present my self in English, I might say:
My name is DisplayName.
Where as in other languages I can both say:
Mitt namn ...
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How did the same perfect-tense structure become so widespread in Europe?
In many Germanic and Romance languages, the perfect tense is formed with the verb 'to have' or 'to be' plus a past participle. It's easy to find explanations ["I have an arrow (which is) made (by me)"...
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French conjugation, spoken vs written
French verbs are conjugated depending on the subject's person and number (ex. je parle, tu parles, il parle, etc.) However in spoken language most of these sound the same anyway because the end part ...
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From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
Why is it, that in words like plaza / piazza, or blanca / bianca, the "l" in Spanish corresponds to an "i" in Italian? Is there a preference for this kind of sound in Italian, or ...
user2146
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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 ...
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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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Why is English classified as a Germanic rather than Romance language?
I am not a linguist. I do not know German nor French. The majority of English vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. Given these facts, I ask for a simple and convincing demonstration (using an ...
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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 ...
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In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?
In french, there are many female given names that are derived from male given names. Those names are often obtained by adding "ine", "ette", "e" or "a" at the end of the male name. Examples include
...
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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 ...
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Italian past participle ending -uto
Why, in the paradigm for Italian past participles ending in -ere, does the regular past participle end in -uto? Whence the vowel, when the other two paradigms have -ato and -ito?
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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 ...
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Italian passato prossimo agrees with subject with 'essere' but not 'avere'. Why?
Another question about Italian grammar aside from this one which has bugged me for ages.
In Italian, when forming the passato prossimo with an intransitive verb, we use forms of the auxiliary verb ...
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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 ...
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What linguistic impact, if any, has the the Roman three name naming system left on modern Romance and European languages?
The ancient Romans had a three name system (tria nomina): praenomen, the birth/given name; the nomen, like a family name but marking the person as belonging to a specific gens; and the cognomen, of ...
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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 ...
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Why do many French and Spanish noun cognates have opposing grammatical gender?
While most French/Spanish noun cognates share the same gender (both descending from the same vulgar latin root), there are many exceptions having opposing genders (e.g. la couleur / el color; la ...
user5306
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Why are the plural and singular first person forms of the verb "go" so different in the Romance languages?
In many Romance languages, the first person plural and singular forms are completely different:
French (aller): je vais, nous allons
Italian (andare): io vado, noi andiamo
Catalan (anar): jo vaig, ...
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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 ...
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Is /ɡ/ Germanic and /dʒ/ French in English ge-/gi- words?
I've recently noticed that in English words starting with "ge-" or "gi-", when the "g" is pronounced /ɡ/, they tend to be etymologically Germanic, while the words where the "g" is pronounced /dʒ/ tend ...
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How does the sound change from L. "benedictionem" to O.Fr. "beneiçon" happen?
benison
c.1300, "blessing, beatitude," from O.Fr. beneiçon "blessing, benediction," from L. benedictionem (see benediction).
Similarly, the word malison comes in the exact way described above.
In ...
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Do Germanic words have Romance qualities and vice-versa?
I know English was heavily influenced by French. But were there any other instances during which a Germanic language obtained Romance qualities or a Romance language with Germanic qualities?
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Definite/indefinite articles vs. inflections
While some languages have definite/indefinite articles (a/an/the in English, le/la/les and un/une/des in French), others don't (Russian, Latin). In this connection I have a few questions:
Chicken or ...
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Can it be that the etymology of the Balkan root for "tickle" stretches as far as Korean?
Some context first:
I am interested in the etymology of the Romanian word gâdila/gîdila ("to tickle; the â/î variation is only graphical: it's /ɨ/, the close central unrounded vowel which in ...
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