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All Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic) descend from Vulgar Latin (more appropriately, Popular Latin), the language of soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Roman Empire[citation needed], which was somewhat different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and AD 100, the expansion of the Empire, together with administrative and educational policies of Rome, made Latin the dominant native language over a wide area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Western coast of the Black Sea. During the Empire's decline and after its collapse and fragmentation in the 5th Century, evolution of Latin within each local area accelerated, and eventually these dialects diverged into a myriad of distinct languages, many of which survive today in their modern forms. The overseas empires established by Spain, Portugal and France from the 15th century onward then spread Romance languages to the other continents—to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance speakers today live outside Europe. Despite multiple influences from pre-Roman languages and from later invasions, the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly evolutions of Latin. As a result, the group shares several linguistic features that set it apart from other Indo-European branches. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the declension system of Classical Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions.
HistoryVulgar Latin
Image:Romance languages.PNG The Romance language family (simplified) - click to enlarge Fall of the EmpireThe political decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the large-scale migrations of the period, notably the Germanic incursions, led to a fragmentation of the Latin-speaking world into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, Huns, and Turks, isolating Romania from the rest of Latin Europe. Latin also disappeared from England, which had been for a time part of the Empire. But the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remnants of Roman culture, and so Latin continued to be the dominant language there. Latent incubation
Between the fifth and tenth centuries, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in the various parts of its domain, leading to innumerable distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, for the written language continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant. Recognition of the vernacularsBetween the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as Portugal, this transition was expedited by force of law, whereas in other countries, such as Italy, the rise of the vernacular was the result of many prominent poets and writers adopting it as their written medium. Uniformization and standardizationThe invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance languages from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency towards greater uniformity of standard(ized) languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages less favored politically. In France, for instance, the Francien spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, while the Langue d'oc and Franco-Provençal of the south lost ground. History of the nameThe term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from romanicus, as used in the expression romanice loqui ("to speak the Roman vernacular", contrasted with barbarice loqui, "to speak the non-Latin (barbarian) languages of the invaders", and latine loqui, "to speak the Latin taught in schools").[1] From this adverb originated the noun romance, which applied initially to anything written romanice, "in the Roman vernacular". Incidentally, the word romance, meaning "love story" or "love affair," has the same origin. In the medieval literature of Western Europe, while serious writing was usually in Latin, popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular and came to be called "romances". Status
The most widely spoken Romance language is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. All but Catalan are main and official national languages in more than one country. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Friulian, Sardinian and Valdôtain in Italy; Romansh in Switzerland; Galician, Occitan Aranese and Catalan in Spain (the latter of which is also the only official language in the small sovereign state of Andorra). Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian are also official languages of the European Union and the Latin Union; French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations. Outside Europe, French, Spanish and Portuguese are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that made up their respective colonial empires. While French is spoken on all continents, Spanish is mostly spoken in South America but also in isolated regions of Africa, and Portuguese is spread over South America, Western and Southern Africa and some regions of Eastern Asia. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions, the language didn't remain official after the end of the colonial domination, resulting in Italian being spoken only as a minority or secondary language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia or African countries like Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Romania didn't establish a colonial empire, but the language spread outside of Europe due to emigration, notably in Western Asia; Romanian flourished in Israel, where is spoken by some 5% of the total population as mother tongue,[2] and by many more as a secondary language, considering the large population of Romanian-born Jews that moved to Israel after WW2.[3] The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it—by extensively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects"—or worse. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities have allowed some of these languages to recover some of their prestige and lost rights. Yet, it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the minority languages' decline. Linguistic featuresFeatures inherited from Indo-EuropeanAs members of the Indo-European (IE) family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared by other IE subfamilies (such as the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Indo-Persian languages, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Lithuanian, etc.), and in particular with English; but which set them apart from non-IE languages like Arabic, Basque, Hungarian, and Tamil. These features include:
Features inherited from Classical LatinThe Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.
Features inherited from Vulgar LatinRomance languages also have a number of features that are not shared with Classical Latin. Most of these features are thought to be inherited from Vulgar Latin. Even though the Romance languages are all derived from Latin, they are arguably much closer to each other than to their common ancestor, due to a core of common developments. The main difference is the loss of the case system of Classical Latin, an essential feature which allowed great freedom of word order, and has no counterpart in any Romance language except Romanian (though even Romanian preserved only five of Latin's seven noun cases). In this regard, the distance between any modern Romance language and Latin is comparable to that between Modern English and Old English. While speakers of French, Spanish or Italian, for example, can quickly learn to see through the phonological changes reflected in spelling differences, and thus recognize many Latin words, they will often fail to understand the meaning of Latin sentences.
Other shared featuresThe Romance languages also share a number of features that were not the result of common inheritance, but rather of various cultural diffusion processes in the Middle Ages — such as literary diffusion, commercial and military interactions, political domination, influence of the Catholic Church, and (especially in later times) conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance (and even non-Indo-European) languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:
Divergent featuresIn spite of their common origin, the descendants of Vulgar Latin have many differences. These occur at all levels, including the sound systems, the orthography, the nominal, verbal, and adjectival inflections, the auxiliary verbs and the semantics of verbal tenses, the function words, the rules for subordinate clauses, and, especially, in their vocabularies. While most of those differences are clearly due to independent development after the breakup of the Roman Empire (including invasions and cultural exchanges), one must also consider the influence of prior languages in territories of Latin Europe that fell under Roman rule, and possible inhomogeneities in Vulgar Latin itself. It is often said that Portuguese and French are the most innovative of the Romance languages, each in different ways, that Sardinian and Romanian are the most isolated and conservative variants, and that the languages of Italy other than Sardinian (including Italian) occupy a middle ground. Some even claim that Languedocian Occitan is the "most average" western Romance language. However, these evaluations are largely subjective, as they depend on how much weight one assigns to specific features. In fact all Romance languages, including Sardinian and Romanian, are all vastly different from their common ancestor. Romanian (together with other related minor languages, like Aromanian) in fact has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian. These features include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (cer = "sky", cerul= "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called the Balkan linguistic union, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times. Sound changesThe vocabularies of Romance languages have undergone massive change since their birth, by various phonological processes that were characteristic of each language. Those changes applied more or less systematically to all words, but were often conditioned by the sound context or morphological structure. Some languages have lost sounds from the original Latin words. French, in particular, has dropped all final vowels, and sometimes also the preceding consonant: thus Latin lupus and luna became Italian lupo and luna but French loup [lu] and lune [lyn]. Catalan, Occitan, many Northern Italian dialects, and Romanian (Daco-Romanian) lost the final vowels in most masculine nouns and adjectives, but retained them in the feminine. Other languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels. Some languages have lost the final vowel -e from verbal infinitives, e.g. dīcere → Portuguese dizer ("to say"). Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, eg. Latin amāt → Italian ama ("he loves"), amābam → amavo ("I loved"), amābat → amava ("he loved"), amābatis → amavate ("you (pl.) loved"), etc. Sounds have often been lost in the middle of words, too; e.g. Latin Luna → Galician and Portuguese Lua, crēdere → Spanish creer ("to believe"). On the other hand, some languages have inserted many epenthetic vowels in certain contexts. For instance Spanish, Galician and Portuguese have generally inserted an e at the start of Latin words that began with s + consonant, such as sperō → espero ("I hope"). French originally did the same, but then dropped the s: spatula → arch. espaule → épaule ("shoulder"). In the case of Italian, a unique article, lo for the definite and uno for the indefinite, is used for masculine s + consonant words (sbaglio, "mistake"), as well as all masculine words beginning with z (zaino, "backpack"). For more detailed descriptions, see the following articles:
Lexical stressThe position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language, and often moves as the word is inflected. Sometimes the stress is lexically significant, e.g. Italian Papa [ˈpa.pa] ("Pope") and papà [pa.ˈpa] ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara ("were he to sing") and future cantará ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stress in appears to be a clue for speech segmentation — namely to help the listener identify the word boundaries in normal speech, where inter-word spaces are usually absent. In Romance languages, the stress is usually confined to one of the last three syllables of the word. That limit may be occasionally exceeded by some verbs with attached clitics, e.g. Italian mettiamocene [me.ˈtːja.mo.ʧe.ne]or Metintilu in Friulian ("let's put some of it in there"), Spanish entregándomelo [en.tre.ɣan.do.me.lo] ("delivering it to me") or Portuguese dávamo-vo-lo ['da.vɐ.mu.vu.lu] ("we gave it to you"). Originally the stress was predominantly in the penultimate syllable, but that pattern has changed considerably in some languages. In French, for instance, the loss of final vowels has left the stress almost exclusively on the last syllable. Formation of pluralsSome Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of the Latin nominative ending /i/).
Borrowed words
Vulgar Latin has borrowed many words, often from Germanic languages that replaced words from Classical Latin during the Migration Period, even including common basic vocabulary. Notable examples is *blancus, (white) that replaced Classical Latin albus in most major languages and dialects except for Romanian, *guerra (war) that replaced bellum, and words for the cardinal directions, where words similar to English north, south, east and west replaced the Classical Latin words borealis (or septentrionalis) (north), australis (or meridionalis) (south), occidentalis (west) and orientalis (east) everywhere (for standard usage). See History of French. DerivationsWords for "more"Some Romance languages use a version of Latin plus, others a version of magis.
Words for "nothing"The common word for "nothing" is nada in Spanish and Portuguese, nada and ren in Galician, rien in French, res in Catalan, ren in Occitan, nimic in Romanian, and niente and nulla in Italian, nue and nuie in Friulian. It is said that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase nullam rem natam ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing". The number 16Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular pattern which could be translated as "one-over-ten", "two-over-ten", etc.. All the other Romance languages use a pattern like "one-ten", "two-ten", etc. for 11–15, and the pattern "ten-and-seven, "ten-and-eight", "ten-and-nine" for 17–19. For 16, however, they split into two groups: some use "six-ten", some use "ten-and-six":
Classical Latin uses the "one-and-ten" pattern for 11–17 (ūndecim, duodecim, ..., septendecim), but then switches to "two-off-twenty" (duodēvigintī) and "one-off-twenty" (ūndēvigintī). For the sake of comparison, note that English and German use two special words derived from "one left over" and "two left over" for 11 and 12, then the pattern "three-ten", "four-ten", ..., "nine-ten" for 13–19. To have and to holdThe verbs derived from Latin habēre "to have", tenēre "to hold", and esse "to be" are used differently in the various Romance languages, to express possession, to construct perfect tenses, and to make existential statements ("there is"). If we use T for tenēre, H for habēre, and E for esse, we have the following distribution:
For example:
Galician-Portuguese used to employ the auxiliary H for permanent states, such as Eu hei um nome "I have a name" (i.e. for all my life), and T for non-permanent states Eu tenho um livro "I have a book" (i.e. perhaps not so tomorrow). Informal Brazilian Portuguese uses the T verb even in the existential sense, e.g. Tem água no copo "There is water in the glass". In most languages, the descendant of tenēre still has the sense of "to hold", as well, e.g. Italian tieni il libro, French tu tiens le livre, Catalan tens el llibre, Romanian ţine cartea, Galician tes o libro, Friulian Tu tu tegnis il libri "You're holding the book". In others, like Portuguese, this sense has been mostly lost, and a different verb is currently used for "to hold". To have or to beSome languages use their equivalent of "have" as an auxiliary verb to form the perfect forms (e. g. French passé composé) of all verbs; others use "be" for some verbs and "have" for others.
In the latter, the verbs which use "be" as an auxiliary are unaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as "fall", "come", "become". All other verbs (intransitive unergative verbs and all transitive verbs) use "have". For example, in French, J'ai vu "I have seen" vs. Je suis tombé "I am fallen" ("I have fallen"). A similar dichotomy exists in the Germanic languages, which share the same Sprachbund; German uses "have" and "be", while English uses "have" only. I did or I have doneSome languages (e.g. Spanish, Catalan, Occitan and written French and Italian) make a distinction between a preterite and a perfect tense (cf. English I did vs. I have done). Others (spoken French, Italian and Galician) contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French, Italian, and European Spanish use the compound past for this, while Sicilian and Latin American Spanish use the simple past. Portuguese is unique in that its equivalent of the passé composé — made with the auxiliary ter (Spanish tener) is uncommon and does not have the same meaning as for other Romance languages. The phrase eu tenho feito is closer in meaning to I have been doing than to I have done, which would be rendered with the simple past eu fiz (although the meaning of the compound tense overlaps with "I have done" in some contexts). Writing systemsLetter valuesWhile most of the 22 basic Latin Letters have similar sound values in all Romance languages, the values of some letters have diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notably H and Q, have been variously combined in digraphs or trigraphs (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions. A characteristic feature of the writing systems of almost all Romance languages is that the Latin letters C and G — which originally always represented /k/ and /g/ respectively — represent other sounds when they come before E, I, and in some cases Y and Œ. This is due to a general palatalization of /k/ and /ɡ/ before front vowels like /i/ and /e/. This is believed to have occurred in the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin. Since the written form of all the affected words was tied to the classical language, the shift was accommodated by a change in the pronunciation rules. However, the new sounds of C and G in those contexts differ from language to language. The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly complex, and subject to considerable regional variation. To a first approximation, the phonetic representation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:
Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally have the same sounds as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by the Romance spelling systems. Digraphs and trigraphsSince most Romance languages have more sounds than can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resort to the use of digraphs and trigraphs — combinations of two or three letters with a single sound value. The concept (but not the actual combinations) derives from Classical Latin; which used, for example, TH, PH, and CH when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "ϕ" (later "φ"), and "χ" (These were once aspirated sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives and the <H> represented what sounded to the Romans like an /ʰ/ following /t/, /p/, and /k/ respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:
While the digraphs CH, PH, RH and TH were at one time used in many words of Greek origin, most languages have now replaced them with C/QU, F, R and T. Only French has kept these etymological spellings, which now represent /k/ or /ʃ/, /f/, /ʀ/ and /t/, respectively. GeminationFor most languages in this family, consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive or present. The double consonants in French spelling are due to etymology. However, Italian, Sardinian and Sicilian do have long consonants like BB, CC, DD, etc., where the doubling indicates a short hold before the consonant is released, which often has lexical value: e.g. note /ˈnɔ.te/ ("notes") vs. notte /ˈnɔt.te/ ("night"). They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco, Neapolitan and Sicilian, and are occasionally written, e.g. Sicilian cchiù (more), and ccà (here). In general, the letters B, R and Z are long at the start of a word. In Jèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: S'S is a long /z/, SS'S is a long /s/, and T'T is a long /t/. In Catalan and Occitan exists a geminate /lː/ sound written ŀl (Catalan) or ll (Occitan), but it is usually pronounced as a simple sound in colloquial (and even some formal) speech in both languages. Diacritics and special charactersDiacritics common across Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis mark (ü), the cedilla (ç), and the tilde (ã). French spelling includes the etymological ligatures œ and (more rarely) æ. Romanian has a few diacritics of its own. An accent mark placed over a vowel generally denotes stress, height, or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Romanian â/î and ă are central vowels; stress is not marked in this language. Catalan and Occitan regularly mark stress with an acute accent on high vowels, and with a grave accent on low vowels in a similar but not identical way. Similarly, French é is a high-mid vowel and French è is a low-mid vowel, although in French stress is not indicated with diacritics. Italian marks stress with the grave accent, except on high e and o, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Galician marks both stress and height with an acute accent, due to the fact that only stressed vowels can be pronounced high. Portuguese marks stress with the acute accent, except for high a, e, o, which take a circumflex accent. Homophones may be differentiated by a grave accent in Italian and French, by an acute accent in Spanish. Upper and lower caseMost languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and minuscule ("lowercase"), derived from Carolingian writing and Medieval quill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the 15th and 16th centuries. In particular, all Romance languages presently capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete sentence, most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. Text in all upper case is used for emphasis and is generally interpreted as shouting. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months (except in European Portuguese), days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizes Francia ("France") and Francesco ("Francis"), but not francese ("French") or francescano ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule. Vocabulary comparisonThe table below provides a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and the main Romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages.
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