Questions tagged [romance-languages]
Branch of the Indo-European language family including all languages descended from Latin, such as French, Spanish and Italian.
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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 ...
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Is Occitan a single language or have its different dialects become separate languages?
The Wikipedia page for the language mentions a 'controversy' about whether it is a language, macrolanguage or language family.
Is there an official status for the language and what are the ...
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Absence of vowel combination /ou/ in Spanish
Spanish has many words containing the diphthongs /au/, /eu/ and /iu/, but the only instances of words containing /ou/ (as a diphthong or in hiatus) are a very small set of foreign loanwords:
bou, ...
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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"?
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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 ...
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Portuguese: Inconsistencies in use of second person pronouns and conjugation
I observed that both colloquial Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese show some inconsistencies in the way they use the second person pronoun (or its conjugation) and would like to know if my ...
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How did Latin drop noun declension?
Latin has/had noun cases, while modern Romance languages don't. I wonder if the transition can be observed in written forms. Are there examples from different historic moments?
A side question: ...
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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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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 ...
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Why is the Romanian syntax for "Good night!" opposite to all the other Romance languages?
It's interesting to look at the phrase "Good night!" in the various languages of different language groups. The phrase is usually recognizable across related languages. (It's similar when looking at ...
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Does a scientific methodology exist for evaluating bilingual dictionaries?
I recently reread What's the difference between the various context dictionaries available for Spanish (e.g., Tatoeba, Reverso, Linguee, …)?. The accepted answer is excellent. But it got me ...
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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 ...
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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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How did ìritu evolve from digitus?
The Latin word for "finger" is digitus. In Italian, I assume the "gi" was lost, perhaps via some lenition of the "g" to *dijitus and then j was lost, giving *dītus, or perhaps accusative *dītum, ...
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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 ...
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Phonetic similarity between *s* and *j*
I've recently discovered that Latin s at the end of words became the palatal approximant j in Italian. I remember reading that this process is also observed in some Occitan dialects,so it cannot be ...
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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 ...
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Why does Italian use definite articles before possessive adjectives, except when these are followed by a singular family noun?
In Italian possessive adjectives are preceded by a definite article: “il mio amico” (the my friend), “la nostra casa”, “i tuoi libri”. The article however is always dropped with singular nouns ...
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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 ...
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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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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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Stark differences in French and German
Both the German and French languages, along with English, evolved from the same roots. This is reflected in some of their words and grammatical structures. So then why are the pronunciations of both ...
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Any other example of "socially stigmatized phoneme" like the "th" sound in some Venetian dialect?
Older people living in some rural areas north of Venice use the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ for many words, like cena "supper" which is pronounced θena, exactly like in Spanish cena (Castilian, not ...
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grammatical role of the word "e" in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages
What is grammatical role of e word in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages? Notice the following excerpt:
>
La léngua emiliâna-rumagnōla l’é parlêda int l’Emélia-Rumâgna, int la pêrt ed sōvra dal ...
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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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r in Romance names of London
Most Romance languages have an "r" in their renditions of the British capital's name: Londres, Londra etc.
Outside the Romance family, I only found it in Turkish Londra and Breton Londrez, but those ...
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Gold in French, light in Hebrew
I am fascinated by questions of linguistic relation between Hebrew and the Romance Languages, but I feel here I may have stumbled on a false connection and would like to be properly put in my place.
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Why were prefixes repeated as postverbal prepositions?
French: s'abstenir de Spanish: abstenerse de English: abstain [from] (v.)
[<--]
late 14c., "to withhold oneself," from Old French abstenir (14c.), earlier astenir (13c.) "hold (...
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Why did English "man" and Latin "homo" take both the senses "gender-neutral human" and "male adult"?
Why did English "man" and Latin "homo" take both the sense "gender-neutral human" and "male adult"?
According to etymonline.com, English "man", and incidentally Latin "homo" (which originally meant "...
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As French is a so-called Roman language, where are the cases? [duplicate]
French language is known to be a Roman language, just like Spanish, Italian, Swiss Roman…
Those Roman languages are told to be originating from Latin language.
When I learnt Latin, one of the first (...
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Common language root for dom, domain
Earlier today I was wondering about the similarity of domain (eng), domaine (fr) and the words for home or house dom (rus), dům (cz) makes me think they have some common root, is that true? If so, ...
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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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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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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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Romance-like pronominal verbs elsewhere
Romance languages are known to have lots of so-called pronominal verbs, which are always conjugated with a reflexive pronoun even though the action is not actually reflexive: for example, Spanish irse,...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Origin & explanation of sabado & sobota being similar in latin and slavic languages?
The word for Saturday in many languages both Romance (Italian, Spanish etc.) and Slavic (Russian, Polish, for example) is Sabado / Sobota - very similar words!
My personal amateur guess is that it ...
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Was Latin A Nasalized Language?
Thinking about it, most of the Romance languages I have heard nasalize vowels quite frequently and it seems consistent: that has me wondering, is there any evidence to show that Latin was a heavily-...
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Etymology of Romance words for Marriage [closed]
There are a few different Romance etyma with the meaning 'marriage'. Some are derived from Latin casa 'house', some from mater 'mother', and some from mas/maris 'man':
L casa [+ -mentum] > CA ...
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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 did the Latin past participle suffix -atus develop into modern French -é?
How did the Latin past participle suffix -atus develop into modern French -é?
Considering the two following examples: modern French état ("state; status") and été ("been"). Both derives ultimately ...
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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 (...
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Spanish Stem Change
I'm looking at a set of data right and I'm a bit confused on how to tackle this. The data is showing a stem alternation of some verbs with [e] and [o] and no change in others. I know this is due to ...
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Earliest recognition that Germanic and Romance languages are related
A recent question here, Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related asks for when in history it was first noted that individual Romance languages were recognized as ... similar/related/...
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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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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,...
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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], ...
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Latin to French - evolution of certain forms of "FACERE > faire"
All forms of the Latin verb "FACERE" that went to French had a "c", but it has disappeared in all forms of the French verb "faire".
In FACIS > fais, the "c" completely disappeared.
In FACIUNT > font,...
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What is the reason for some languages have non-linear word order for numbers?
Is there a scientific/historic explanation for the reversed word order for numbers in some languages?
For example, while we have for 32:
in English: thirty two (tens units), Hebrew: shloshim ...
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