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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Have Latin and Romance languages evolved from vowel to consonant variety?
Seeing information on Latin, there are many diphtongs, and less consonants, or at least less letters for them.
Nowadays among Romance languages, only Portuguese has a bit complex vowel system (like ...
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Etymological development of forms of Spanish "seguir" from Latin "SEQVI" (*sequire)
I am seeking an explanation for the development of the forms of Spanish "seguir" from Latin "SEQVI" (Vulgar Latin: *sequire), especially the irregular forms.
Especially, why did the "e" become "i" in ...
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Past participle agreement in French
Background (skip if you know French)
In French, to generate the past tense, you use the past participle of the verb, attaching in front a conjugated form of avoir or être. For example:
J'ai mangé. (I ...
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Why were words for the four cardinal directions in Romance languages borrowed from Old English?
Why were words for the four cardinal directions (east, west, north, south) in Romance languages borrowed from Old English? They could have used their own words derived from Latin because these words ...
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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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Plural "you" in different language families connoting respect
I recently found out that French has two different words for "you."
From here:
Tu is the familiar "you," which demonstrates a certain closeness and informality. ... Vous is the formal "you." It is ...
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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 ...
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Why does "date" in Portuguese became "data", while in Dutch "datum" is used?
I didn't study Latin, but I can recognize when a noun is singular or plural.
It's weird that date is used in the singular form data in Portuguese - a Neo-Latin language - while Dutch contains the ...
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Why do English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share a common alphabet and many words?
I wonder why English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share common alphabet and other words.
Also what is the relation among them.
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Efficient linguistic algorithms for detecting language of a website?
Some browser addons and web-services for website/dictionary translation sometimes offer a "automatic-language-detection" feature. This works more or less in my experience.
There is probably a variety ...
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Which Romance language has the simplest phonotactics?
I have decided to give my latest conlang romance vocabulary, but I want the phonotactics of this language to be as simple as possible and yet still be recognizably Romance. (I don't generally spend a ...
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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 ...
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Why did Latin fragment so much?
I'm not sure exactly when almost the entire population was exposed to Mass but until Protestantism everyone heard Latin every Sunday and Good Friday and Holy Thursday and Christmas and Epiphany and ...
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Spelling Similarities in English and Spanish but not in Italian and Spanish
The spelling of the word 'admit' has a ⟨d⟩ in both English and the Spanish equivalent, admitir, but not in Italian ammettere. Why is the ⟨d⟩ absent in the Italian equivalent?
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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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What vowels are most likely to be deleted in European Portuguese?
Stepping off of the airplane in Lisbon, I could immediately hear that the pronunciation was much different from Brazilian Portuguese, which I am more accustomed to.
The level of vowel deletion was ...
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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 Latin and its descendants retain a case system most recently?
So we know that Latin nouns and adjectives inflect for case as well as person, number, and gender.
Also we know that all the major modern Romance languages except Romanian no longer have a case ...
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Are there any specific traits in Italian which make it different from other Romance languages?
Although Wikipedia says 'the grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages', I suppose some ancient Italic (or perhaps even pre-italic) traits might prevail.
I am especially curious about ...
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To what extent do African dialects of Italian differ from their European counterparts?
According to Wikipedia, Italian is spoken to some degree in Libya, Eritrea and Federal Republic of Somalia.
Are there in Africa any clearly different varieties of this language which have distinct ...
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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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Explaining the relationship between "short", "kurz" and "curzu"
I've recently noticed something that I can't explain, a link between German and Sardinian. Two languages that, at least apparently for me, are not supposed to be that linked. Also English is included ...
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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, ...
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Are there any papers about the calling contour (minor third, vocative chant) in Italian?
As indicated in the answers to "Is it common to use the minor third for calling someone?", "many European languages" use this type of chanted falling contour, but the examples all come from English, ...
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Are Slavic languages better suited for poetry? [closed]
When I try to write a poem or some lyrics in English, I am stuck with the very strict word order and other things like articles, very repetitive usage of articles (a/an, the) that destroy the sound ...
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Why does Spanish have so many diphthongs compared to other Romance languages?
I have studied and known Spanish my whole life, and got a job at a University where I am allowed to take some free classes. Over the past three years, I have taken all the Italian classes offered, all ...
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Do all languages with pre-positional articles have zero-articles if they don't have post-positional articles?
To clarify, pre-positional articles are the articles positioned before a noun they refer to, like English the or a(n).
Post-positional articles are those positioned after a noun they refer to, like ...
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Are there ablaut changes in romance languages?
The ablaut system was in Proto-Indo-European. It also is present in some English, German and Greek. Are there ablaut changes in romance languages such as Italian, French and Spanish?
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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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