Romance languages

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Template:Infobox Language familyTemplate:Indo-European topicsThe Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.

All Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic) descend from Vulgar Latin (more appropriately, Popular Latin), the language of soldiers, settlers and slaves of the Roman Empire, which was substantially different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BCE and 100 CE, the expansion of the Empire, coupled 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. All languages are constantly changing, and 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 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 a number of 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.

Contents

History

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Vulgar Latin

Template:MainThere is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and it is often hard to interpret or generalise based upon what evidence does exist. In any case, many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers—that is, more likely to be natives of the 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, which distinguishes 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, of comparative inflections, and of many verbal tenses, the use of articles, and the initial stages of change in pronunciation of Template:IPA and Template:IPA before front vowels Template:IPA, Template:IPATemplate:IPA.

The Romance language family (simplified) - click to enlarge

Fall of the Empire

The 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. On the other hand, the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remains of Roman culture, and thus Latin continued to be the dominant language in those areas.

Latent incubation

Template:SeealsoBetween the fifth and tenth centuries, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in various parts of its domain, leading to innumerable distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, as the written language for all purposes continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.

Recognition of the vernaculars

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars came to be written 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 medium.

Uniformization and standardization

The 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 much ground.

History of the name

The 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 each. 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 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.

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 features

Features inherited from Indo-European

As 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, Tamil, and many more. These features include:

  • Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.
  • They have a complex system of word inflections to indicate syntactic relationships between words and to create derivative words in the same or in other classes.
  • Inflection almost always consists in replacing a suffix of the word, and each word has relatively small set of "suffix slots".
  • They are verb-centered; meaning that the basic clause structure consists of a verb, expressing an action involving one or more nouns — the arguments of the verb — that play specific semantic roles in the action and specific syntactic roles in the clause.
  • The verb is inflected to indicate various aspects of the action, such as time, completeness or continuation; and also according to the grammatical person and grammatical number of one of the arguments, the subject.
  • The verb can be further modified by adverbs, or by additional nouns preceded by prepositions that indicate their semantic roles.
  • Nouns are classified into several grammatical genders and grammatical numbers.
  • Adjectives are noun modifiers; each adjective is normally inflected so as to echo the gender and number of the noun it is attached to.
  • Verbs are usually not inflected according to the gender of the subject (unlike Arabic and Hebrew, for example).
  • Tone (voice pitch) is used only at the sentence level, e.g. to indicate surprise or interrogation (unlike Chinese and Yorùbá, for example, where pitch changes the meaning of words).

Features inherited from Classical Latin

The Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.

  • In most languages, personal pronouns have different forms according to their grammatical function in a sentence (a remnant of the Latin case system); there is usually a form for the subject (inherited from the Latin nominative) another for the object (from the accusative or the dative), and a third set of personal pronouns used after prepositions or in stressed positions. Third person pronouns often have different forms for the direct object (accusative), the indirect object (dative), and the reflexive.
  • They all have retained at least three of Latin's verbal tenses: present, preterite, and past imperfect:
Present:
"he says"/
"he is saying"		 Preterite:
"he said"/
"he has said"		 Past Imperfect:
"he was saying"/
"he used to say"
Latin dīcit dīxit dicēbat
French il dit il a dit il disait
Piedmontese a dis a l'ha dit a disìa
Spanish dice dijo decía
Italian dice disse diceva
Portuguese diz disse dizia
Romanian zice zise zicea
  • For each tense, there are usually six distinct verbal inflections, encoding each of the three persons (I, you, he/she/it) and two numbers (singular and plural) of the subject.
  • At least one form of the subjunctive mood remains in use (often two, the present and the imperfect), and it is clearly distinguishable from the indicative mood.
  • There is a special imperative form for the second person.
  • Most of them are null-subject languages. French is one notable exception.
  • They have lost the dual number, retaining only singular and plural.
  • Italian and Sardinian have kept the phonological opposition between simple and long consonants, although it was lost in all other languages in the group. Sicilian, Neapolitan and Jèrriais have gemination.
  • All those languages are written with the "core" Latin alphabet of 22 letters — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z — subsequently modified and augmented in various ways.
  • In particular, the letters K and W are rarely used in most Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as they were in late Latin.

Features inherited from Vulgar Latin

Romance 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 to some extent in Romanian, which preserved three 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.

  • The distinction between long and short vowels, believed to have been present in Classical Latin, was lost and replaced by a system of lexical stress, where one vowel of each word is pronounced slightly louder, or in a higher pitch, than the rest. (An exception is Friulian.)
  • The Latin letters C and G — which usually stand for Template:IPA and Template:IPA — represent other sounds when they come before E and I. (See below.)
  • There are definite and indefinite articles, derived from Latin demonstratives and the numeral unus ("one").
  • There are only two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. The neuter gender of Latin has been lost (mostly merging with the masculine). (Exceptions: Romanian, which retains neuter gender; Spanish, which has the neuter third person pronoun ello, the neuter demonstratives eso, esto, aquello, and the neuter article lo, all used for objects or some abstract notions; and Italian, which while not keeping the neuter gender intact, has residual traces of it represented by some words that switch gender between singular and plural, such as il dito (the finger), plural le dita, inherited from Latin digitum, plural digita).
  • There are no cases, that is, noun and adjectives are no longer altered to indicate their grammatical function. (An exception is Romanian, which retains a combined genitive/dative case. Also, Old French and Old Occitan retained an oblique case.)
  • Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
  • The normal clause structure is SVO, rather than SOV, and is much less flexible than in Latin.
  • They all had originally two copular verbs, derived from the Latin stare (mostly used for "temporary state") and esse (mostly used for "essential attributes"). However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula. In French, stare and esse had become ester and estre by the late middle ages. Due to phonological development, there were the forms êter and être, which eventually merged to être. In Italian, the two verbs share the same past participle, stato. See also Romance copula.
  • Most Latin synthetic perfect tenses and all synthetic passive voice tenses were lost, generally replaced by new compound forms with "to be" or "to have" + past participle.
  • The Latin future tense was replaced by new synthetic future, based on infinitive + present tense of habēre ("to have"), fused to form new inflections.
  • A new conditional form (distinct from the subjunctive) was created, by fusing the imperfect tense (in Italian, the perfect tense) of habēre to the infinitive.
  • Many Latin combining prefixes were incorporated in the lexicon as new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian estrarre ("to extract") from Latin ex- ("out") and trahere ("to drag").
  • Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in indirect discourse and the use of the ablative absolute) were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clauses in all Romance languages except Italian (for example, Latin tempore permittente > Italian tempo permettendo; L. hoc facto > I. fatto ciò).

Other shared features

The 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:

  • Most Romance languages have polite forms of address that change the person and/or number of 2nd person subjects (T-V distinction), such as the tu/vous contrast in French, the tú(or vos)/usted in Spanish, the tu/Lei contrast in Italian or the tu/dumneavoastră (from dominus + vostre) contrast in Romanian.
  • They all have a large collection of prefixes, stems, and suffixes retained or reintroduced from Greek and Latin, used to coin new words. Most of those have cognates in English, e.g. "tele-", "poly-", "meta-", "pseudo-", "dis-", "ex-", "post-", "-scope", "-logy", "-tion".
  • During the Renaissance, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a few other Romance languages developed a new, progressive aspect that did not exist in Latin. In French, progressive constructions remain very limited, the imperfect aspect generally being preferred, as in Latin.

Divergent features

In 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 changes

The 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 Template:IPA and lune Template:IPA. 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, Franco-Provençal, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels.

Some languages, like Portuguese, Spanish, and Venetian, 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 ("I loved you"), etc.

Sounds have often been lost in the middle of the word, 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 and Portuguese have generally inserted an e in front of Latin words that began with S + consonant, such as sperō → espero ("I hope"). French has gone the same way, but then dropped the s: spatula → 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 stress

The 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 Template:IPA ("Pope") and papà Template:IPA ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive cantara ("he would sing") and future cantará ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stres