Romance languages  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Romance language)
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, comprised of all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. They have more than 700 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 descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Roman Empire, which was somewhat different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati.

Vulgar Latin

Documentary evidence is limited about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and other Italic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.

Vulgar Latin is believed to have already had most of the features shared by all Romance languages, which distinguish them from Classical Latin, such as the almost complete loss of the Latin grammatical case system and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter grammatical gender and comparative inflections; replacement of some verb paradigms by innovations (e.g. the synthetic future gave way to an originally analytic strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'); the use of articles; and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /ɡ/, and /t/.

To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them," i.e. Latin had ceased to be a first language and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers.

With the rise of the Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern, western, central, and southeastern Europe, and northern Africa along parts of western Asia.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Romance languages" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools