Talk:Romance languages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Languages, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, and easy-to-use resource about languages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
language Portal
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Other languages WikiProject Echo has identified Romance languages as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the French language Wikipedia.


Contents

[edit] Why english first?

Hello, Im spanish and I found quite amazing that when reading the article, the table where there is a comparassion of the romance languages with latin, english appears firs, before latin, I know this is the english version of wikipedia but... are not we taking latin as the original language?? So why dont we just set latin in the first column of the table??? Please Answer, I dont want to change anything before previous discussion. (Sorry for my english, I´m trying to do my best XD)

This is because we may safely assume that people who read the article understand English and would like to know what the word means in English, first. Unoffensive text or character 07:29, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I know what you mean, but if you put latin first and next to it the english column it wont change a thing, a latin-english comparission will be as easy and obvious as it is now but with the difference that in that way we´d point out the importance of latin as the "mater lingua" of all the rest romance languages, because its latin and not english (from my point of view) the most important language to study in this article.
You Know, this wikipedia its not just for british and USA people, not at all. This english wikipedia its a common job of all the people around the world that knows how to speak in english (the "modern latin" by the way) and colaborate here, I just imagined that putting latin first would be a kind of "piece of respect" to all the people who actually speak a romance language in here.
I actually started that comparison table. I admit that I didn't really think long and hard about. Clearly, both the English and Latin words need to be there, for reasons already stated - but which first? I don't have a strong view, but it seems to me that the advantage of the Latin being where it is is that the romance languages follow immediately after it, so it might make reading along the line a bit easier. I imagine this is the sort of the thing where you aren't going to get a clearcut consensus one way or the the other. πίππύ δ'Ω∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 11:43, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
I was under the impression that there was a very good reason for the first column to be in english. You may notice that after the english column, the rest of the table contains romance languages. If Latin were the first column then the chart of Romance languages would be broken up by the non-romance english column. That seemed to be the main reason for the format, although here are two other ones: First, as you said, english today is a lingua franca that many people will be able to reference to if they do not know the other languages. Second, being that this is the english-language wikipedia, it might be assumed that the people reading it are among those people that understand english. Therefore more people using this page will be expected to understand english rather than any particular one of the other columns. RSimione 17:18, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Latin cultures

Hello everyone! You may want to go to Latin cultures an participate in the article and discussion. There are a lot of disputed statements... The Ogre 12:41, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ter x Haver in Brazilian Portuguese

While "tem" often replaces "há" and "tinha" is used in lieu of "havia" in informal spoken Brazilian Portuguese, I believe it is quite rare for "teve" to replace "houve". Furthermore, I don't think it is correct to say that "há" and "havia" have disappeared completely from spoken BP. Could the author of that claim in the article please provide a reliable reference ? 161.24.19.82 18:10, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

This is a generic article which deals only with broad trends. Exceptions to the schemes that the article outlines no doubt can be found. Still, if you wish you can rewrite the paragraph to make it more accurate. I ask only that you avoid making it too detailed. Remember that this is a generic article about the Romance languages, not about Brazilian Portuguese alone. FilipeS 15:37, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Confusion in categories

I was trying to bring the categorization of Romance languages in the Hebrew Wikipedia in harmony with its English counterpart and ran into these strange things:

I am not an an expert in the classification of Romance languages. I am doing as preparation for writing a real academic paper about it. I will eventually find my way to academic books about it. In the meantime, any help will be strongly appreciated. --Amir E. Aharoni 12:43, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

You are right - it's all confusing. Partly this is because linguists disagree, and therefore Wiki editors follow different authorities. The Occitan/Catalan categorisation boils down to different theories that place them either in a Gallo-Romance group or an Iberian Romance group. The Western Romance classification is primarily, I think, based on the Ethnologue system. According to article Italo-Western languages, Rhaeto-Romance and Pyrenean-Mozarabic would also be in Western Romance with Gallo-Iberian - other authorities classify otherwise. Hope this helps! Man vyi 13:08, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
It helps a little, but adds even more confusion. According to Italo-Western languages, the Rhaeto-romance group and the Gallo-Iberian group are both directly beneath the Western branch, but according to Wikipedia categories the Rhaeto-romance group is beneath the Gallo-Iberian group ... And there are more confusing things.
What can i trust? There are contradictions everywhere. --Amir E. Aharoni 13:16, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I suspect that there are some political sensibilities behind these contradictions. In particular, I've noticed that some wish to group Catalan with Occitan, while others prefer to describe it as an "Iberian" language (thus grouping it implicitly with Spanish rather than Occitan). Still, note also the caveats stated at Classification of the Romance languages. FilipeS 15:35, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for the Classification link. It seems to describe the problem pretty well. I'll have to dig into more academic sources, but it looks credible.
It also solves the problem with the lonely Gallo-Iberian languages, as long as we trust Ethnologue. I created Category:Pyrenean-Mozarabic languages accordingly.
As for Catalan - i more or less understand the political controversy and i'd better not touch it :) . At this moment i am mostly concerned with Italian. --Amir E. Aharoni 16:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Concerning Occitan, Catalan and the Occitano-Romance subgroup, a response is there.--Aubadaurada 13:37, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Big Category cleanup

OK, i couldn't stand the temptation and did an even bigger clean-up in all of the Category:Romance languages category tree.

I am ready for an avalanche of reverts and complaints ("Ethnologue is crap!", "Sicilian is not Italian!", "Galician is not Portuguese!" etc.), but at least now there's some reference point.

Anyone who can make this even better and provide good sources is welcome to do it. --Amir E. Aharoni 17:43, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

If you have the time and the patience, there's a merger of Languages_of_Europe#Romance_languages into List_of_Romance_languages waiting to be made. The section in the first article needs to be simplified, and list only the Romance languages still spoken today throughout Europe (as is done for the other language groups). Everything else should be moved to the second article. FilipeS 18:01, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
That's it, done.
Thank you so much for pointing me to this task. I started studying Spanish in 1999, French in 2001, Italian in 2003 and Judeo-Italian in 2005, but these three days of working on the merge were the best lesson of Romance linguistics i ever had. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:53, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
Thank you very much for your work! I would like your opinion on another possible merger: what do you think of joining List of Romance languages with Classification of the Romance languages? FilipeS 14:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Haitian Creole

Haitian Creole is considered as one of the romance languages and should therefore be included on this page.

Creole languages are not normally included in the language family of their superstrata. FilipeS 14:37, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Diacritics

The section on diacritics says that diacritics "common across Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis mark (ü), and the tilde (ã)." I'm not aware of tildes being used outside of Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician. Unless I am mistaken about that, it seems that the use of the tilde is not common across Romance languages, but rather is restricted to one small subdivision of the Romance family, Ibero-Romance (or an even smaller subdivision, Western Ibero-Romance, if you classify Catalan as an Ibero-Romance language). All of the other diacritics listed in that sentence are used across multiple subdivisions. Perhaps the tilde should be broken out of that sentence and discussed more like the mention of ligatures in French. PubliusFL 23:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll rephrase it. FilipeS 12:34, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "about the nature of Vulgar Latin"

From: "There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin". Would there be any change in meaning if the above were changed to simply "about Vulgar Latin"? RedRabbit 13:51, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vulgar Latin

Would anyone object if I changed the section Vulgar Latin to this:

There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and it is often hard to interpret or generalise upon what there is. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers—more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. It is believed that Vulgar Latin already had most of the features that are shared by all Romance languages[citation needed] and that distinguish them from Classical Latin: such as the almost complete loss of the Latin declension system, and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter gender, comparative inflections, and many verbal tenses; the use of articles; and the initial stages of change in pronunciation of c and g before the front vowels e and i. There are some modern languages, such as Finnish, which have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form; which perhaps suggests that the Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was always there, spoken alongside the written Classical Latin reserved for official and formal occasions.?

I wouldn't suggest that is perfect, but it seems tidier than the previous version. I am not sure what to do with the last sentence. RedRabbit 14:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.

Doesn't this apply to any language? FilipeS 14:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

In short, no. Not all languages divide up their parts of speech the same way. PubliusFL 19:26, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Map of Europe

This is a good map over the distribution of the Romance languages in 1850 but should we perhaps use a more current map? Or does anybody claim that French is not spoken in Quimper, in Strassbourg, in Marseille, in Toulouse and in Lyon. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in those cities speaking Breton, Alsace-German or Provencal. JdeJ (talk) 09:22, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Romance 20c en.png (if that's what you're referring to) marks all of the French state as 9a (generalized French) and seems to cover all the cities you mention. Is it a different map, then, you mean? Man vyi (talk) 12:27, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Right you are! Stupidly enough, I completely missed that. Still, isn't there a risk that others are as stupid as I? :) I still think the map is a bit disambiguous. And perhaps some similar additions could be made to Spain and Italy, as there is after all a general Italian speech that is completely absent from the map. JdeJ (talk) 12:33, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
The map's certainly not ideal. Generalized Italian and Spanish would probably be helpful, as well as better distinction of the Oïl languages, and probably other tweaks - but I'm not in a position to undertake that myself. Man vyi (talk) 13:30, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Same here. And I wouldn't even know how to do it, not very good with computers. :) Well, it's not a big problem provided the persons who read it know a bit about the Romance languages. If not, they will probably wonder if there isn't a language called Italian spoken anywhere in Europe. :) JdeJ (talk) 15:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map of The world

someone should check the map, since equatorial guinea appear as a portuguese speaking country, while is a spanish speaking one (the only one in africa holding it as official language actually. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.32.56.2 (talk) 21:04, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

In fact, you are just partially right. Spanish is, as you say, the main official language but French and Portuguese are also official thought less used (I don't even know if Portuguese is spoken at all). However, Spanish is not the principal mother tongue. Aaker (talk) 20:24, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Sardinian cognate of dicere

I've commented out Sardinian from the table with the sample conjugations, because the verb does not seem to be a cognate of Latin dicere. Should anyone know of such a cognate, please add it to the table. FilipeS (talk) 14:40, 5 April 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Current Map of Romance Languages in Europe

I would like to point out a few problems with this map: the MAP is very rough and contains several errors. For example in Alsace and Bretonia French is spoken as a first language by over 75% of the population (these areas are bilingual at most) but the map does not show that. In Spain, virtually less than 15% of the population speaks Basque and Catalonian and Spanish are both spoken in Catalonia. In Romania's Szeklerland, people are indeed bilingual however in Moldova's Transnistrian region bilingualism is only persistant in the centre of the region, not throughout as it is depicted on the map. Similarly in Gagauzia, Romanian is understood by just 5% of the population. The spread of the Romanian language is also slightly exagerated in Chernivtsi Oblast. Bellow is a map I propose based on the languages of Europe map as well as current wiki articles on Alsace, Chernivtsi Oblast, Gagauzia and Basque Country.
Romance languages, 20th century
Romance languages, 20th century

Dapiks (talk) 20:31, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] English should be counted as a Romance language, not a Germanic language

I can see why they would say English is a Germanic language, there are many German words in English, But English is more related to French, there are more French words in English than in German.

In fact, English is more closely related to German than to French. An analogy: think of cousins who remain closely related genetically, regardless of the country of origin of whatever clothes they may have borrowed. Man vyi (talk) 05:23, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
English is definitely Germanic, even with the large Norman and French vocabulary. Studies have been done revealing that the 100 most common words in English are all of Germanic origin and 80 something percent of the 1,000 most common words are of Germanic origin. Many of the French words are used mostly in law and science and not everyday conversation. All linguistic books that I have state that it is Germanic. Kman543210 (talk) 06:16, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mutual intelligibility

It would be interesting to know more about how well Romance speakers from different places can understand each other, the especially written language. How well does a Brazilian understand written Romanian? Is it difficult for an Angolan to understand what a Spaniard says? Has anyone seen any studies? Aaker (talk) 21:30, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sample section

I have re-introduced the sample section as I believe this adds a lot to the article. It's probably more useful than the other comparative section as it compares whole sentences rather than just words. --Gibmetal 77talk 10:57, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. The sample section reveals little about each language's grammar (discussed in detail further down) or phonology; all it shows is the word for "window" in each language, followed by a discussion about how each language came to arrive at that word for window!--Yolgnu (talk) 12:35, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
I think having a sample section does add to the article. I like being able to see the same sentence in several of the Romance languages together for comparison to see how they are similar and how they are different. If you object to the sample sentence that were recently removed, maybe we can put another one up, but I always think it adds to see comparative texts. Kman543210 (talk) 06:17, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Yolgnu makes a good point - something instructive would be to come up with a sentence that showed some variation in prepositions, pronouns and maybe even the use of tenses (e.g. different takes on the use of the subjunctive and/or conditional, or the past tenses). E.g. (just for argument's sake): If she had arrived a minute earlier she may have noticed the small boy seated quietly at the table eating two slices of bread with his soup. or something that shows a variety of grammatical parts, which, hopefully, might highlight some differences (could also think abouth throwing in adjectives and adverbs, etc.). A sentence comparison will definitely be useful if we pick up a good one! πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 06:53, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yolgnu - I'm not sure if there is a consenus yet except that there is at least some support for something similar. Unless someone comes up with a better sample sentence (and mine above was just a very tentative suggestion) - then I don't think you should pull it out. I do agree with your general proposition that this particular objective, while worthy, could probably be better met. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 03:40, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with the above poster. If someone continues to remove it at this point, I shan't revert the edit as another user has been doing; however, I don't see a problem with keeping it in until something better is created. Is there anyone that can find an example sentence in the most common Romance languages? I don't think it needs to be long and complicated, but like I previously stated, I strongly think it adds to the article. Kman543210 (talk) 03:50, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, but I'm still not convinced that this section adds anything to the article. I think it's ridiculous to try to explain the differences between these languages in one sentence, and if anything we should be showing the similarities between them, not the differences.--Yolgnu (talk) 09:33, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it should be used to "explain the differences between the languages", but it is very useful to be able to compare them. Where one can see both the differences as well as the similarities. --Gibmetal 77talk 14:07, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I oppose this deletion. FilipeS (talk) 18:11, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

What deletion? We're discussing in what form it should be restored, but since it's agreed that the current version is bad, it's been temporarily removed. Please join the discussion, rather than edit warring.--Yolgnu (talk) 00:58, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree that these comparisons of the different languages should stay. I looked at this history of this, and it was deleted w/o consensus to delete. Consensus seems to be that it's a good idea to keep and could be improved, but it should stay until it's improved, not deleted. 66.53.210.194 (talk) 01:28, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
That it should stay until it's improved is your opinion, not consensus.--Yolgnu (talk) 02:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Users Gibmetal77, FilipeS, πιππίνυ δ, Kman543210, and I all agree that it should stay according to the above discussion. You're the only one who seems to be deleting it. Last time I checked, 5 to 1 is consensus. 66.53.210.194 (talk) 02:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

No, those users agreed that *a* sample section should be there, but not the current one.--Yolgnu (talk) 02:52, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Gibmetal77 reverted deletion first, so he agrees should stay. πιππίνυ δ states "I don't think you should pull it out." FilipeS reverted deletion and stated "oppose this deletion." Kman543210 stated "I don't see a problem with keeping it in until something better is created." That is clear to me that even though everyone agrees that you can improve it, they all agree that it should stay until then. Jabez2000 (talk) 03:18, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Well if you're serious about improving the article, rather than just looking to edit war, I'm sure you'll tell what your suggestions for improving the sample section are.--Yolgnu (talk) 07:51, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Yolgnu wrote: "No, those users agreed that *a* sample section should be there, but not the current one." Kindly do not put words in my mouth. My position is that, until such time as a better comparison is produced by some editor, the current one should stay where it is. FilipeS (talk) 12:14, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone else think that the super script numbers that were just added are a little distracting in trying to read the example sentences? I think the idea was good intended, but to me it's more of a distraction in a section that still may need improvement. Kman543210 (talk) 09:20, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Neuter Gender

I just noticed the recent edit stating that Romanian still has the neuter gender and that Italian has remnants of it. Doesn’t Spanish still have remnants of the neuter gender as well in the lo constructions such as lo mejor or lo bueno? I've been under the impression that this is a gender-neutral construction. Kman543210 (talk) 12:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

There are remnants of the neuter is several Romance languages, but they are usually minor. What I mean by this is that they are not usually visible in noun inflection — with the exception of Romanian, and, arguably, Italian. The thing is, it's also possible to analyse Italian neuter nouns as a mix of masculine and feminine (masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural). I don't think we should be too dogmatic about this. There are different ways to analyse it. FilipeS (talk) 12:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks...wasn't trying to be dogmatic, but when I read that it was just Italian and Romanian, it got my brain cells going back to the Spanish grammar days. Actually, I just confirmed that lo is considered the neuter definite article in Spanish, and it's actually quite common. Whether it comes from the Latin neuter gender, that I'm not sure of, but it is definitely a commonly used construction that I use all the time when I'm speaking Spanish. Kman543210 (talk) 12:42, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
It's generally agreed that languages on the conservative side of the La Spezia-Rimini Line retain features of the neuter, while languages on the innovative side have entirely lost them. Romanian is generally - whether correctly or incorrectly - regarded as having preserved the neuter more or less intact, while Italian is generally regarded as having mostly lost it, but preserved important features of it.--Yolgnu (talk) 12:53, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

The masculine-singular / feminine-plural analysis that Filipe mentions for Italian is equally applicable to Romanian. But in Romanian, the nouns that behave like this are much more numerous, they form a productive class, and they are traditionally referred to as neuter nouns. So this is more than just "residual traces" of neuter gender. At the same time, it cannot be said that Romanian "retains the neuter" from Latin: there are no neuter declensions, no specifically neuter endings. Could we please end the current edit war and focus on producing an accurate description? CapnPrep (talk) 22:24, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Of course, when I used the word "residual" I was not talking about Romanian, but evidently tat flew over everyone's heads. FilipeS (talk) 14:43, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
The version that you restored several times did use "residual" in reference to Romanian. Anyway, I have edited the text because reverting back and forth is really not useful. To address (or rather, to sidestep) Kman's original question above, I made it explicit that the article is talking about noun gender here (and thus ignoring things like lo in Spanish). CapnPrep (talk) 15:16, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
I reverted Yolgnu's edits, because they echoed the nationalistic fiction that Romanian is the only Romance language with any trace whatsoever of the neuter. I have no objection to a rewrite to make the article more accurate, but I do object to edits that push nationalistic and linguisticallly false agendas. FilipeS (talk) 16:00, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Ha ha ha! You've just given me the biggest laugh I've had in a long time! You probably don't appreciate the irony of calling me a Romanian nationalist, right after I went on a Wiki-crusade against Romanian nationalism[1][2][3]. It would have to be a pretty sad nationalism: "We're the greatest ethnic group in the world, because we've got the only language preserving traces of the Latin neuter!" And Filipe, kindly do not put words in my mouth: I said "Italian [has] preserved important features" of the neuter, not "Romanian is the only Romance language with any trace whatsoever of the neuter". All this makes it obvious you're nothing but a disruptive, moronic edit warrior: and your edits aren't even "linguisticallly" accurate.--Yolgnu (talk) 06:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)