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The Almost Romance Languages
- bane 3y agoThere's a funny concept I've come to appreciate called "cultural inventory" which includes all of the things associated with a culture, which includes its language. I think it's interesting that among the major modern language groups in Europe -- Romance, Germanic, Slavic -- the kinds of typical alcohol are also highly associated with those languages -- grapes (wine), grain (beer), potato (distilled) -- and their alignment with north-south/east-west differences.
- worklaptopacct 3y agoHard for potatoes to be ingrained in our vocabulary if they have only been widely known and used as food since the 18th century. And the association of vodka with potatoes is primarily a Western thing. If you don't specify further, vodka means rye spirit in Poland and brands that make it from potatoes specifically say it on the packaging.
- stefantalpalaru 3y ago> Romanian vocabulary likewise includes words of an unclear pre-Roman substrate language That would be the Dacian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoNo, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. It only hangs on due to outdated references or a certain strand of Romanian nationalism. In the last 30 years or so, as the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian has made great advances, scholars have found that Romanian borrowed words specifically from the ancestor of Albanian, not from some Dacian language possibly related to Albanian. The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, and the linguistic ancestors of Romanian speakers included Albanian speakers who switched to Latin and carried over some of their vocabulary, while Albanian speakers are descended from those who never made that switch. There are still few popular-science books representing this state of the art, but particularly curious readers can look, for example, to the publications of Matzinger and Schumacher.
- VitruviusBen 3y agoAlbanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous pastoralist people with contact to Daco-Thracians and their romanized descendants - the early Romanians. There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoAgain, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages. I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
- adrian_b 3y agoWhat is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them. However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those. Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar. The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
- laylomo2 3y agoI'm not a linguist, but I always love finding (possible) examples of hard C in Latin in other languages. For instance "Caesar" is borrowed into German as "Kaiser", and the borrowing of Latin "piscis" into Albanian as "peshk" appears to me as another example of that vestigial hard C.
- barrkel 3y agoAnd of course Tsar & czar, also from Caesar.
- simiones 3y agoThose are using a tz sound, similar to the zz in pizza. It's probably closer to the "s" in English pronunciation of "Caesar" than it is to the K used in Caesar's time.
- alberto_ol 3y agoAnother example is Sardinian. From the wikipedia page about the Sardinian phonology: "Preservation of the plosive sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ before front vowels /e/ and /i/; for example, centum ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_phonology
- elnatro 3y agoWhy some Romance languages had the hard C sound lost before e and i?
- linguistics__ 3y agoBecause of palatalization [0], a very common sound change. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)
- elnatro 3y agoThanks for the insight!
- ochrist 3y agoInteresting. This is about Welsh: "Likewise, diwrnod ‘day’ goes back to Latin diurnāta, apparently an alternative word for ‘day’ that also led to French journée and Italian giornata." In Danish the word 'døgn' indicates a day and a night (24 hours). I don't know if these words have a shared origin, but it sounds plausible (not a scientist).
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoIn French you also have a closer "diurne" - "that happens during the day".
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThe Danish word comes from Old Norse dœgn, ultimately a derivation from Proto-Germanic dōgaz ‘daily’. (If one is familiar with comparative Germanic linguistics, the long vowel in the Old Norse form speaks against any borrowing from Latin diurnāta). Meanwhile, Latin diurnāta is a derivation from dies ‘day’, unrelated to the Germanic word. If you are curious about where words come from, the English-language Wiktionary often has etymologies in its entries for words, and for the Nordic languages they are usually pretty up-to-date in terms of the scholarly state of the art.
- ochrist 3y agoThanks. I had actually checked Wiktionary but only the Danish language version.
- tomca32 3y agoIts so interesting. If you follow dōgaz one more step you get to Proto-Indi-European dheg: (to burn). Origin of Latin “dies” is also from PIE but a different word: dyews: (sky, heaven). Interesting Latin dies (day) and deus (deity) are very much related since both come from dyews.
- riffraff 3y agoMy favorite trivia related to dyews is that the Greek "theos" (theology etc) is unrelated despite the sinilarity, but the Greek "Zeus" is :)
- DrBazza 3y agoLinguistic history is interesting. I read Spoken Here [1] which talked about subject-verb-order [2], and how there was only a one or two languages in the entire world that were OSV. 1. http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/ http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order
- danjac 3y agoIt's interesting that while Latin spread across Western Europe (whether through conquest, commerce or religion), the eastern Mediterranean stubbornly held onto Greek long after the Western empire had fallen.
- simiones 3y agoGiven that the greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire (the so-called Byzantine empire) went on for a thousand more years after the fall of the Western half, is it that surprising?
- danjac 3y agoSure, but the eastern half never adopted Latin to begin with, unlike the West.
- goodbyesf 3y agoIt's because latin was the official language of the catholic church and church services were carried out in latin while the greek orthodox church used local languages.
- danjac 3y agoGreece was conquered by Rome in the 2nd century BC, i.e. 200 years before Christianity, let alone its Catholic and Orthodox variants.
- inkyoto 3y agoGreek culture and language survived in a form of the Byzantine Empire (after the fall and the following decline of Rome) where Greek was the state, liturgy and predominantly spoken language. Even before the Great Schism of 1054, Greek had been the language used to spread Christianity across southern and eastern Europe, i.e. across the Slavs. Even though the bible was always translated into a local language, Greek retained its prominence in the local education, hence the historical dominance (as opposed to Latin which didn't come into light until after the Renaissance and the spread of the scientific thought all over Europe).
- xhevahir 3y agoThese sound like examples of Sprachbünder, not some category of "almost-" X languages. Does the lexicon of Albanian really owe as much to Latin as it does to its position within the Balkan Sprachbund? Not to mention, does a table of related words really tell indicate a profound similarity between these languages? If Albanian and Latin are so much alike, then where, for example, are Latin's optative or admirative moods?
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> Does the lexicon of Albanian really owe as much to Latin as it does to its position within the Balkan Sprachbund? Yes, definitely, because the extremely heavy Latin impact on the Albanian lexicon is not found in the other Balkan Sprachbund languages Serbian–Macedonian–Bulgarian–Greek. Moreover, the Balkan Sprachbund is generally defined through shared morphological and syntactic features, not lexicon. And those features spread through the region up to centuries after the Latin > Albanian lexical influence – the Slavic languages in the Sprachbund only arrived in the mid-first-millennium AD.
- paganel 3y agoAlso, the way Albanian is spoken, the intonation, the way the words come out of one’s mouth is very, very similar to Romanian, or at least to the Romanian dialect spoken in Southern Romania, between the Danube and the Carpathians. I’m Romanian myself, and the first time when I heard someone speak Albanian was as a teenager, when zapping through the satellite TV channels and landing on a Albanian news segment. I was very intrigued because it felt that the lady presenting the news spoke a language that I should have understood, and yet I didn’t, not one word. Later on I found out that there’s a name for that, i.e. for languages that have very similar intonation, but I forgot which one was exactly. Granted, that similarity between how Romanian and Albanian sound is most likely caused by our common Thracian/Dacian substrate.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThere is no one Albanian intonation. If you think that the standard pronunciation used on Albanian television sounds like Romanian, or like Oltenian-dialect Romanian, then OK. But in general the Albanian language is extremely fractured dialectally – it is quite common in the region to go over a mountain pass and find that the people on that side speak markedly different, yet it is a distance of only a few km. I personally see very little in common in intonation between an Albanian speaker from, say, Gjirokastër and one from Kukës or Prishtina, and I suspect you might agree too if you checked out representatives of all these varieties on YouTube. As I said elsewhere in this thread, Thracian has been conclusively shown to represent a different branch of Indo-European than Albanian, so the idea of “Thracian/Dacian” playing a role in similarities between Albanian and Romanian is very out of date.
- sharikous 3y agoWell I would put English in this category too, even if it has a much more recent and convoluted history. People who speak very unrelated languages find much easier to learn Italian, Spanish or French after they learn English. Not so with e.g. Arabic
- rob74 3y agoBesides being (mostly) from the same Indo-European family, all European languages have influenced each other over the centuries. I don't know enough about Albanian and Welsh, so I'll take Romanian - which is a Romance language, but also has plenty of Slavic, Greek, Hungarian etc. etc. loan words. That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to another family.
- xhevahir 3y ago> That's why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to another family. That's one of my problems with this article. Even if the author does briefly admit its facetiousness, a lot of readers will come away thinking that language families are about family resemblances, when they're really a matter of genealogy, pure and simple. That, and it comes across sort of like a Latinist's attempt to prove all roads lead to Rome, giving short shrift to Albanian (which occupies its own branch of the Indo-European family, with its own characteristics) and to English, which among other things is drastically analytic in comparison with the rest of the I-E languages. (I can't comment on the case of Welsh.)
- schuyler2d 3y agoHe said it himself: > English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate origin. That being said, 1066 was some time after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west, and it wasn’t Latin that the invaders were speaking. Also, frankly, I’ve written enough about English.
- _dain_ 3y ago>The lexical contribution of Latin to Albanian is simply vast; one previous estimate for the total today is around 600 words, another around 800 (Gramelová 2013: 101). That doesn't seem "vast" to me?
- unhammer 3y agoNumbers like that don't even make sense. With lots of morphology, one "word" has lots of forms and derivations. With high frequency, one "word" takes up a huge chunk of any given text. Maybe it would give a better idea if they counted the frequency of Latin-contributed (vs other) tokens in a corpus.
- urubu 3y agoFor comparison: Spanish has around 4000 words of Arabic origin. I don't think anyone ever called Spanish almost Semitic.
- as_bntd 3y agoIt is true that no one would call it almost Semitic, but some very common words are of arabic origin. Taza, guitarra, almohada, albañil, algebra, elíxir, tamarindo, fulano, alfombra, acimut, cenit, café, azúcar, naranja, azar, ajedrez, arsenal, aceite, alcohol, arroba, azulejo, alberca, cero, etc. And also several toponyms, the most famous probably being Andalucía.
- drycobbler 3y agoAndalucía to name the geography is Arabic-speakers’ legacy, but as a term for a people, it can be traced further back to a Germanic root.
- jefftk 3y agoSeveral of the words you list are also English words: guitar, algebra, elixir, tamarind, cafe, orange, arsenal, alcohol. When talking about English origins do we count those for Spanish or Arabic? ;)
- usrusr 3y agoIf Old English lacks Brythonic influences because, as the article speculates, Angles and Saxons settled in thoroughly latinized regions, are there many traces of that pre-Norman latin in Old English? That's something I've often wondered when considering that simple mental model od English as "a Germanic language with lots of 11th century French sprinkled in". (That model may be too simple, but it got me through school at least, filling many gaps in my French vocabulary with "whatever the English say they isn't almost the same as in German")
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThe problem would be determining that Latin words entered Old English directly from the Latin spoken in England, instead of being part of the Latin influence on Old English while it was still spoken on the continent. English already had such Latin loanwords as street (from Latin strāta ‘paved road’) before the Anglo-Saxons set off to to invade England.
- cryptonector 3y ago> This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason behind the Romance family and its wide spread. Keep in mind that Celtic and Latin are both Indo-European languages that split off about 4kya, so 1.5kya-2kya they were a lot closer that Romance languages and Celtic are today, and so what's more likely to have happened is that the Celtic spoken by the Gauls blended with the Latin spoken by the Romans. Germanic and Slavic languages are also Indo-European, so this dynamic worked in much of Europe over the past 2ky. The point is that the other languages, where they were Indo-European, did not get "ousted", rather they blended with Latin. Basque, Finnish, Hungarian -- these are not Indo-European, and those haven't Romanized, which I think helps my thesis :)
- piranha 3y agoBasque - sure, but Finnish and Hungarian? :-) Those were too far away for Romans even to have contacts with them. :)
- cryptonector 3y agoFair point, but it's not like they've not experienced interfacing with Romance language speaking peoples in the last 1ky.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoItalic and Celtic languages are probably more closely related to each other than to any other branch of IE languages. I also have the impression that the Romans viewed the Celts as more closely related to them both linguistically and culturally than almost any other group. Which is possibly one of the reasons why Gaul adopted Latin so rapidly.
- aix1 3y agoI'd highly recommended John McWhorter's lectures to anyone interested in languages. I've listened to three or four of his popular-linguistics courses. There's a bit of overlap in material but I found all of them to be very informative and highly entertaining. He's such an engaging lecturer. Edit: I'm referring to his Great Courses series. I've just looked them up and the list prices are silly. I don't know if that's still an option, but I got the audio versions on Audible for very little money.
- erikw 3y agoI liked his podcast Lexicon Valley so much that I went back and listened through every episode. It’s had a large impact on my thinking about language and empathy for communication. I went from thinking there was a “right” way to use language, to understanding that it’s all about communication, and there are nearly endless patterns in which languages are structured.
- bane 3y agoDescriptivism vs prescriptivism are the two extremes of modern English linguistics. I've found most prescriptivists cite style guides that were written in a time and location when the dialects involved weren't as far from one another and social class signaling were considered important. Today, English is global language with an astonishing amount of variation and learning to communicate in English is as important as learning to understand it in all its glorious forms. It places the burden back on the receiver to learn the local mode rather than an Imperial style self-assuming greatness seeking to subdue conquered peoples.
- zetazzed 3y agoSubscribe to Wondrium (formerly called the Great Courses)! It includes many of McWhorter's courses and is a fixed cost per month (reasonable IMO). E.g. https://www.wondrium.com/language-a-to-z https://www.wondrium.com/language-a-to-z Also, if you ever need chill content while you fall asleep, they have many moderately-interesting classes from professors with calm voices and detailed content...
- AuBon320 3y ago[dead]