Talk:Romance languages

Please add IPA to the written samples

Hi. Just wanted to ask someone to add pronunciation in IPA for the charts, otherwise an uninformed reader might not be able to understand how the modern languages are similar or different. Based only on written forms one could think they're still very similar, since all their spellings are based on Latin, even though pronunciation has changed a great deal.

Angola and Mozambique missing

Angola and Mozambique are missing from the Romance-language distribution map.

Missing languages

The language tree in the article is missing Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.

censorship

Can anything be done about the automated censorship of the Dante quotation in footnote 12, which now ends: "nam domus nova et dominus meus lo**censored**ur." The censored part is a "c" followed by a "u" followed by an "n" followed by a "t"; the original can be found, for example, here: http://www.greatdante.net/texts/vulgari/vulgari.html (chapter XI, paragraph 7). I wonder if the Automated Puritan, or whatever it's called, also censors the Latin word for "with," which is "c" followed by "u" followed by "m." GeckoFeet (talk) 01:00, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

thoughts — uh?

... The Gallo-Romance languages went even farther, merging final /e o/, and French has carried things to the logical extreme by deleting all post-stressed vowels and uniformly placing the stress on the final syllable (except for a more-or-less non-phonemic final unstressed [ə] that occasionally appears, like the almost unnoticeable "uh" after the word "thoughts.").

I get the feeling I'm missing some context here. Is there an English dialect (other than Chicomarxic) where final /ts/ commonly becomes /tsǝ/? —Tamfang (talk) 06:38, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

I've just wondered the same thing. Perhaps some more "exotic" dialects, but none that I have heard of. But with a French accent, the described phenomenon is possible or even likely to occur (it seems /ə/ is still present for many speakers, even in words such as dame, but devoiced or something, forming an ultrashort syllable – I believe I can also hear this trace of the schwa in their speech rhythm when they pronounce German words, especially in consonant clusters, because they sound distinctly slow and over-enunciated). Native speakers of Spanish and Italian may add an -e as well (and deny it or play it down, hence calling it "almost imperceptible"), and the editor who added the comparison seems to be Spanish-speaking. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:43, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Origin of Romance Tenses chart — clarification on Italian Preterite

The idea that the Italian preterite is a "remote past" (including the name "passato remoto" itself) is entirely a conception of the Regional Standard Italian used in Northern Italy and not actual Standard Italian, which is literary Tuscan.

In Florence this morning, and yesterday, and a year ago, and 500 years ago, the Florentines used the preterite both in writing and in their normal day-to-day conversation — as explain the keepers of the Standard Italian Language, the Accademia della Crusca, here:

http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/faq/faq_risp.php?id=4697&ctg_id=93

I have updated the Origin of Romance Tenses chart to reflect this. That is, I updated it in the past, but it was not a punctual action. The state of being updated endures to the present. And hopefully the future.

The North is so dominant culturally today in Italy (and on Wikipedia) that Northerners are not even aware that indeed they are speaking and writing (and creating grammatically-incorrect Italian Wikipedia templates in) a distinct Regional Standard Italian, not "the" Standard Italian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.180.1.148 (talk) 17:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Latin?

This article states that "Latin had no third person personal pronouns." I can only assume that the person who wrote this was misinformed, as Latin, quite clearly to any person who has ever studied it, most certainly had third person personal pronouns. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/is#Latin — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.68.5.3 (talk) 03:51, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Quite so. How do you like it now? —Tamfang (talk) 01:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

The original statement is correct. is ea id is normally considered a demonstrative pronoun, not a personal pronoun. Benwing (talk) 02:38, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

a missed window

“

Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window."

”

Note that this deletion (by 201.234.213.50 on January 26) overlaps a parenthesis. The edit summary ("Deleted inaccurate example of the Spanish language") suggests that the intended change was only this:

“

Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window."

”

I'll change it accordingly. —Tamfang (talk) 07:55, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

linguistically independent at last, linguistically independent at last, thank God my language is linguistically independent at last

What does it mean to say a language "became linguistically independent"? That it diverged? That it ceased to belong to a dialect continuum? That it stopped letting other languages push it around? —Tamfang (talk) 02:23, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

"Really? I thought support would be difficult."

... Italian also has /tʃ/ from Vulgar Latin -CY- and supported -TY- (elsewhere /ts/). Former French /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin C- before A; Spanish /tʃ/ is from Latin -CT- or supported PL, CL; former Portuguese /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin PL, CL, FL.

The word supported appears nowhere else in the article. What does it mean? —Tamfang (talk) 02:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Digraphs and trigraphs (also h)

This section (Digraphs and trigraphs) at the beginning reads:
"Since 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) is derived 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:"
My understanding of this passage is that the Romans created all these digraphs and the letter h on their own, without influence, partially in order to represent as closely as possible the relevant Greek sounds as they sounded to them, transliterating single Greek letters.Can this be verified?I.e. sources?Cause although the Latin alphabet was derived from the Etruscan one (and the latter from the one of Chalcis-Euboea), wherein as far as I know (admittedly very limited knowledge) these digraphs were not present (though a form of h was), most (probably all except th) of these digraphs (and h) were already present, they already existed in Greek in one form or another in some variant of the Greek alphabet;please read -inter alia- this wiki-article.So what do the sources say: Did the Romans created them again on their own without being influenced, without copying (as this passage, at least as I understand it, claims) or did they copy other variants of the Greek alphabet?Does anybody know??? Thanatos|talk 01:40, 6 April 2013 (UTC)