# Romance language least related to Latin



## Testing1234567

Personally I don't know so many Romance languages. But for fun, I would like to start a discussion on the romance language least related to Latin. 

I'm going for Romanian.


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## Angelo di fuoco

It all depends on the criteria you use. Lexically and morphologically, I think, your guess is correct.


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## ahvalj

The word _related_ is incorrect here: every direct descendant is equally related to the mother language. The most _derived_, phonetically and grammatically, is the spoken French. _ãfã, žönsepa, šoz, mãže, o, smen, tutaku. _Trajan_​ _would have probably recognized something Latin in the Romanian speech of the 18th century (i. e. before its intentional re-romanization), but I doubt he could even think that French (without its _mots savants_) has anything to do with Latin.


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## Nino83

Yes, I agree.
Romanian for the vocabulary and French for the pronunciation. 
This is why written Romanian is the least intelligible (for the other Romance speakers).


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## Testing1234567

And for those of you who don't know what the French words are:
ãfã: enfant (child)
žönsepa: je ne sais pas (I don't know)
šoz: chose (thing)
mãže: manger (eat)
o: eau (water)
smen: semaine (week)
tutaku: tout-à-coup (all of a sudden)

Question: What did French go through that made it that distinct in the pronunciation? Maybe a GVS similar to English? Because 'pause' (pause) is pronounced poz instead of pauzə... And why did French drop so many final letters?


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## Nino83

All Western and Southern (Italian) Romance languages had some change (except Portuguese): 
p*è*tra -> p*ie*tra, p*ie*dra, p*ie*rre 
n*ò*vu -> n*uo*vo, n*ue*vo, n*eu*f (ò -> uò -> uè -> eu [œ]) 

but French had further changes: 
c*à*sa -> ch*e*z, p*é*ra -> p*oi*r [wa], s*ó*lo -> s*eu*l [œ], d*u*ro -> d*u*r [y], c*ó*rte -> c*ou*rt , plus nasal vowels (nasalization happened before é -> oi and o -> eu), loss of voiceless stops between vowels (for example: vita, vida, vie), loss of final vowels (except /a/), loss of some final consonant. 

I don't know why. Celtic/Germanic influence?


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## ahvalj

The Celtic influence is almost certainly seen in the shift _u_>_ü_ as it is 1) present exactly where Celts switched to Latin (except for the Iberian peninsula) and 2) occurred in the history of Welsh. Also Dutch experienced a similar change — again, in vicinity with the former Celtic speech (Belgae). 

The voicing of the intervocal consonants is also found on the former Celtic territory (plus it was attested in Lusitanian, a non-Celtic IE language) and is absent in the southern half of Italy, Dalmatia, Sardinia and Romania. In Celtic, it is comparable with the lenition, though the Celtic evolution was much more far reaching than in Romance.

_E_>_ei_ and _o_>_ou_ is not found in the first millennium either in Celtic or Germanic. _A_>_æ_ is attested in Old English and Early Frisian, though I doubt it was somehow related.

The deep vowel reduction of a similar degree is again Celtic, cp. Occitan or north Italian, though on the other hand, it is characteristic of most non-southern West European languages and occurred approximately around the years 900–1000.

Most other phonetic changes found in French are too late to be ascribed to a substrate.


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## bearded

Most dialects in Northern Italy have similarities with French. They cover a territory once inhabited by Gauls, before the Romans arrived.  It cannot be a coincidence. Those dialects are called 'Gaulic-Italian'.  The way Gauls pronounced Latin probably left - as heritage - some ''inner trends'' which explain the parallel evolution of French and  northern Italian dialects.  Poor Trajan would hardly identify the Latin origin in these dialects, unless he studied very hard..


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## Nino83

So, what was the difference between Gauls and the other Celtic inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula (whose pronunciation is more conservative)?


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## bearded

@ Nino
All these theories cannot be proved or documented, unfortunately, and that is why I wrote 'probably'.  Within this field of speculations, I will remind you that Celtic populations spoke a variety of dialects, and those of Gaul and Northern Italy were presumably the most similar to each other.
Mine is just a useful hypothesis to explain the really astounding similarities between French and our northern dialects.  I do not think that these dialects were ever subject to massive direct influence from the French language. Do you know that in my dialect (Bolognese) to do is 'fèr', pronounced just like 'faire', five is 'zénc', pronounced almost like 'cinq', and I could quote innumerable other examples. And just think of Lombard dialects, where a wall is pronounced like French 'mur', etc.etc.
Spain and Portugal are far away from this territory, and probably the Celtic tribes there had a different accent, or could not influence the local pronunciation so much (although some 'suspect' traces can be found in Portugal with the nasal vowels, and in Spain in words like 'beso, obrero' etc. with this e instead of the stressed a of Latin basius, operarius...But that would really be a long story and completely off-topic.


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## Nino83

Yes, Gallo-Italic languages are very similar to French in pronunciation. 
So it seems that Gauls had the "strongest" accent among Celtic speakers.


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## ahvalj

Nino83 said:


> So, what was the difference between Gauls and the other Celtic inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula (whose pronunciation is more conservative)?


The Celtiberian was the earliest attested Celtic branch — it preserved several archaic features and most probably did not participate in a number of later Celtic developments, which may explain the absence of the shift _u_>_ü_ in the Iberian peninsula. Also remarkable is that the Ibero-Romance language closest to Occitan is Catalan, which arose on the Iberian, non-Celtic and non-Indo-European substrate.


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## ahvalj

By the way, all these theories concerning the substrate, waves of innovations, opposition of archaic/neutral/advanced features etc. are best studied on the Romance material since this group of languages, being perfectly attested since its very beginning and originating from a single, again very well attested language, are a truly ideal field of study. No group of languages in the entire world is studied better. You can find discussions about the Celtic and other influences in any major book dedicated to the Romance philology.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> Also Dutch experienced a similar change — again, in vicinity with the former Celtic speech (Belgae).


The Old Dutch /y/ is a perfectly native West Germanic i-mutation. There is no reason to suspect any obscure Celtic influence. I am rather wary of most of these Celtic substratum theories. We know extremely little about continental Celtic languages and the logic of these theories appears a bit like _There is an obscure development in language XYZ, Celtic is an obscure language, sounds like a match.

_*Moderator note: Discussion about u-fronting in Dutch moved to separate thread.*


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## ahvalj

CapnPrep said:


> Um… so which Romance language do the two of you figure is the least similar to Latin?


Spoken French, as has been written the first day. Then a problem arose of how to explain this. As far as I imagine, there is no explanation, it is just an empirical fact: one of the Romance languages showed the fastest evolutionary rate.


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## Caktus

Angelo di fuoco said:


> It all depends on the criteria you use. Lexically and morphologically, I think, your guess is correct.



Could you please explain your last sentence? When you talk about the  lexicon do you take into consideration the inherited words or all the  words that have a Latin origin, including the ones that were later  borrowed from Latin in all romance languages? But above all I would like  to know how is Romanian more morphologically distant from Latin than  the other romance languages.


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## Nino83

Caktus said:


> Could you please explain your last sentence?



"Roughly a fifth of spoken Romanian colloquial vocabulary is based on common Slavic roots", source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_influence_on_Romanian


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## Angelo di fuoco

Caktus said:


> Could you please explain your last sentence? When you talk about the  lexicon do you take into consideration the inherited words or all the  words that have a Latin origin, including the ones that were later  borrowed from Latin in all romance languages? But above all I would like  to know how is Romanian more morphologically distant from Latin than  the other romance languages.



Nino has already answered about the vocabulary, I think it's also possible to detect Slavic influence in morphology, as it is possible to detect Romance influence in English grammar and, to a lesser degree, morphology.
I mean, if I ever read a Romanian text (which doesn't happen very often, since I haven't learned or studied the language), the Slavic component is really striking. That doesn't happen with the Germanic vocabulary in other Romance languages (and I know quite a few); the phenomenon coming closest is either Arabic vocabulary in the Ibero-Romance languages (quite noticeable, but I don't perceive any influence in grammar) or the Basque influence on vocabulary & grammar in Spanish in Northern Spain, where both Spanish & Basque are spoken.


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## ahvalj

I know, Romanian speakers are often not that proud of the Slavic component in their vocabulary, but honestly these words don't look alien: they are reasonably digested by the language and, being rather old, experienced very much the same phonetic evolution as the inherited words in the last millennium. The borrowings of the last two centuries from French or Latin, being products of two different evolutions, look much more alien from an esthetic viewpoint (as are _mots savants_ in French, by the way, not to mention much of the English vocabulary).


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## Angelo di fuoco

I see the Germanic vocabulary in the other Romance languages (there's some of it) and the Arabic vocabulary in the Ibero-Romance languages (more prominent in Spanish & Portuguese: many nouns beginning with a or al), but the Slavic vocabulary, however well it may be assimilated, is still recognisable in many cases (at least for a native speaker of a Slavic language, like myself), and the sheer quantity is striking (well, almost like Romance vocabulary in English).


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## Nino83

The fact is that in Romanian also the most used conjunctions and adverbs are different: 
mais (FR), ma/però (IT), pero/sino (SP), mas (PT) --> dar/ci (RO) 
pourquoi, perché, porqué, porquê --> pentru ce/de ce 
en effet, infatti, de hecho, de facto --> într-adevăr 
grâce à, grazie a, gracias a, graças a --> datorită 
au point que, al punto che, a tal punto/ponto que --> astfel încât 
afin de, al fine di, a fin/fim de --> pentru a 
(if) si, se, si, se --> dacă 
à moins que, a meno che, a menos que --> doar dacă 
(and) et, e, y, e --> şi


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## killerbee256

You forgot portuguese _porém _


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## mataripis

Do you think that there was only one type of early latin?


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## ahvalj

mataripis said:


> Do you think that there was only one type of early latin?


Latin was a language originally spoken in the city of Rome and the surrounding land of Latium, i. e. in a territory of several thousands of square kilometers. The Roman authors clearly stated that there was an elaborated language of the city, and a rustic language, of the city and the countryside, with rather minor differences between them. The Romance languages descend from this vulgar speech (and actually were even initially called _sermo vulgaris_). So, the original Latin was of course a single language with some social stratification, but since the moment it began to spread over the vast territory, it started to change differently in each area (the most archaic characters preserved in Sardinia).


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## Nino83

mataripis said:


> Do you think that there was only one type of early latin?



I don't know which differences there were between them but the fact that all these conjunctions and adverbs are the same in four (I'd say, five, six, if we count Catalan and Galician) languages and different in Romanian makes me think that the latter is the "least related".


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## Angelo di fuoco

The problem for us who don't know Romanian is that we now little or nothing about the etymology, i. e. origins and semantical & phonetical evolution of those words. If they can be traced down to some Latin words (and I think, some or of most of them can be traced down), there would be no reason to say that they are less related to Latin that the others.


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## Caktus

Nino83 said:


> "Roughly a fifth of spoken Romanian colloquial vocabulary is based on common Slavic roots", source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_influence_on_Romanian



You are quoting a wikipedia article which does not cite its  sources... it is original research. Could you indicate me serious academic sources that can support the claim made in article you  are quoting? I know a few studies, but none give the figure 20% of  "colloquial vocabulary" (how do we define this?)



Angelo di fuoco said:


> Nino has already answered about the vocabulary, I think it's also possible to detect Slavic influence in morphology, as it is possible to detect Romance influence in English grammar and, to a lesser degree, morphology.
> I mean, if I ever read a Romanian text (which doesn't happen very often, since I haven't learned or studied the language), the Slavic component is really striking. That doesn't happen with the Germanic vocabulary in other Romance languages (and I know quite a few); the phenomenon coming closest is either Arabic vocabulary in the Ibero-Romance languages (quite noticeable, but I don't perceive any influence in grammar) or the Basque influence on vocabulary & grammar in Spanish in Northern Spain, where both Spanish & Basque are spoken.



You didn't answer my question. If the "Slavic component is really striking" (in morphology), I am sure that you can give me countless examples of how the Slavic languages influenced the Romanian morphology. Please do?
Something else, I see that you do not know Romanian "learned or studied", but still you participate this "ranking" of the Romance languages and speak about Romanian as if you studied it. Which are the objective criteria used to do such a ranking?


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## Peterdg

Caktus said:


> You didn't answer my question. If the "Slavic component is really striking" (in morphology), I am sure that you can give me countless examples of how the Slavic languages influenced the Romanian morphology. Please do?
> Something else, I see that you do not know Romanian "learned or studied", but still you participate this "ranking" of the Romance languages and speak about Romanian as if you studied it. Which are the objective criteria used to do such a ranking?


The guy is giving his opinion, an impression, and he made it very clear that that was what it is and as far as I know, that's still allowed here, or isn't it?

So, if you have some counter-arguments, give them but don't criticize people for giving their opinion without adding any trustworthy sources yourself.


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## irinet

Angelo di fuoco said:


> The problem for us who don't know Romanian is that we now little or nothing about the etymology, i. e. origins and semantical & phonetical evolution of those words. If they can be traced down to some Latin words (and I think, some or of most of them can be traced down), there would be no reason to say that they are less related to Latin that the others.


Finally, I could read something positive here about my language which is one of the 10th Romance languages on the globe without any doubt whatsoever!
Though ancient, Latin is very much alive: "Harry Potter" was translated in Latin! Catholic Priests quote from Latin. Here you have a very interesting forum topic entirely dedicated to Latin. (I may also suggest that this thread should be moved there as I've read many literate and trustworthy posts.) Latin used to be a lingua franca and now it is no longer available for everyone. It is a precious diamond! 
I am thrilled to belong to it as the 10th tiny part out of 10 all in all no matter _tiny - tinier or tiniest _I'd be!


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## irinet

Caktus said:


> You are quoting a wikipedia article which does not cite its  sources... it is original research. Could you indicate me serious academic sources that can support the claim made in article you  are quoting? I know a few studies, but none give the figure 20% of  "colloquial vocabulary" (how do we define this?)
> 
> 
> 
> You didn't answer my question. If the "Slavic component is really striking" (in morphology), I am sure that you can give me countless examples of how the Slavic languages influenced the Romanian morphology. Please do?
> Something else, I see that you do not know Romanian "learned or studied", but still you participate this "ranking" of the Romance languages and speak about Romanian as if you studied it. Which are the objective criteria used to do such a ranking?


Hi,
Don't be upset! In 100 years from now we will be seen as an American most related language of Europe since we have been continuously borrowing and assimilating many of the American words and habits for 2 decades. Alas, this would not mean that they christianised us, too ('creştin' - 'cristianus') nor they brought God ('deus' - 'dumnezeu)' into our churches ('biserică' - 'basilica'), etc.!

To the initiator of this thread who firstly stated clearly that does not read thouroughly about the Romance languages, I also wonder why Romanian is at question in the first place?! Can you enjoy argumenting your position?


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## Angelo di fuoco

Caktus said:


> You are quoting a wikipedia article which does not cite its  sources... it is original research. Could you indicate me serious academic sources that can support the claim made in article you  are quoting? I know a few studies, but none give the figure 20% of  "colloquial vocabulary" (how do we define this?)
> 
> You didn't answer my question. If the "Slavic component is really striking" (in morphology), I am sure that you can give me countless examples of how the Slavic languages influenced the Romanian morphology. Please do?
> Something else, I see that you do not know Romanian "learned or studied", but still you participate this "ranking" of the Romance languages and speak about Romanian as if you studied it. Which are the objective criteria used to do such a ranking?



I have stated my impressions based on my (admittedly, quite limited) exposure to Romanian (including reading grammar books years ago) and balanced by my knowledge of other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian including some basics of the regional languages, Catalan and Portuguese; and, of course, the mother language Latin) as well as Germanic languages (English & German - I live in Germany). I studied Romance philology with focus on French, Italian & Spanish. I am a native speaker of a Slavic language (Russian), I attended some Polish classes and studied a little Czech on my own. I've also had some exposure to Bulgarian & other Southern Slavic languages in their written form.

If you ask me for examples (although I never stated that the Slavic component was "really striking in morphology" - only in vocabulary), I need to do little but point you at the Wiki article linked by Nino83, since it cites several ones. While I can't confirm or refute the numbers and the historical facts, from my point of view I can say almost all of the purely linguistical stuff (vocabulary, morphology, phonology) is quite solid. The little I cannot vouch for is due to some (insignificant) knowledge gaps.
 The article isn't exhaustive (it's too short), but there's little to add in terms of grammar & morphology. My additions would be the future with "a voi" (found in other languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, but not in any other main Romance language I know: the standard future found in every other Romance language stems from the Vulgar Latin construction "infinitive + present of _habeo_"; Latin has completely different morphology for the future tenses) and the observation that many scholars are inclined to give the Balkan Sprachbund some credit for the preservation of the case system in Romanian, lost in all the other Romance languages. In morphology, I'd say they forgot the suffix -nic and the corresponding female form.

If we speak about vocabulary in "colloquial" language, the simplest thing would be to check the Swadesh list for Romanian (of course, that would be only a starting point, since the Swadesh list is too short).


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## irinet

'Volunt, volo', 'voglio', 'vouloir' = a vrea, a *voi* (Romanian). The Romanian future is made up of this verb as an auxiliary plus the lexical verb.
How does the Swadesh list help here?


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## irinet

ahvalj said:


> I know, Romanian speakers are often not that proud of the Slavic component in their vocabulary, but honestly these words don't look alien: they are reasonably digested by the language and, being rather old, experienced very much the same phonetic evolution as the inherited words in the last millennium. The borrowings of the last two centuries from French or Latin, being products of two different evolutions, look much more alien from an esthetic viewpoint (as are _mots savants_ in French, by the way, not to mention much of the English vocabulary).



Hi,
The Slavic component of our language is much younger than the Latin one. Our alphabet is a Latin alphabet, too. Bye the way, "mileniu" (Romanian) is the Latin word you used before, "millenium", which English also use. We also have "secol" from "saeculum", 'luna' from "lunae", "pecuniar", "pluvial", "mane", "Jovis" - 'Joi', "est", "sunt", and so many more.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I know about "a voi" and what it means. Do you have examples for it in Vulgar Latin? If not, it's an innovation common to the Balkan Sprachbund languages.

The Swadesh list (100 words) includes only "hardcore", the most basic vocabulary of a language.


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## irinet

Sorry, I do not understand any of those: Sprachbund Balkans (Balkan languages?) nor the Swadesh list?! Can you explain these to me? The first one, peut-etre?


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## Angelo di fuoco

irinet said:


> Hi,
> The Slavic component of our language is much younger than the Latin one. Our alphabet is a Latin alphabet, too. Bye the way, "mileniu" (Romanian) is the Latin word you used before, "millenium", which English also use. We also have "secol" from "saeculum", 'luna' from "lunae", "pecuniar", "pluvial", "mane", "Jovis" - 'Joi', and so many more.



Of course it's younger, but it's as significant as the Latin/Romance component in English, if not more (because in English, the Latin/Romance component doesn't affect the core vocabulary that much, whereas in Romanian, the Slavic component does affect the basic vocabulary). Luna meaning "month" (instead of "mensis") is a Slavism. What are the Romanian words for "love", "to love" and "friend"?
Irinet, you know that the Latin alphabet was introduced relatively recently and that the alphabet in itself really doesn't mean that much. After all, Turkish and Azeri use it, too - as do Tagalog & Quechua.


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## irinet

Ok, you will be referring to colloquialisms which is difficult to me. 
If you consider '*love*' a counter-argument, let see then if "*amor*" or "litera" is as important, or 'luna' as a celestial corpus, or better "*mensis*" - "*menstră*" (= _female_ _period_) or "frate' - 'fraternitate', 'Danubius', 'mater/nitate", etc. My *core* *vocabulary** is not Slavic*, that's for sure. I only say that, the Chirilik or, how it is spelled, alphabet could be as well my alphabet. 
Going back to my foremother language, which is Latin and not to forget "Traco-Dacic", too, this would mean that such a powerful 'imperiu' - "emporium" like the Roman one had a weak linguistic influence. It cannot be!
Is English nowadays lingua franca because the British Empire was ...?

Though I know I am caught in the middle here again, I am ready to fight for my Latin origins! So, shoot me, comrades! By the way, isn't 'comrade' a Slavik word (or perhaps German), too? Whoops!


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## Angelo di fuoco

irinet said:


> Sorry, I do not understand any of those: Sprachbund Balkans nor the Swadesh list?! Can you explain these to me? The first one, peut-etre?



The Balkan Sprachbund (sprachbund meaning a "union of languages") which, although not closely related (Albanian, Greek, several Slavic languages & Romanian), share many common features in grammar, phonology etc. - some features may be shared not by all languages, but by most The future with "a voi" ("to want", in each respective language) is one of those features.

Extensive reading: a Wiki article citing its sources.

A Swadesh list is a list of the most basic words of a language (most important parts of speech including prepositions, conjunctions, numbers and pronouns), 207 in all, compiled by the linguist Maurice Swadesh, in order to determine the lexical relation of languages.


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## irinet

Many thanks for this input! I didn't know. I've become smarter today thanks to you!
However, I still not consider that list relevant  nor the prepositions so important for the basics. Our numeral  is Latin, too. And as far as I know, the common trait to Albanian is the way we speak is the same we write. Even the English faces this peculiarity (frog, put, lost, big, set, etc.). Is that relevant, too? The Union to this discussion is rather strange: Greek, Slavik, Albanian, Romanian?! Other than a geographical position and two or so important common features or coincidental traits in between (religion, WYSIWYG, some borrowings), what would be the major linguistic argument, the family of Indo-European languages? Let's see, how many more: the Romance languages (it's only them under discussion in this thread), and their global spread then.


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## Angelo di fuoco

irinet said:


> Ok, you will be referring to colloquialisms which is difficult to me.
> If you consider 'love' a counter-argument, let see then if "litera" is as important, or 'luna' as a celestial corpus, or "frate' - 'fraternitate', 'Danubius', 'mater/nitate", etc. My core vocabulary is not Slavic, that's for sure. I only say that, the Chirilik or, how it is spelled, alphabet could be as well my alphabet.
> Going back to my foremother language, which is Latin, this would mean that such a powerful 'imperiu' - "emporium" like the Roman one had a weak linguistic influence. It cannot be!
> Is English nowadays lingua franca because the British Empire was ...?



You know, the big mighty powerful Roman empire (by the way, please don't mix up imperium & emporium - two completely different words) had a strong influence in the European part of the Western Roman Empire (after all, it succeeded in supplanting most of the local languages), but little to no lasting linguistic influence in Africa and in the near East (at least, there's very little to prove it today, except historic records). The dominant language in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire was Greek - but that was swept away from most of the territory. Actually, it's a real wonder that the former Dacia has retained (and developed) Latin as its main language.

According to the Swadesh list, a tiny part of your core vocabulary is Slavic. What I personally find most astonishing, it's that it includes even some very basic verbs (most often borrowed words are nouns) which I wouldn't call colloquialisms, because they are stylistically neutral and not really specific. Some important prefixces & suffixes are Slavic.
If you speak about core vocabulary like family members, then you have some of it on the Swadesh list. Although that list is really short, basic vocabulary comprises about 2,500 words.
 The word for "mother" (maică) is Slavic. The word for "daughter" combines a Latin root with a Slavic ending. The very word for "relatives" is Slavic. The word for "bride" (nevastă) is Slavic.
The way you name your numerals from 11-19 is essentially a calque from the Slavic languages (the x-above-10 construction).
I mean, that's not to prove you are Slavs, just to make you see that living together with Slavs had a greater impact on your language than you care to admit.



irinet said:


> Many thanks for this input! I didn't know. I've become smarter today thanks to you!
> However, I still not consider that list relevant nor the prepositions so important for the basics. Our numeral is Latin, too. And as far as I know, the common trait to Albanian is the way we speak is the same we write. Is that relevant, too? The Union is strange too: Greek, Slavik, Albanian, Romanian?! Other than a geographical position and two or so important common features or coincidental traits in between (religion, WYSIWYG, some borrowings), what would be the major linguistic argument?



Sorry, you are mixing up things. Religion (what's WYSIWYG?) is a cultural thing and we are discussing languages.
The "sprachbund" phenomenon is really a strange thing. The geographical proximity is there for something. Basically it means that, due to extensive linguistic contact for a long time (centuries, more than thousand years, I'd say), languages from different families acquire many common features. That doesn't make them a real family (after all, Greek & Albanian have no close relatives), but they grow closer in several aspects, like... flatmates or sorts of. That's what the whole "sprachbund" thing is about.


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## ahvalj

Well, the discussion has predictably downgraded to a patriotic defense of the essentially Latin character of the Romanian language by a Romanian speaker.


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## Angelo di fuoco

irinet said:


> Ok, you will be referring to colloquialisms which is difficult to me.
> If you consider '*love*' a counter-argument, let see then if "*amor*" or "litera" is as important, or 'luna' as a celestial corpus, or "frate' - 'fraternitate', 'Danubius', 'mater/nitate", etc. My core vocabulary is not Slavic, that's for sure. I only say that, the Chirilik or, how it is spelled, alphabet could be as well my alphabet.
> Going back to my foremother language, which is Latin, this would mean that such a powerful 'imperiu' - "emporium" like the Roman one had a weak linguistic influence. It cannot be!
> Is English nowadays lingua franca because the British Empire was ...?
> 
> Though I know I am caught in the middle here again, I am ready to fight for my Latin origins! So, shoot me, comrades! By the way, isn't 'comrade' a Slavik word (or perhaps German), too? Whoops!



You know, Russian has two words for the moon: one is Slavic, exactly the same as "month", the other is from Latin (with shifted stress).
Comrade is a Hispanism.
Do you really use "amor" more often than "dragoste"?

I mean, nobody here is disputing the Latin origins of Romanian. It's just that some Romanians here are apparently afraid or ashamed of the Slavic component of Romanian as if it were something bad and are constantly trying to play it down.


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## Angelo di fuoco

ahvalj said:


> Well, the discussion has predictably downgraded to a patriotic defense of the essentially Latin character of the Romanian language by a Romanian speaker.



Two of them...


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## irinet

Nice! The thread is about degrees to certainty whether Romanian is lesser or least related to Latin! What am I supposed to say?! 
I'd say the truth. The manner I say it do not need bother anyone. I am a polite traco-geto-daco - roman patriot. 
I am deeply sorry I cannot be Slavik nor German, nor Turkish, nor Austrian! If I could be 3 of them at least, I'd freely travel in Schengen.


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## ahvalj

Angelo di fuoco said:


> You know, Russian has two words for the moon: one is Slavic, exactly the same as "month", the other is from Latin (with shifted stress)


_Луна_ is inherited: both the Slavic and the Latin words originate from *_lowksnā_.


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## ahvalj

irinet said:


> Nice! The thread is about degrees to certainty whether Romanian is lesser or least related to Latin! What am I supposed to say?!
> I'd say the truth. The manner I say it do not need bother anyone. I am a polite Roman patriot.


Well, the question was which Romance language is the most derived. Phonetically we seem to have agreed, it is the spoken French, now we have to find the winner in three other categories: morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Any suggestions from a Romanian patriot?


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## killerbee256

ahvalj said:


> Well, the question was which Romance language is the most derived. Phonetically we seem to have agreed, it is the spoken French, now we have to find the winner in three other categories: morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Any suggestions from a Romanian patriot?


 Romanian and Romanish both have massive influence from other language families; Slavic and German respectively, either might qualify as most divergent in those categories.


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## Angelo di fuoco

irinet said:


> Nice! The thread is about degrees to certainty whether Romanian is lesser or least related to Latin! What am I supposed to say?!
> I'd say the truth. The manner I say it do not need bother anyone. I am a polite traco-geto-daco - roman patriot.
> I am deeply sorry I cannot be Slavik nor German, nor Turkish, nor Austrian! If I could be 3 of them at least, I'd freely travel in Schengen.



Once again, getting emotional with no reason and completely missing the topic.
Once for all: nobody seriously wants to dispute the Latin core of Romanian. However, the Daco-Geto-Thracian components of Romanian combined avail to less than the Old Slavic component alone. That's the truth acknowledged by Romanian linguists. Hard facts. And I'm not speaking about the ethnogenese of the Romanian nation because here the composition most probably would look completely different.

And if this may comfort you:
The Italian linguist Mario Pei made a comparative study to determine the degree of evolution of the principal Romance languages (1949). According to his results, Romanian was neither the "closest" nor the most "distant" "relative". In his classification, based on several criteria, French was the farthest away (44 %), followed by Portuguese (31%). On the other end, you have Sardinian (8 %), followed by Italian (12 %). I think phonology was one of the most important or "weighty" criteria in Pei's classification, since, in terms of grammar, Portuguese is one of the most conservative Romance languages, and Sardinian hasn't even preserved the simple past of Latin.


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## Angelo di fuoco

ahvalj said:


> _Луна_ is inherited: both the Slavic and the Latin words originate from *_lowksnā_.



Oh, thanks! Interesting to know.


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## irinet

Angelo, as usual, upsets me. I didn't sleep all night. So, since I did not like the way he always tries to send me to corner, I will intervene later! I don't understand your arguments a bit!!! I said the numerl is Latin and you start counting from 19...?! As I knew it, it's 1, 2, 3 , the BASICS, the CORE!
For you to know AMOR is a much lovable word than the empty "iubire". It comprises EVERYTHING: the passion, the soul, the sin and the profoundedness of this feeling! But you don't speak my language. You only learnt about it. You are as cold as "frig" and as "loquace" as me! "Maică" is no longer used but "fiu" is! What, you sent me a book?!
Emporium and imperium were confused on the 'anticipation' ! Bye the way, we still use "coloquial" in my language. Latin is a vivid language that has passionate orators who cannot be silentio nor calm. So, 45,56 % my Latin words. I won! I want a candy.


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## Angelo di fuoco

No, I don't speak your language (would be nice, but there are neither opportunities nor major stimuli right at the moment), but I even translated a short excerpt of an Eminescu poem (not real translation - just the main ideas).
 By the way, first you compatriot Caktus kept *me* up, and then came you to replace him: change of shift. I'm alone against you two.

You know, you throw in random words - so and so - and make weird conjectures. Poetic vocabulary is fine (I adore poetic language), but let's stick to the facts, however unpleasant they may be. And here I am more of a linguist than of a patriot and discuss rather rationally. So therefore I may seem cold to you... and some topics cannot be covered with just a few words.


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## irinet

Angelo, that was the prize for the most beautiful word in this world: to move to the world of Poesis!
Eminescu is sublim! I adore him and his poetry. Again Romance but different though.


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## Angelo di fuoco

The Catalan Josep Carner is my favourite poet right now: warm, affectionate, rather positive, laconic & to the point.


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## Caktus

Angelo di fuoco said:


> If you ask me for examples (although I never stated that the Slavic component was "really striking in morphology" - only in vocabulary), I need to do little but point you at the Wiki article linked by Nino83, since it cites several ones. While I can't confirm or refute the numbers and the historical facts, from my point of view I can say almost all of the purely linguistical stuff (vocabulary, morphology, phonology) is quite solid.


 
The wikipedia article that everybody can read, contains 5 references. The first one contains 2 paragraphs about the Slavic influence on Romanian, which are correct. The links to the 2nd and 3rd sources do not work. These sources (one of them a newspaper article) are supposed to be about the Romanian Greek Catholic Church! The 4th reference is about the 1930 census (no linguistic reference). The 5th link gets you to a page where it states, without any proof or other comments, the percentage of Slavic and Latin words in Romanian. Are these solid sources for a wikipedia article?



Angelo di fuoco said:


> My additions would be the future with "a voi" (found in other languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, but not in any other main Romance language I know: the standard future found in every other Romance language stems from the Vulgar Latin construction "infinitive + present of _habeo_"; Latin has completely different morphology for the future tenses)


 
In Romanian the standard future tense has the following components: “present of voi (<lat. volo)”+infinitive. This construction is as unrelated/related to the Latin indicative future as are the constructions found in the other Romance Languages.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> … many scholars are inclined to give the Balkan Sprachbund some credit for the preservation of the case system in Romanian, lost in all the other Romance languages. In morphology, I'd say they forgot the suffix -nic and the corresponding female form.
> 
> If we speak about vocabulary in "colloquial" language, the simplest thing would be to check the Swadesh list for Romanian (of course, that would be only a starting point, since the Swadesh list is too short).


The case system (nouns, adjectives, pronouns) is something that makes Romanian more related to Latin than the other Romance languages. Why was it kept in Romanian, but also in old French, I don’t know!
The Swadesh list for Romanian contains only a few words the have Slavic origin (some also have synonyms inherited from Latin).
The –nic suffix in Romanian is not a productive one in contemporary Romanian, but there are suffixes the have a Slavic origin that are (ex. -iţă).



Angelo di fuoco said:


> The word for "mother" (maică) is Slavic. The word for "daughter" combines a Latin root with a Slavic ending. The very word for "relatives" is Slavic. The word for "bride" (nevastă) is Slavic.


 
The word for mother in Romanian in “mamă”. The word maică is mostly a religious term. The word for daughter contains a suffix that many linguists consider to be of Latin origin. The word for “bride” is “mireasă”. “Nevastă” means wife and it has a synonym inherited from Latin: “soţie”.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Caktus said:


> The wikipedia article that everybody can read, contains 5 references. The first one contains 2 paragraphs about the Slavic influence on Romanian, which are correct. The links to the 2nd and 3rd sources do not work. These sources (one of them a newspaper article) are supposed to be about the Romanian Greek Catholic Church! The 4th reference is about the 1930 census (no linguistic reference). The 5th link gets you to a page where it states, without any proof or other comments, the percentage of Slavic and Latin words in Romanian. Are these solid sources for a wikipedia article?


 
I didn't go over the sources (I don't do that for every article). I wasn't discussing the number or the historical facts, but the linguistic stuff. That seems quite OK to me.



Caktus said:


> In Romanian the standard future tense has the following components: “present of voi (<lat. volo)”+infinitive. This construction is as unrelated/related to the Latin indicative future as are the constructions found in the other Romance Languages.


 
The fact is: this construction is found in almost all languages of the Balkan sprachbund. Would be interesting to know which language developed it first.



Caktus said:


> The case system (nouns, adjectives, pronouns) is something that makes Romanian more related to Latin than the other Romance languages. Why was it kept in Romanian, but also in old French, I don’t know!
> The Swadesh list for Romanian contains only a few words the have Slavic origin (some also have synonyms inherited from Latin).
> The –nic suffix in Romanian is not a productive one in contemporary Romanian, but there are suffixes the have a Slavic origin that are (ex. -iţă).


 
Well, in French the case system agonised for a longer time than in the other Mediterranean Romance languages, that's all.
Once again, the Romanian case system shares some features with the other Balkan sprachbund languages.
The paper I cited above gives another percentage from a larger number of words (about 2500).
 The suffix isn't productive, OK, but it was productive for some time, wasn't it?



Caktus said:


> The word for mother in Romanian in “mamă”. The word maică is mostly a religious term. The word for daughter contains a suffix that many linguists consider to be of Latin origin. The word for “bride” is “mireasă”. “Nevastă” means wife and it has a synonym inherited from Latin: “soţie”.



Sources for the Latin origins of the suffix, please.
In theory, besides the Arabic "ataúd", Spanish has the Latin "féretro" for "coffin" (as do Portuguese & Catalan, with minor differences in the exact forms). However, the Latin word is very infrequent. How is this in Romanian with "nevastă” & “soţie”?


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## irinet

It is from "socius" which is 'partner, relative ally' or even in business it gives 'asociat'- "pro socio" = business partners. You know it from Italian as well 'soccio'. The Romanian derivatives are: 'însoți' + the suffixes '_-re_' -'însotire',  or + _'-e_' - 'soție'.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Irinet, if I need an etymological explanation, I'll ask. The etymology of "soţie” is obvious enough. What I was asking is: which word is used more frequently - "nevastă” or “soţie”


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## irinet

Pardonais moi, I did not understand that, and I did not write for you only.
Both are extremely frequent. I'd say that 'soție' is academic while 'nevastă' is common.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Well, thanks.


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## irinet

As you all may know, while the Romance languages subdivise to the Proto-Indo-European language and they belong to the branch of Centum languages, the Slavik is a component of the ancient Proto-Slavik, and is a Balkan language as said here. Hence, the linguistic borrowings (nor varied shifts) from one branch to another (Centum to Satem to other) do not make us Balkans. We still keep up with our family. To this point, a bigger or lesser percentage of linguistic changes, which can be constantly debatable due to either insufficient proofs or false evidence, on any level be it phonetical, morphological, etc., do no exclude the historical links nor could minimise the status quo of my language.


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## killerbee256

irinet said:


> While the Romance languages subdivise to the Proto-Indo-European language and they belong to the branch of Centum languages, the Slavik is a component of the ancient Proto-Slavik, and is a Balkan language as said here. The linguistic borrowings (nor varied shifts) from one branch to another (Centum to Satem to other) do not make us Balkans. We still keep up with our family. A bigger or lesser percentage of linguistic changes, which can be constantly debatable due to either insufficient proofs or false evidence, on any level be it phonetical, morphological, etc., do no exclude the historical links nor could minimise the status quo of my language.


I think he was refering to the Balkan sprachbund. I do see your point as Italians say they can still understand spoken Romanian to a degree. Which isn't the case with say, English and German.


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## irinet

The Balkans was an example, but it could also be other indeed. And BHW, I suppose that the list of the countries speaking Romance languages should include the Republic of Moldova, too.
Thank you for the input. To me English and German are as different as salt and sugar, black and white though they are both related to Satem. Is German to English like Latin is to the Romance languages?


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## bearded

Hello irinet
Some replies and one question:
No, German to English is not like Latin to Romance languages.  Both German and English are 'branches' deriving from an ancient Common Germanic Language (which is unfortunately not documented as Latin is), so they are cognate languages. The main difference - apart from a somewhat diverging evolution - is the presence of a great many words of Latin/Old French words in the English language , due to invasions that the British Isles went through.  There is however a basic common vocabulary between English and German (sun/Sonne, moon/Mond, father/Vater, seven/sieben...).
As concerns Romanian, I would say that the initial question (language least related to Latin) cannot receive a simple reply, since some of the Romance languages have preserved some features of Latin well (vocabulary, phonetics), while others show a remarkable presence of Latin characteristics (some declensions, verbal tenses etc.).  It is admirable (and...moving) to see how Romanian was able to retain its Latin core in spite of being isolated and far away from its sister languages, and surrounded by Slavic-speaking people. It is a wonder that it was not completely submerged...
And now my question:  can you please let us know something more about the differences between Romanian and Moldavian, e.g. is it just accent or also morphology, grammar...? Thank you in advance.  

EDIT Re your post #55
In Italian, it is _socio_ (with one c), and for ''asociat'' we have _associato._


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## killerbee256

irinet said:


> The Balkans was an example, but it could also be other indeed. And BHW, I suppose that the list of the countries speaking Romance languages should include the Republic of Moldova, too.
> Thank you for the input. To me English and German are as different as salt and sugar, black and white though they are both related to Satem. Is German to English like Latin is to the Romance languages?


I used English as an example because like Romanian it was cut off from it's related languages and then latter heavenly influence by another language family, though German has large amounts of Latin and romance loans if not to the degree of English. I think Moldavian is clearly a Romanian dialect, it's Aromanian that's the real sticky issue.


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## Angelo di fuoco

killerbee256 said:


> I used English as an example because like Romanian it was cut off from it's related languages and then latter heavenly influence by another language family, though German has large amount of Latin and romance loans if not to the degree of English.



German even borrowed some very basic words like "Fenster" (window) from Latin...


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## irinet

killerbee256 said:


> I used English as an example because like Romanian it was cut off from it's related languages and then latter heavenly influence by another language family, though German has large amounts of Latin and romance loans if not to the degree of English. I think Moldavian is clearly a Romanian dialect, it's Aromanian that's the real sticky issue.



You are right about Ar(o)manian. It is fuzzy! As far as I know, this group belongs to the _Macedoneean_ - Romanian group or 'armâni' or the vulgar 'machedoni' as we say in my country (the famous Romanian footballer, *Gigi Hagi*, is an *Armân*). They are even constituted as a minority group in my country. So?! There are also two more old dialects like, _Megleno_ and _Istro-Romanian_. I'd say that _these dialects are languages _at the same time. I will come to explain later about the word 'A(prefix) -romanian'. This prefix could have a spatial meaning or a possessive hint. Though there are similarities to be found to Romanian, I could not understand an Armân text (*ts*ărapă (Ar.) = *ci*orapi (Rom.) = socks) unless I knew the characteristics of this old dialect.  This does not happen to the Moldavian, which is a Romanian dialect and not a distinct language spoken by some (not many) milions of people.


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## berndf

*Moderator note: Side discussion about the status of Moldavian in relation to Romanian moved here.*


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## killerbee256

It would seem that Romanians are descended from those Latin speakers who lived out side the Eastern Empire and Aromanains those who stayed with the boarders of the empire.


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## Nino83

Some notation. 

Romanian declension system is quite different from the Latin one: 
1) only determiners (except s. f. G-D case = pl. f. N-A case) have case inflections: un băiat frumos, un*ui* băiat frumos (puer pulcher, pueri pulchri, puero pulchro, puerum pulchrum), băiatul frumos, băiatul*ui* frumos (ille, illius, illi, illum...)
2) singular genitive/dative case of feminine nouns is equal to the plural nominative/accusative one: unei frumoas*e* fate (puellae pulchrae, puellas pulchras), so also the adjective is plural. The difference is clear with the nouns of the third declension: o pac*e*, unui păc*i* (pacī, dative singular, is different from paces, nominative plural, in Latin). 
3) with masculine proper names, there is Marcel (nominative/accusative) and *lui* Marcel (genitive/dative), while constructions like de Paulo, ad Paulum (later de/ad Paulo) were normal in Latin. 

The prepositional genitive and dative cases began to be replaced with de + ablative and ad + accusative in the second century BC. 

So, it's not automatic that the existence of a simplified and different case system makes Romanian closer to Latin, grammatically speaking. 

About vocaulary, I've not only quoted an article of wikipedia but I've also written a list of conjunctions which are very different in Romanian. 

@Angelo: I don't understand spoken Romanian (I get some word here and there). Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are, by far, easier to understand, in my opinion. If someone would like to give it a try, http://www.tvrplus.ro/live-tvr-international


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## killerbee256

Nino83 said:


> @Angelo: I don't understand spoken Romanian (I get some word here and there). Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are, by far, easier to understand, in my opinion. If someone would like to give it a try, http://www.tvrplus.ro/live-tvr-international


I got about 45% just enough to have some vague idea what they were saying, but to little to actually understand. The interview I was saw was very technical so there were many modern neologisms.


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## francisgranada

I have some very, very little (almost none) knowledge about Romanian and I know some Slavic and Romance languages, but I could very hardly understand anything from the spoken text in the given link; rather separate words (including those international ones), than full phrases. 

For curiosity: I was once, many times ago in Romania and I tried to comunicate in "Romanian" with the owners of the house we were ubicated during our about 2 week holidays, near Constanta. My "improvised Romanian", sometimes using a little pocket dictionary, was something like this: "Buna ziua. Din centrul orašului am cumparat un chilo de piine ši un litru de lapte ši acest melonul care este foarte bun. Dupa, cu meu priatenul avem probat un pahar braghei, numai nu a placut pe noi. Plajele Romaniei ši fatele romanešte sint foarte frumoase. Etc..."  The result was a big fun for the house owners, we were laughing a lot . But we could _really _communicate in a certain low degree when speaking to each other, without practically any knowledge of the Romanian language from my part.


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## irinet

Nice, I could understand your text, Francisgranada, and while reading it, I even thought that you knew Romanian a bit!
I wouldn't be able to talk/write Hungarian. Though I may try as you did. I wonder if this would work for me as it worked for you?


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## francisgranada

irinet said:


> ... I even thought that you knew Romanian a bit! ...


In fact I don'know, except of some very basic words and some idea about the grammar and phonetics. In those times this was the result of my interest towards the languages. When being in Romania (2 or 3 times) I noticed the inscriptions on the streets, shops etc. and listened to people. Many of the words were easily understandable for me in the given context (piine, lapte, apa, iarba, foarte, ši, din, pentru  ...) the others could be "guessed" and even remembered (dupa - It. dopo, prieten - Sl. priateľ, pahar - H. pohár, -lui - It. lui, frumoas - It. formoso, cumparat-It. comperato, etc.). Of course, I often invented non existent words, as well ...


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## irinet

To *Bearded man*: "And now my question:  can you please let us know something more about the differences between Romanian and Moldavian, e.g. is it just accent or also morphology, grammar...? Thank you in advance".  

EDIT Re your post #55
In Italian, it is _socio_ (with one c), and for ''asociat'' we have _associato._[/QUOTE]

Hi
I  don't know to be so many. For example, the Romanian future "voi face" (= I shall do) is different from the dialectal Moldovan "am să fac / oi face". This is what I still use while speaking, but not writing.


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## bearded

Thank you for your reply, irinet.


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## Bostan

irinet said:


> Our alphabet is a Latin alphabet, too. Bye the way, "mileniu" (Romanian) is the Latin word you used before, "millenium", which English also use. We also have "secol" from "saeculum", 'luna' from "lunae", "pecuniar", "pluvial", "mane", "Jovis" - 'Joi', "est", "sunt", and so many more.


Actually the Latin alphabet in Romania was introduced in the 19th century.  And the word "secol", for instance, is younger than "veac" (century).
Nobody tries to maximize Slavic influence over Romanian, it's just that Romanians have to deal with the fact, that their language does have a little bit of Slavic influence, that's all.


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## irinet

Nobody says otherwise. The Latin alphabet was officially introduced in The Romanian Lands by Al. I. Cuza,  a great leader at that time. However,  there had been attempts  attested for using this alphabet
 in the XVI th,  XVIIIth centuries,  too. 
As for the difference between 'veac'  and 'secol',  I would think logically that 'secol' was used by the literate groups so,  it seems to have been used more in writing.


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## irinet

I would like to listen that channel if you try to provide another link.  I cannot access this one,  unfortunately. Also,  I suspect that it's about not standard Romanian,  too,  by seeing Cluj TVR.


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## irinet

Testing1234567 said:


> Personally I don't know so many Romance languages. But for fun, I would like to start a discussion on the romance language least related to Latin.
> 
> I'm going for Romanian.



I wonder,  when you bet on my language as it is the least related to Latin,  if you are considering in your question the percentage in number like,  50% for Spanish and 45% for Portuguese (and I would add to that that so large populations on the move needed so many words like 'sermo vulgaris' .) , or a percentage in purity, like the 24 k gold?
If my country was isolated from Latin  and its linguistic developments because of the geographical position,  I'd advise than to seek for pure Latin words in my language,  and I bet that hundreds of them will shine like gold.
I also believe that we are talking here from bottom to the upper,  don't we?!  So, my language foundation is Latin,  while the rest is vicinity or superstrata of passing-by 'tourists', searching for fun,  too.


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## irinet

Nino83 said:


> Some notation.
> 
> Romanian declension system is quite different from the Latin one:
> 1) only determiners (except s. f. G-D case = pl. f. N-A case) have case inflections: un băiat frumos, un*ui* băiat frumos (puer pulcher, pueri pulchri, puero pulchro, puerum pulchrum), băiatul frumos, băiatul*ui* frumos (ille, illius, illi, illum...)
> 2) singular genitive/dative case of feminine nouns is equal to the plural nominative/accusative one: unei frumoas*e* fate (puellae pulchrae, puellas pulchras), so also the adjective is plural. The difference is clear with the nouns of the third declension: o pac*e*, unui păc*i* (pacī, dative singular, is different from paces, nominative plural, in Latin).
> 3) with masculine proper names, there is Marcel (nominative/accusative) and *lui* Marcel (genitive/dative), while constructions like de Paulo, ad Paulum (later de/ad Paulo) were normal in Latin.
> 
> The prepositional genitive and dative cases began to be replaced with de + ablative and ad + accusative in the second century BC.
> 
> So, it's not automatic that the existence of a simplified and different case system makes Romanian closer to Latin, grammatically speaking.
> 
> About vocaulary, I've not only quoted an article of wikipedia but I've also written a list of conjunctions which are very different in Romanian.
> 
> @Angelo: I don't understand spoken Romanian (I get some word here and there). Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are, by far, easier to understand, in my opinion. If someone would like to give it a try, http://www.tvrplus.ro/live-tvr-international



1.The prepositional dative "contra"  exists in Romanian, too. 
2. We still have the participial "absentat". 
3. Vocabulary list: "flamă", "fisură", "flagel", "incomod", "lacrimă" (tears), "lax" (large), "opulent" (fat/rich), "opta" [group I ('opto' I - choose)] ,  "remediu" (treatment), so many  etc.
4.Not only determiners have case inflections : N sg. /pl.  - 'casă/e' ; G-D -  'casei/caselor'.  Pronouns: N. - "care" ; G-D - "căruia"   or N -  'cine/ce' ; D - cui; Acc - pe/despre care, etc. 
5. We preserved the neuter gender. 
Kindly ask about my language.


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## Nino83

Salut, irinet. 
It's clear that Romanian is Romance. The fact is that differently from other Romance languages, whose vocabulary is 95% (or more) of Latin origin, Romanian has a lower percentage (70-80%) so there are (mostly Slavic) words which can't be understood by Italians, Frenchmen, Spanish, Portugues, Catalans, Galicians and so on. 
Yes, you're right that also nouns have case inflection but when there is an attributive adjective or a determiner, the noun is not inflected for case.


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## fdb

Nino83 said:


> The fact is that differently from other Romance languages, whose vocabulary is 95% (or more) of Latin origin, Romanian has a lower percentage (70-80%)



It depends on how you count the words (lexicon based, or frequency weighted), but let us take these percentages as roughly correct. The problem here is that the Romance languages of Western Europe (French, Italian, Spanish etc.) have, besides the vocabulary inherited from Vulgar Latin, a very large number of words borrowed from the written Latin of the Catholic Church. And then there are the borrowings between the Romance languages (Provencal to French, Italian to French, French to Italian etc., etc.). The Romanians belong to the Orthodox Church; their Church language was not Latin but Church Slavonic, though in very recent times (since the 19th century) Romanian has borrowed a lot of words from written French. So, if you really want to measure the amount of inherited Latin vocabulary in any given Romance language you need to discount these “cultisms”. From this perspective I am not sure that the amount of inherited Latin vocabulary in Romanian is significantly lower than in other languages.


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## Hulalessar

fdb said:


> It depends on how you count the words...



And on who is doing the counting. If you want to emphasise the Slavic element you will include all the rare Slavic words; if you want to play it down you will leave them out.

What would tell us more about the true situation is statistics for different situations. It will show if there is a different percentage in say, an economic report, a discussion about how well Steaua Bucharest played last night and a novel set in a farming community. Are regional and/or social class differences significant?


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## irinet

Hulalessar said:


> And on who is doing the counting. If you want to emphasise the Slavic element you will include all the rare Slavic words; if you want to play it down you will leave them out.
> 
> What would tell us more about the true situation is statistics for different situations. It will show if there is a different percentage in say, an economic report, a discussion about how well *Steaua Bucharest* played last night and a novel set in a farming community. Are regional and/or social class differences significant?


 
Oh,  oh,  I loved that!
I was talking about the percentages of Vulgar Latin,  the borrowed  ones from written Latin are much less,  and I didn't count the adstrata,  as I said. 
The statistics offered is not meant to minimise the Slavik element which belongs to the superstratum,  and I was not referring to that,  and which came long after Latinisation.


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## irinet

Salut, Nino, 

Yes,  they are: "băieților mei"  - dative.  It's the position that influences the inflection : "alor mei băieți"  - dative. So,  not the entire nominal structure is inflected for the case.  There are instances when the entire group is formally inflected,  though: "fetelor acelora" -  dative.


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## Nino83

irinet said:


> It's the position that influences the inflection



Sure, you're right, I forgot it. 



fdb said:


> The problem here is that the Romance languages of Western Europe (French, Italian, Spanish etc.) have, besides the vocabulary inherited from Vulgar Latin, a very large number of words borrowed from the written Latin of the Catholic Church.



I don't know what is this percentage. 
What I find is that it's easy for me to understand 85-90% (without studying, I started studying Spanish and Portuguese this year, so this percentage is what I was understainding one year ago) of a television news in Spanish or Portuguese. It doesn't happen with Romanian.


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## francisgranada

Romanian vs. other Romance languages - my personal experience/impression: 

I can surely understand better texts written e.g. in Catalan, Sardinian, Asturian, Galician, Extremeño, Romanesco or  Sicilian (i.e. Romance languages that I do not speak at all) than written texts in Romanian, inspite of my knowledge of some Slavic languages. 

I think this is also due to the different meaning/usage of some words (even if of Latin origin) in some cases. Exemples from the Lord's Prayer: _pământ,  împărăția, rău. _These words are of Latin origin, but in the Latin and other Romance versions of the Prayer we find different words, namely _terra, regnum, malus_ (or derived from these). But neither the word _ispită_ suggests (at least to me) clearly the idea of _temptation, _even if I can easily recognize it's Slavic origin.


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## irinet

Yes,  words like 'mir', 'bogdaproste ',' ispită ' came from the liturgical area,  which clearly belong to the OSC. While' gospodar' came from OS.

As a side, about the abbreviated forms,  Rom.  < Romanian ; Rum. < Rumâ/în (older) .


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## Angelo di fuoco

francisgranada said:


> Romanian vs. other Romance languages - my personal experience/impression:
> 
> I can surely understand better texts written e.g. in Catalan, Sardinian, Asturian, Galician, Extremeño, Romanesco or  Sicilian (i.e. Romance languages that I do not speak at all) than written texts in Romanian, inspite of my knowledge of some Slavic languages.
> 
> I think this is not only because of the non-Romance origin of some words and the ignorance of the peculiarities of the Romanian grammar from my side, but it’s also due to the different meaning/usage of some words (even if of Latin origin) in some cases. Exemples from the Lord's Prayer: _pământ,  împărăția, rău. _These words are of Latin origin, but in the Latin and other Romance versions of the Prayer we find different words, namely _terra, regnum, malus_ (or derived from these). But neither the word _ispită_ suggests (at least to me) the idea of _temptation, _even if I can easily recognize it's Slavic origin.



I can very well see the idea of temptation in _is/pită_: asking, questioning, trying & trial /tempting & temptation, attempt (hence the word _tentative_), even torturing (yes, torturing and questioning were once very well related - even today, in some areas & places). Just remove the prefix.
_pământ_ - look at the English pavement and Italian pavimento, French rue pavée. However, one needs to know what it means to recognise the connection.
As for_ împărăția _&_ rău_, my imagination doesn't suggest me anything.

As I stated in some deleted post, the lack of contact with other Romance languages is one of the reasons Romanian developed in a completely different way. After all, Romanian isn't the only Romance language where the meaning of Latin words shifted to something different. And, of course, there's the mutation of some vowels & consonant groups that makes it difficult to establish the right connections and to guess the meaning.


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## DarkChild

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I can very well see the idea of temptation in _is/pită_: asking, questioning, trying & trial /tempting & temptation, attempt (hence the word _tentative_), even torturing (yes, torturing and questioning were once very well related - even today, in some areas & places). Just remove the prefix.
> _pământ_ - look at the English pavement and Italian pavimento, French rue pavée. However, one needs to know what it means to recognise the connection.
> As for_ împărăția _&_ rău_, my imagination doesn't suggest me anything.
> 
> As I stated in some deleted post, the lack of contact with other Romance languages is one of the reasons Romanian developed in a completely different way. After all, Romanian isn't the only Romance language where the meaning of Latin words shifted to something different. And, of course, there's the mutation of some vowels & consonant groups that makes it difficult to establish the right connections and to guess the meaning.


_împărăția _reminds me of imparare in Italian, to learn.


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## DarkChild

Hulalessar said:


> And on who is doing the counting. If you want to emphasise the Slavic element you will include all the rare Slavic words; if you want to play it down you will leave them out.
> 
> What would tell us more about the true situation is statistics for different situations. It will show if there is a different percentage in say, an economic report, a discussion about how well Steaua Bucharest played last night and a novel set in a farming community. Are regional and/or social class differences significant?



I don't think "time", "love", "goal", "ill", "rich", "dear" for example are rare words.


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## Angelo di fuoco

DarkChild said:


> _împărăția _reminds me of imparare in Italian, to learn.



True, but I'd rather go for the Latin verb impero.


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## francisgranada

According to dexonline.ro:
_
ÎMPĂRÁT_, s. m. (Absolute) sovreign of an empire ... – Lat. imperator. 
_Î__mpărăție_ derives from the previous (_Î__mpărăt + -ie)_ and means empire, country governed by an emperor, etc.


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## irinet

francisgranada said:


> According to dexonline.ro:
> _
> ÎMPĂRÁT_, s. m. (Absolute) sovreign of an empire ... – Lat. imperator.
> _Î__mpărăție_ derives from the previous (_Î__mpărăt + -ie)_ and means empire, country governed by an emperor, etc.



1. As I previously mentioned in a post deleted and unrecovered,  "împărăție"  comes from 'impero, imperare', 'imperator'.  
2. I looked up for 'rău', and,  beside the already known Latin word 'reus'  ('accused/guilty') which may be a source variant that gave the it. 'rio', the Spanish &  the Portuguese  'reo' ,  there may also be the Albanese word 'rrung' <PIE 'urong' > En. 'wrong'. 
3. from the  Sanskrit  'ras,  raya'  or Avestica 'rayo',  which meaning was 'unproductive'  (land), 'imoral'.  If that were so,  'rău'  would be a Thracian word. 
["Romanian Dictionary of Etymology ", M. Vinereanu,   p. 701, 2009, Bucharest]


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## killerbee256

irinet said:


> ...from the  Sanskrit  'ras,  raya'  or Avestica 'rayo',  which meaning was 'unproductive'  (land), 'imoral'.  If that were so,  'rău'  would be a Thracian word.
> ["Romanian Dictionary of Etymology ", M. Vinereanu,   p. 701, 2009, Bucharest]


 Could it be a loanword from Alan?


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## buffalo66

A close counsel of late Pope John Paul II and one of the few researchers to have access and study the huge Vatican library, has come to the conclusion that rather than Romanian being a romance language, in actuality high latin was a language derived from the early language of our ancestors, the Dacians. That should settle the debate. Follow the link for an article (in Romanian) and the video interview (in English, subtitled).

Of course, nobody in their right mind would (or should) challenge the fact that Romanian borrowed a lot from slavic languages, especially Russian. It would have been impossible otherwise. We share not only a border, but also a two millennia close collaboration and friendship through our common liturgical heritage (Orthodoxy). Through this stream of cultural exchange, that was quite pronounced back in the day, we had both Greek and Phanar influences (a lot of abbots -- egumen/staretz --  back in the day were from the Ecumenical Patriarchate). Moreover, for centuries, I think even after Romania established its own autocefalous Church and Patriarchate, the liturgical language was still Church Slavonic. So, there's no question that the language has been infused with Slavic vocabulary.

By the way, I just came from a mass with a visiting Russian archbishop, mass that was served in three languages: Romanian, Russian and Greek. And, what do you know, I understood many snippets of what the Russian clerics were saying (of course, it's easier when you know anyways what it's said) and they understood snippets of what we were. Not so surprising.


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## buffalo66

It seems I'm not allowed to post links, because I am a new member. They should have put a way to work around this, or just limit the number of posts with links or whatever. I'll try again. Just put the tags yourselves.

obiectiv.info _[slash]_ se-zguduie-istoria-romanilor-teoria-care-schimba-radical-tot-ce-stiam-pana-acum-venita-direct-de-la-vatican_55799 _[dot html tag]_


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## guihenning

Interesting thread! But too little was discussed about other romance languages, I see people mostly arguing about Romanian borrowing or not many Slavic words
I'm lusophone and I feel Portuguese still being quite close to Latin (especially lexicon), despite numbers and percentages attesting PT is quite far from Latin Lang.


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## Penyafort

ahvalj said:


> Also remarkable is that the Ibero-Romance language closest to Occitan is Catalan, which arose on the Iberian, non-Celtic and non-Indo-European substrate.



Considering Catalan an Ibero-Romance language is, at the very least, risky. Specially if you don't consider Occitan an Ibero-Romance language too.

The fact that the present distribution of Catalan spreads along the ancient Iberian language territory does not necessarily mean that it was its main substrate. The eastern shore of Catalonia was a very Romanized territory, and by the time the onset of the Romance languages took place, Iberian-speaking survivors, if there were any left, had most likely either been totally Romanized already or pushed back into less Romanized inland/mountain territory (which, alongside with the old area of Basque language(s), might explain several features of the neighbouring Upper Aragonese, as well as the main distinction between Western Catalan and Eastern Catalan).
---

Anyway, and in order to get back to the main topic, I concur with most opinions about French being the farthest in phonology and Romanian the least related in terms of vocabulary. Regarding grammar, it might not be so obvious, at least when compared to Classical Latin.


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## Hulalessar

Penyafort said:


> Considering Catalan an Ibero-Romance language is, at the very least, risky. Specially if you don't consider Occitan an Ibero-Romance language too.



It is indeed a problem. If there is a continuum between Castillian and Catalan and between French and Occitan there is most decidedly a continuum between Catalan and Occitan with (I think) linguists agreeing that Catalan and Occitan have an immediate common ancestor. That makes the division between Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance look dodgy - which it is. The classification of Romance languages is problematic and no system is entirely satisfactory.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> The classification of Romance languages is problematic and no system is entirely satisfactory.



Yes. It happens also with Gallo-Italian languages. They have vocalic plural but at the same time they are not pro-drop languages, and their vocalic system is almost the same of the French one.


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## Riverplatense

Hulalessar said:


> The classification of Romance languages is problematic and no system is entirely satisfactory.



I don’t think there is any real parameter allowing to make a clear and language-based distinction. For almost every phenomenon you will find exceptions like, as Nino83 mentioned, the vocalic plural in Gallo-Italian languages, sigmatic conjugations in Lucanian or intervocalic sonorisation in southern Italian dialects. On the other hand also the Iberian languages have a lot of common ground with southern Italian’s, even though they belong, if you apply the occitan/oriental distinction, to two different groups.



Penyafort said:


> I concur with most opinions about French being the farthest in phonology and Romanian the least related in terms of vocabulary



So do I. As far as grammar is concerned, I’d go for the Gallo-Romance languages, whose «distance» is also linked to phonological phenomena, of course. But still it depends on the parameters you use.


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> intervocalic sonorisation in southern Italian dialects.



Little correction: intervocalic sonorisation in Roman dialect, where intervocalic p/t/k > b/d/g (from Rome to Sicily there is nd/mb > nn/mm, from Gaeta to Cosenza nt/mp/nk > nd/mb/ng).


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> Little correction: intervocalic sonorisation in Roman dialect, where intervocalic p/t/k > b/d/g (from Rome to Sicily there is nd/mb > nn/mm, from Gaeta to Cosenza nt/mp/nk > nd/mb/ng).



Yes, you are right. I guess I had in mind the lenisation/deltacism/gammacism/betacism of occlusives, like _ma*δ*uru _← MATURU, _io*γ*u _← IOGU etc. But of course it’s not the same thing as the sonorisation of the occidental languages, the more so as in southern Italian dialects there’s also _strata_, _lacu _(← STRATA, LACU vs. standard _strada_, _lago_) and even _petë _← PEDE.


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> _io*γ*u _← IOGU



In Sicilian _iocare_ is _iucari_, in Neapolitan is _iucà_ (they are written _jucari_ and _jucà_ because in Sicilian and Neapolitan orthography "j" represents the semi-consonant [j]).


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> In Sicilian _iocare_ is _iucari_, in Neapolitan is _iucà_.


Of course, yes. Again my mistake. I actually wanted to write _iuγu_ (‹yoke›). *_Ioγu _wouldn’nt make any sense, anyway, because of metaphony (← iógu).


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> I actually wanted to write _iuγu_ (‹yoke›)



Ah, ok. But, at least in Sicilian and Neapolitan languages intervocalic /b, d, g/ are pronounced [b, d, g]. 
I don't know of any Italian language which has intervocalic [β, ð, ɣ] (wikipedia says that they are allophones in some Sardinian accents).


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> I don't know of any Italian language which has intervocalic [β, ð, ɣ]


Well, as far as I know, they exist at least as sandhi phenomena, like in Spanish. _Grossa _→ _na ɣrossa_, _donna _→ _a ðonna_. I also have a text in Laziale, where it’s also written like that. And it would also be a logical base for Neapolitan rhotacism of intervocalic /d/.


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## Nino83

Yes, Neapolitan rhotacism like for /nu dente/ [nu rɛndə] is well known.
In some Sicilian accents (central Sicilian, like Enna, Caltanissetta) there is /bucca/ [vukka] (i.e b (> β) > v, probably [β] was just in regression when Rhols wrote his book in 1966) but not in eastern accents (here we say [bukka], with a /b/). This is valid only for initial /b/.
For initial /g/ we have [j], like in _jattu, jamma_ (gatto, gamba from Latin _cattus, gamba_), but intervocalic is _jucari, lacu. _
The same for /t/, for example _latu_ (from Latin _latus_).

In central and southern Italian accents, intervocalic /b/ is doubled, for example /'abile/ is ['abbile], while in Spanish intervocalic /b/ is pronounced [β].


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> In central and southern Italian accents, intervocalic /b/ is doubled, for example /'abile/ is ['abbile]


Do all of them (generally or by analogy) or just/mainly proparoxytons (_abbile_, _maggica_, _cammera_, _femmina_)?



Nino83 said:


> I don't know of any Italian language which has intervocalic [β, ð, ɣ]


Here they give [-ɣ-] for Calabrian _u *g*addë_ and here for Campanian _a *g*addinë._


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## Nino83

Wow, I didn't know in Calabria there were those accents. Maybe I've only listened to the urban ones. 



Riverplatense said:


> Do all of them (generally or by analogy) or just/mainly proparoxytons (_abbile_, _maggica_, _cammera_, _femmina_)?



Only intervocalic /b, ʤ/ (it doesn't happen in _camera_, while _femmina_ is the standard orthography and pronunciation, _femina_ is not standard).


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> it doesn't happen in _camera_


Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought it depended only on the syllable structure ('KV-KV-KV → 'KV-KːV-KV).



Nino83 said:


> _femina_ is not standard


Yes, but also standard is ~ central Italian and _femmina _← FEMINA († Ital. _femina_).


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## Nino83

Latin "fēmina" became "femmina" also in Tuscan and Standard Italian, and it happened with other consonants in proparoxtyones (like _pubblico, macchina_).
If we're speaking of this evolution, from Vulgar Latin to Italian, it was a peculiar feature of Tuscan (for example, in Sicilian and other Southern langauges, it is _machina_).
If we're speaking about contemporary intervocalic gemination of consonants, in those languages spoken from Rome to Sicily, intervocalic /b, ʤ/ (not only in proparoxytone words) are often geminated also in words that are written and pronounced with a single consonant in Tuscan and Standard Italian.
I thought we're speaking of the second feature.


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> I thought we're speaking of the second feature.


You are right, I mixed up things which don't belong together. Both are spontaneous sound changes in a similar area/an adjoining area with a similar effect. However, the period is not the same. But doesn't this gemination also affect /m/?


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> But doesn't this gemination also affect /m/?



No, neither in accents nor in languages


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## merquiades

I found this study by chance in the Wikipedia article on the Sardinian. I don't think it has been mentioned before and it's full of food for thought.  According to the study Romanian is much closer to Latin than French or even Portuguese or Occitan, and Sardinian is closer than Italian.
A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from the languages' parent (Latin, in the case of Romance Languages) by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary and intonation, indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%.


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## bearded

Very interesting, Merquiades.
But just out of curiosity: among the characteristics compared in that study, you mention intonation.  Now what do we know about intonation of a dead language (Latin) and how can we compare it to that/those of the Romance languages? Besides, due to the width of the area where Latin was spoken, I do not think that there was just one intonation...


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## merquiades

I have been unable to find the full study.  I imagine that researchers have been able to reconstitute Latin intonation.  It had long and short vowels. All pretonic and postonic syllables were pronounced. Also words were accented on the penultimate or antipenultimate syllable.  So I imagine the intonation was very different from Spanish or French as it could not be monotone.  Perhaps closer to Italian.​


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## Nino83

It's difficult to say which language has the most similar intonation by analyzing the syllable structure, because immediately postonic vowels (and sometimes syllables) were dropped in almost all Romance languages, for example: _masculum > masclum > maschio, macho _
In other words, syllabic reduction is extremely similar in Italian (and other Italian languages), Spanish, and to a lesser extent Portuguese (it's true that there is more reduction in French, Occitan, Catalan and Gallo-Italian languages).
I agree with bearded man too. Probably also during the Roman Empire, the Latin spoken in Italy had a less flat tone of that spoken, for example, in Northern France, so I think it's not so correct to include it in the historical evolution.
Probably Romanian has that percentuage thanks to the retention of some case system but it is attested that for Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Catalans, Galicians, is very difficult to understand a text written in Romanian and, seeing that Italian and Sardinian are the most similar to Latin and that for Italians is easier to understand written Portuguese and French than written Romanian, there is something strange in those percentages.
Anyway, I don't think one can make a general rank like that, because it's important how much weight is given to each aspect.


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## merquiades

It would be nice to find the whole report. I'm pretty sure scholars know exactly how the language was spoken.  I have even seen methods to learn to speak classical Latin.  Latin is not my forte though.

If Italians can read French or Portuguese more easily than Romanian, it just speaks about the accessibility of these languages to one another.  I'm pretty sure any Romance speaker is more comfortable with a modern Romance language than classical Latin. All Western Romance languages have developed in a similar direction since Antiquity, have had a common history and have borrowed heavily from one another.  Romanian, cut off from Western Europe, could have conceivably developed differently but at the same time not as much from classical Latin, making it closer to the latter, but also more difficult for other Romance Language speakers who hardly, if ever, come into contact with Romanian.

Italian may have dropped some unstressed vowels in the word examples you have given but in general kept them much more often than the other languages.  Possibilis, possibile, possible /possibl/, posible, posível... Femina, femmina, femme /fam/, hembra, fêmea... Tabula, tavola, table /tabl/, tabla, tábua


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## Hulalessar

Nino83 said:


> Anyway, I don't think one can make a general rank like that, because it's important how much weight is given to each aspect.



Exactly what I was thinking. And, apart from that, what sort of a study was it? A back of an envelope job one afternoon or a conclusion reached after lengthy study? Precise figures like 23.5%? We also do not have any indication of what the figures mean. They cannot surely mean that Sardinian is only 8% different from Latin.


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## merquiades

Hulalessar said:


> Exactly what I was thinking. And, apart from that, what sort of a study was it? A back of an envelope job one afternoon or a conclusion reached after lengthy study? Precise figures like 23.5%? We also do not have any indication of what the figures mean. They cannot surely mean that Sardinian is only 8% different from Latin.


The figures measure the degree of difference from Latin. He pinpointed 77 variables and studied those aspects in each of the languages assigning points or half points when they diverged.  We need to read his book "The History of Latin and the Romance Languages" to see more specifically what were the criteria and how he went about researching. This is a very old study, 1949, so I cannot seem to locate it.  Only the results I gave before seem to be repeated high and wide across the web.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> If Italians can read French or Portuguese more easily than Romanian, it just speaks about the accessibility of these languages to one another.  I'm pretty sure any Romance speaker is more comfortable with a modern Romance language than classical Latin. All Western Romance languages have developed in a similar direction since Antiquity, have had a common history and have borrowed heavily from one another.  Romanian, cut off from Western Europe, could have conceivably developed differently but at the same time not as much from classical Latin, making it closer to the latter, but also more difficult for other Romance Language speakers who hardly, if ever, come into contact with Romanian.



This makes me think that maybe Mario Pei underrated vocabulary and overrated phonetics.
But I think Romanian is not so conservative, for example there is vowel dropping, for example all unstressed /a/ (written /ǎ/) are schwas, like "cas*ǎ* de piatr*ǎ*" [ˈkas*ə* de ˈpjatr*ə*], most words lost final /o/, compare "port" [ˈport] (Romanian) with "porto" [ˈpɔrto] (Italian) [ˈpɔɾtu] (European Portuguese) [ˈpɔhtʊ] (Brazilian Portuguese), "puerto" [pweɾto] (Spanish), which is more similar to the French "port" [pɔʁ] or Catalan and Occitan [ˈpɔɾt].
The same, for example, for "caz" [ˈkaz] (Romanian) vs. "caso" [ˈkaːzo/ˈkaːso] (Italian), [ˈkazu/ˈkazʊ] (Portuguese) [ˈkaso] (Spanish), similar to the French "cas" [ˈka] and Catalan and Occitan [ˈkas].

If Italian and Romanian are much closer to Latin than Portuguese or French, one could expect that there is more mutual intelligibility between Italian and Romanian but it is the opposite (at least in the written form and also in the spoken form for Brazilian Portuguese).
The only explanation is that Romanian retained case inflection and that Mario Pei gave a big importance to this aspect, because if we speak about morphology/phonology, Romanian is not so conservative, factum > fapt, qui > cine (k > ʧ), dignum > demn, gelum > gerul, decem > zece.


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## robbie_SWE

> _Italica: Bulletin of the American Association of Teachers of Italian_. 27–29. Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company. 1950. p. 46. Retrieved November 18, 2013. Pei, Mario A. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification." Word, v, 2 (Aug. 1949), 135–146. Demonstrates a comparative statistical method for determining the extent of change from the Latin for the free and checked accented vowels of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, Old Provençal, and Logudorese Sardinian. By assigning 3½ change points per vowel (with 2 points for diphthongization, 1 point for modification in vowel quantity, ½ point for changes due to nasalization, palatalization or umlaut, and −½ point for failure to effect a normal change), there is a maximum of 77 change points for free and checked stressed vowel sounds (11×2×3½=77). According to this system (illustrated by seven charts at the end of the article), the percentage of change is greatest in French (44%) and least in Italian (12%) and Sardinian (8%). Prof. Pei suggests that this statistical method be extended not only to all other phonological, but also to all morphological and syntactical, phenomena.





> Koutna, Olga (December 31, 1990). "Chapter V. RENAISSANCE: On the History of Classifications in the Romance Language Group". In Niederehe, Hans-Josef; Koerner, E.F.K. _History and Historiography of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24–28 August 1987_. Volume 1: Antiquitity–17th Century. Amsterdam, The Netherlands / Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 294. ISBN 9027278113. Retrieved November 18, 2013. 1.11 In the late forties and in the fifties some new proposals for classification of the Romance languages appeared. A statistical method attempting to evaluate the evidence quantitatively was developed in order to provide not only a classification, but at the same time a measure of the divergence among the languages. The earliest attempt was made in 1949 by Mario Pei (1901–1978), who measured the divergence of seven modern Romance languages from Classical Latin, taking as his criterion the evolution of stressed vowels. Pei's results do not show the degree of contemporary divergence among the languages from each other but only the divergence of each one from Classical Latin. The closest language turned out to be Sardinian with 8% of change. Then followed Italian — 12%; Spanish — 20%; Romanian — 23,5%; Provençal — 25%; Portuguese — 31%; French — 44%.



This kind of explains Pei's methodology - tried finding the study, but I was (also) unsuccessful.


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## Nino83

Thank you, robbie, now it's more clear. 
Those percentages are reasonable for vocalic evolution.


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## Hulalessar

"Taking as his criterion the evolution of stressed vowels" is rather different from "comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary and intonation".


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## merquiades

Pei's full study included all of those aspects as I mentioned two times before.


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## irinet

Nino83 said:


> Romanian retained case


 ... and neuter gender, too. And so did Italian, right?
In point of Phonetics,  as you know, 'l' in between vowels became 'r'  ('palus' > 'par') or 'b' is dropped ('caballus' > 'cal') in  'mia lingua'.

I will understand you if you tell me '_Inno e un canto sacro_' (Rom. 'sacru').


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## Hulalessar

merquiades said:


> Pei's full study included all of those aspects as I mentioned two times before.



The extracts quoted by robbie_SWE both say that his study was restricted to stressed vowels.


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## Nino83

irinet said:


> ... and neuter gender, too. And so did Italian, right?



Only in a few plurals (uovo/uova, dito/dita, braccio/braccia o bracci, osso/ossa o ossi, muro/mura o muri). 
In Italian there are more or less 20 words and this category is improductive but there isn't a neuter gender because it's true that there is a diferent inflection (plural -"a") for 20 nouns but there is not the corresponding inflection for articles and adjectives (which take the feminine plural, for example "il muro alto" but "le mura alte" ("e" feminine plural, "a" neuter plural). 
In Romanian, neuter words don't have a different inflection (they takes the feminine plural "e"), so the existence of the neuter gender in Romanian is debatable. Probably it is said that Romanian has a neuter gender because there are a lot of words with the double gender (masculine singular and feminine plural). 

Some languages with neuter articles are _dialetti mediani_ and _altomeridionali_: 
_lo ferru_ (iron, neuter singular) vs. _lu ferru_ (electric iron, masculine singular), _dialetti mediani_ (Southern Lazio, Southern Umbria, Southern Marche, L'Aquila) 
_o fierro_ [offjerrə] (with _raddoppio fonosintattico_, iron, neuter singular) vs _o fierro_ [ofjerrə] (with single "f", electric iron, masculine singular), _dialetti altomeridionali_ (Neapolitan, in the example, Campania, Abruzzo, Molise, Northern and Central Apulia, Basilicata, Northern Calabria).


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## irinet

Nino83 said:


> In Romanian, neuter words don't have a different inflection (they takes the feminine plural "e"), so the existence of the neuter gender in Romanian is debatable. Probably it is said that Romanian has a neuter gender because there are a lot of words with the double gender (masculine singular and feminine plural).



I wouldn't agree as we also have 'cor'(sg -masc) vs 'coruri'(pl-fem), 'ou' vs 'ouă', 'pat' - 'paturi', 'stilou' -'stilouri' , 'nisip' vs 'nisipuri', 'pix' vs 'pixuri', etc., beside 'meridian' vs 'meridiane' or 'planor' vs 'planoare'. The article is 'le'  for the feminine and the plural, 'stilourile', 'meridianele', 'pixurile'.


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## Ronin81

robbie_SWE said:


> This kind of explains Pei's methodology - tried finding the study, but I was (also) unsuccessful.





Nino83 said:


> Thank you, robbie, now it's more clear.
> Those percentages are reasonable for vocalic evolution.




I know this study is highly regarded but I find some of its results dubious.

For instead, under no circunstance is Spanish closer to Latin than Provençal, or any other Occitan language (if they form a block after all). This is true for both, phonology and lexicum, in a great degree, thoug in some elements like the verb conjugation Spanish can be closer.


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## Nino83

irinet said:


> I wouldn't agree as we also have 'cor'(sg -masc) vs 'coruri'(pl-fem), 'ou' vs 'ouă', 'pat' - 'paturi', 'stilou' -'stilouri' , 'nisip' vs 'nisipuri', 'pix' vs 'pixuri'



Yes, true, but the inflection _-uri_ is feminine, like treabă > treburi, marfă > mărfuri, ceartă > certuri, vreme > vremuri.

Romanian neuter nouns did't retain the Latin plural _-a_, contrary to those 20 nouns in Italian.



Ronin81 said:


> For instead, under no circunstance is Spanish closer to Latin than Provençal, or any other Occitan language (if they form a block after all). This is true for both, phonology and lexicum, in a great degree, thoug in some elements like the verb conjugation Spanish can be closer.



In fact I don't think that these aspects can be summarized in a single number, because it would depend on (and change with) the method. 

Edit:
I made some sentence and tried to put many words which changed from Vulgar Latin to Romance languages (it's obvious that a Portuguese would use _bonito_ and a Spanish _hermoso_ instead of _belo/bello_, but I put that common word).

This night on the roof of the palace it's cold, at eight o'clock Mark eat a fruit (literal translation):
/ˈkwesta ˈnɔtte sul ˈtetto del paˈlaʦʦo faˈffreddo, alle ˈɔtto ˈmarko ˈmanʤa un ˈfrutto/ (Italian)
/ˈesta ˈnoi̯te ˈsoβɾe oˈ teto do paˈlaθjo fai̯ ˈfɾio as ˈoi̯to ˈoras ˈmarkus ˈkɔme un ˈfɾoi̯to/ (Galician)
/ˈesta ˈnoʧe ˈsoβre el ˈteʧo ðel paˈlaθjo ˈaθe ˈfrio a las ˈoʧo ˈmarko ˈkome un ˈfrukto/ (Spanish)

/ˈsta ˈnɔtti ˈsupra uˈ tɛttu du paˈlaʦʦu faˈffriddu all ˈɔttu ˈmarku ˈmanʧa un ˈfruttu/ (Sicilian)
/ˈeʃta ˈnɔi̯ti ˈsobɾi u ˈtɛtu du paˈlasju fas ˈfriu azˈ oi̯tu ˈɔɾas ˈmahkus ˈkɔmi ũ ˈfrui̯tu/ (NE Brazilian Port.)

/ˈsɛtə nɥi sʏʁ lə twa dy paˈlɛ il fɛ fʁwa a ɥit œʁ maʁk ˈmɔ̘̃ʒə æ̃ fʁɥi/ (French, Parisian accent)

It's not false to say that (to have) a beautiful hair is better (literal translation):
/non ɛˈffalso ˈdiːre ke un kaˈpello ˈbɛllo ɛˈmmɛʎʎo/ (Italian)
/non ɛ ˈfalso diˈθir ke un kaˈβelo ˈbɛlo ɛ meˈʎor/ (Galician)
/no es ˈfalso ðeˈθiɾ ke un kaˈβeʎo ˈβeʎo es meˈxor/ (Spanish)

/non ɛˈffau̯su ˈdiːʧiri ki un kaˈpiɖɖu ˈbɛɖɖu ɛ ˈmɛɟɟu/ (Sicilian)
/nũ ɛ ˈfaʊ̯su diˈze(h) ki ũ kaˈbelu ˈbɛlu ɛ meˈʎo(h)/ (NE Brazilian Port.)

/il ne pɑ fo̘ diʁ kæ̃ ʃəˈvø bo̘ e mjø/ (French, Parisian accent)

In june Mark goes swimming to the sea:
/aˈʤʤuɲɲo ˈmarko fa un ˈbaɲɲo  nel ˈmaːre/ (Italian)
/en ˈʃuɲo ˈmaɾkus fai̯ un ˈbaɲo no maɾ/ (Galician)
/en ˈxunio ˈmaɾko aθe un ˈβaɲo en el maɾ/ (Spanish)

/aˈʤʤuɲɲu ˈmarku fa un ˈbaɲɲu nto ˈmaːri/ (Sicilian)
/eĩ̯ ˈʒũɲu ˈmahkus faz ũ ˈbɐ̃ɲu nu ma(h)/ (or /ʒũj̃u, bɐ̃j̃u/) (NE Brazilian Port.)

/ɔ̘̃ ʒɥæ̃ maʁk fɛ æ̃ bæ̃ dɔ̘̃ la mɛʁ/ (French, Parisian accent)

As one can see, Italian, Galician and Spanish are similar, then you change some /o/ to /u/ and some /e/ to /i/ and you have Sicilian and Brazilian Portuguese (NE, without di > ʤi and ti > ʧi). Then reduce some unstressed vowel and you have European Portuguese.

Anyway, French sounds different from the other ones.

Can any Romanian speaker translate these sentences in Romanian (if there is some other Romance language speaker, he can translate them too).


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## robbie_SWE

Nino83 said:


> Yes, true, but the inflection -uri is feminine, like treabă > treburi, marfă > mărfuri, ceartă > certuri, vreme > vremuri.
> 
> Romanian neuter nouns did't retain the Latin plural -a, contrary to those 20 nouns in Italian.



Well, it's not that easy. Studies show that Latin plural *-a* was kept in Romanian but underwent significant changes in order to maintain a distinction between singular/plural.



> Altă desinenţă este _–e_ (< _ă_ < _a_), prezentă la substantive cu singularul în _–u_ (oase < oasă < ossa, meare < meară < mela). *Evoluţia –ă > -e este explicabilă morfologic: -ă era desinenţă de singular, ca atare -ă de la pluralul neutrelor a fost înlocuit cu –e pentru a putea marca opoziţia singular/plural*: „necesitatea de diferenţiere a celor două numere fiind cu mult mai puternică decît evoluţia fonetică, s-a stabilit în interiorul neutrelor o corelaţie morfologică în raport cu posibilităţile interne ale limbii şi, cum singura modalitate de rezolvare a pluralului lor era transformarea lui _-ă_ în _-e_, s-a recurs la ea” (I. Coteanu, Morfologia numelui, 31).



So basically, neuter nouns ending in plural *-e* represent an archaic *–ă* inherited from Latin *-a*. E.g.

*os*, *oase *(pl.) ("bone" < Latin _ossum_)
*măr*, *mere *(pl.) ("apple" < Vulgar Latin *_melum _< Latin _malum_)
*fier*, *fiare *(pl.) ("iron" < Latim _ferrum_)
*deget*, *degete *(pl.) ("finger" < Latin _digitus_) (N.B. in Latin _digitus _is a masculine noun)
*braț*, *brațe *(pl.) ("arm" < Latin _bracchium_)
The only example still present today is evidently "egg": *ou*, *ouă *(pl.) (< Latin _ōvum_).

As to the inflection* -uri*, I found the following explanation:



> *La neutru desinenţa specific de plural este -ură, devenită ulterior -ure şi apoi -ur*i. Această desinenţă se impune în româna comună, ca rezultat al unei analize diferite a structurii cuvintelor: în latină desinenţa de plural pentru neutre era _-a_, dar la substantivele imparisilabice, clasă dispărută în latina tîrzie, aceasta se adăuga după _-or_ (tempus, tempora); ulterior desinenţa _-ură_ s-a extins şi la alte substantive (locus, -i, din latina clasică, a devenit locora, locură apoi locure).(Istoria limbii şi dialectologie, 42)



According to first sentence in this quote the original inflection was *-ură* (later *-ure*, then finally *-uri*) which – in its initial form – represents the archaic plural *–ă* from Latin.

In summation, there is a neuter gender in Romanian which represents the Latin neuter. However, unlike the twenty-something words in Italian, Romanian neuter nouns have undergone (radical) changes making them hard to recognise as neuter.

Hope this doesn't venture too far off topic.


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## Nino83

robbie_SWE said:


> In summation, there is a neuter gender in Romanian which represents the Latin neuter. However, unlike the twenty-something words in Italian, Romanian neuter nouns have undergone (radical) changes making them hard to recognise as neuter.



Thank you for the info.
Is it applicable also to articles and demonstratives, for example (_il)la > (il)lă > (il)le_, merging with the feminine plural _le_?

I make an attempt to translate those sentences in Romanian. Correct me if I wrote something wrong 

această noapte *pe* *acoperiș* *al* *clădirii* este frig *la* ora opt Marcu mâncă un fruct
nu este fals *a* *spune* că un *păr* frumos este mai bun 
în iunie Marcu face un baie în marea

/aˈʧastə ˈno̯apte pe akoˈperiʃ al kləˈdiri ˈeste ˈfrig la ˈora opt ˈmarku ˈmɨnkə un ˈfrukt/
/nu ˈeste fals a ˈspune kə un pər fruˈmos ˈeste mai̯ bun/
/ɨn ˈjunje ˈmarku ˈface un ˈbaje ɨn ˈmarea/

About vocabulary, I note that some prepositions are difficult to understand, _pe < super_ (compare with _sopra, sobre, sur_) , _la < illac_ (instead of _de_), infinitive _a_, _păr < pilus_ (final vowel dropped and _r < l_), _spune_ and _clădi_ (from a Slavic root), _acoperiș_.
From a phonological point of view, there is a lot of vowel dropping, compare _aʧastə,_ _frig, opt, mâncă (mɨnkə), fruct, fals, păr (pər), frumos (< formosum)_ and _baje < banium_.
Probably Romanian is placed before Portuguese because a) Pei considered European Portuguese (but compare _friu, oi̯tu, frui̯tu, faɫsu, pelu,_ with final vowels and_ bɐɲu_, with the consonant) b) Romanian took some additional point from some change that happened in the other Romance languages, like _junjum > ʤʤuɲɲo, ʒuɲu_.
But there is more vowel dropping in Romanian than in Brazilian Portuguese.
I'd put Romanian between Brazilian Portuguese and French.


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## robbie_SWE

Nino83 said:


> Yes, true, but the inflection _-uri_ is feminine, like treabă > treburi, marfă > mărfuri, ceartă > certuri, vreme > vremuri.
> 
> Romanian neuter nouns did't retain the Latin plural _-a_, contrary to those 20 nouns in Italian.
> 
> 
> 
> In fact I don't think that these aspects can be summarized in a single number, because it would depend on (and change with) the method.
> 
> Edit:
> I made some sentence and tried to put many words which changed from Vulgar Latin to Romance languages (it's obvious that a Portuguese would use _bonito_ and a Spanish _hermoso_ instead of _belo/bello_, but I put that common word).
> 
> This night on the roof of the palace it's cold, at eight o'clock Mark eat a fruit (literal translation):
> /ˈkwesta ˈnɔtte sul ˈtetto del paˈlaʦʦo faˈffreddo, alle ˈɔtto ˈmarko ˈmanʤa un ˈfrutto/ (Italian)
> /ˈesta ˈnoi̯te ˈsoβɾe oˈ teto do paˈlaθjo fai̯ ˈfɾio as ˈoi̯to ˈoras ˈmarkus ˈkɔme un ˈfɾoi̯to/ (Galician)
> /ˈesta ˈnoʧe ˈsoβre el ˈteʧo ðel paˈlaθjo ˈaθe ˈfrio a las ˈoʧo ˈmarko ˈkome un ˈfrukto/ (Spanish)
> 
> /ˈsta ˈnɔtti ˈsupra uˈ tɛttu du paˈlaʦʦu faˈffriddu all ˈɔttu ˈmarku ˈmanʧa un ˈfruttu/ (Sicilian)
> /ˈeʃta ˈnɔi̯ti ˈsobɾi u ˈtɛtu du paˈlasju fas ˈfriu azˈ oi̯tu ˈɔɾas ˈmahkus ˈkɔmi ũ ˈfrui̯tu/ (NE Brazilian Port.)
> 
> /ˈsɛtə nɥi sʏʁ lə twa dy paˈlɛ il fɛ fʁwa a ɥit œʁ maʁk ˈmɔ̘̃ʒə æ̃ fʁɥi/ (French, Parisian accent)
> 
> /aˈʧæstə ˈno̯apte aˈsupra akopeˈriʃul paˈlatuluj ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e frig, la ˈora opt ˈmarku məˈnɨnkə un frukt/ (Romanian)
> 
> It's not false to say that (to have) a beautiful hair is better (literal translation):
> /non ɛˈffalso ˈdiːre ke un kaˈpello ˈbɛllo ɛˈmmɛʎʎo/ (Italian)
> /non ɛ ˈfalso diˈθir ke un kaˈβelo ˈbɛlo ɛ meˈʎor/ (Galician)
> /no es ˈfalso ðeˈθiɾ ke un kaˈβeʎo ˈβeʎo es meˈxor/ (Spanish)
> 
> /non ɛˈffau̯su ˈdiːʧiri ki un kaˈpiɖɖu ˈbɛɖɖu ɛ ˈmɛɟɟu/ (Sicilian)
> /nũ ɛ ˈfaʊ̯su diˈze(h) ki ũ kaˈbelu ˈbɛlu ɛ meˈʎo(h)/ (NE Brazilian Port.)
> 
> /il ne pɑ fo̘ diʁ kæ̃ ʃəˈvø bo̘ e mjø/ (French, Parisian accent)
> 
> /nu ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e fals de a ˈziʧe kə ˈpər fruˈmos ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e maj ˈbine/ (Romanian)
> 
> In june Mark goes swimming to the sea:
> /aˈʤʤuɲɲo ˈmarko fa un ˈbaɲɲo  nel ˈmaːre/ (Italian)
> /en ˈʃuɲo ˈmaɾkus fai̯ un ˈbaɲo no maɾ/ (Galician)
> /en ˈxunio ˈmaɾko aθe un ˈβaɲo en el maɾ/ (Spanish)
> 
> /aˈʤʤuɲɲu ˈmarku fa un ˈbaɲɲu nto ˈmaːri/ (Sicilian)
> /eĩ̯ ˈʒũɲu ˈmahkus faz ũ ˈbɐ̃ɲu nu ma(h)/ (or /ʒũj̃u, bɐ̃j̃u/) (NE Brazilian Port.)
> 
> /ɔ̘̃ ʒɥæ̃ maʁk fɛ æ̃ bæ̃ dɔ̘̃ la mɛʁ/ (French, Parisian accent)
> 
> /ɨn ˈjunie ˈmarku ˈfatʃe ˈbaje ɨn ˈmare/ (Romanian)
> 
> As one can see, Italian, Galician and Spanish are similar, then you change some /o/ to /u/ and some /e/ to /i/ and you have Sicilian and Brazilian Portuguese (NE, without di > ʤi and ti > ʧi). Then reduce some unstressed vowel and you have European Portuguese.
> 
> Anyway, French sounds different from the other ones.
> 
> Can any Romanian speaker translate these sentences in Romanian (if there is some other Romance language speaker, he can translate them too).



Ok, tried my best here but keep in mind that some features are incorrect in order to maintain a literal translation.

Notes:

1. "Roof" in Romanian is *acoperiș*, from the verb *a acoperi *(< Late Latin *_accoperire_, *_accooperire_, from Latin _ac-_ + _cooperiō_). Articles are suffixed in Romanian, hence acoperiș-_ul _and palat-_ului_. The literate third person singular of "to be" is *este *- however, *e* is a common short form. Unlike other Romance languages, expressing weather ("it's hot, cold etc.") uses *a fi* ("to be" < Latin _sum_, _fuī_, present active infinitive of _fiō_) instead of *a face* ("to make, to do" < Latin _facere_, present active infinitive of _faciō_).

2. Latin _bellus _did not survive in Romanian, only *frumos *(< Latin _fōrmōsus_). "Hair" in Romanian is *păr *(< Latin _pilus_). Comparing adjectives in Romanian is done exclusively using *mai* (Latin _magis_).

3. Although *baie *(< Latin *_bannea_, from _balnea _or *_baneum_, from _balneum_) can be used to mean "a swim/swimming" in the extended sense, *înot *(from the verb *a înota* < Vulgar Latin *_innotare_, from Late Latin _notare_, from Latin _natāre_, present active infinitive of _natō_) is more appropriate as a standard translation.


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## robbie_SWE

Nino83 said:


> Această noapte *asupra* *acoperișul* *al* *clădirii* *palatului *(we're talking about a "palace" right?) este frig, *la* ora opt Marcu *mănâncă* (mâncă is not standard) un fruct
> Nu este fals *a* *spune* (correct but you could just as well use *a zice *to maintain continuity) că un *păr* frumos este mai bun *bine*
> În iunie Marcu face un baie în marea
> 
> /aˈʧæstə ˈno̯apte aˈsupra akopeˈriʃul paˈlatuluj ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e frig, la ˈora opt ˈmarku məˈnɨnkə un frukt/
> /nu ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e fals de a ˈziʧe kə ˈpər fruˈmos ˈ[j]este/ˈ[j]e maj ˈbine/
> /ɨn ˈjunie ˈmarku ˈfatʃe ˈbaje ɨn ˈmare/
> 
> /aˈʧastə ˈno̯apte pe akoˈperiʃ al kləˈdiri ˈeste ˈfrig la ˈora opt ˈmarku ˈmɨnkə un ˈfrukt/
> /nu ˈeste fals a ˈspune kə un pər fruˈmos ˈeste mai̯ bun/
> /ɨn ˈjunje ˈmarku ˈface un ˈbaje ɨn ˈmarea/



Corrections, but please see my explanations in my previous post.


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## Nino83

robbie_SWE said:


> Ok, tried my best here but keep in mind that some features are incorrect in order to maintain a literal translation.



Thank you for the translation and the explanation (I made some mistake, as I thought  ).


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## Penyafort

Ronin81 said:


> For instead, under no circunstance is Spanish closer to Latin than Provençal, or any other Occitan language (if they form a block after all). This is true for both, phonology and lexicum, in a great degree, thoug in some elements like the verb conjugation Spanish can be closer.



Indeed. In fact, phonological changes in some cases have gone even further in Spanish than in the rest of languages, French included. One just has to take a look at words like *hacer*, *hijo *or *echar*.


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## merquiades

Penyafort said:


> Indeed. In fact, phonological changes in some cases have gone even further in Spanish than in the rest of languages, French included. One just has to take a look at words like *hacer*, *hijo *or *echar*.


I'd say vowel evolution went farther in French, but consonant evolution (or simplification) in Spanish:
f > h > nothing
b and v > [β]
[k+e,i] >  [ts] > [θ]
[t+e,i] > [dz] > [ts] to [θ]
[-z-] > [-s-]
[-s] > [-h] (in many dialects)
[-kt-] to [ʧ]
[kul] > [kl] > [ʎ] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ]
[pl, fl, gl] > [ʎ] > [j]
[g+e,i] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ]
[j] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ]
[-p-] > [-b-] > [-β-]
[-k-] > [-g-] > [-ɣ-]
[-g-] > [-ɣ-]
[-d-] > [-ð-] > nothing
[-t-] > [-d-] > [-ð-]


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> I'd say vowel evolution went farther in French, but consonant evolution (or simplification) in Spanish



About these changes, I think the relevant ones are:

f > h > nothing
[pl, fl, gl] > [ʎ] > [j]
[kul] > [kl] > [ʎ] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ]
[g+e,i] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ], [j] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ]  > [χ]

b and v > [β] doesn't reduce understanting

the other changes are bigger in French:

[-kt-] to [ʧ] _noctem > noite > noche_ (Sp) but _noctem > nuòi(t) > n[ɥi]_ (Fr)
[-p-] > [-b-] > [-β-] _ripam > riba_ (Sp) _> rive_ (Fr)
[-k-] > [-g-] > [-ɣ-] _amicum > amigo_ (Sp)_ > amie_ (Fr)
[-t-] > [-d-] > [-ð-] _vitam > vida_ (Sp) _> vie_ (Fr)
[-g-] > [-ɣ-] > nothing _ruga > rúa_ (Sp)_ > rue_ (Fr)
[-d-] > [-ð-] > nothing, _videre > ver_ (SP) _> voir_ (Fr)

[k+e,i] >  [ts] > [θ] (> /s/ in French, Portuguese, Catalan, i.e it is very similar)
[t+e,i] > [dz] > [ts] to [θ] ? civitatem > cidad, tempum > tiempo, do you mean [t + j]? gratias > gracias?
[-z-] > [-s-]? /rosa/ (Latin) > /rosa/ (Spanish) > /roz/ (French)

About [-kt], in French the vowel "i" (from _-kt- > -it-_, but also from -tj-, -ce-) formed a diphthong with the preceeding vowel that underwent further changes and modifications:
_factum > fait > fé, palatium > palais > palè,  lèctum > ljèit > li, téctum > teit > toit > t[wa], nòctem > nuòit > nuit > n[ɥi], crócem _(CL crǔcem)_ > croix > cr[wa], fructum > fruit > fr[ɥi]_.

A similar thing before [-ɲ-], _balneum (CL) > baniu (VL) > bain > bɛ̃, punctum (CL) > pongt (OF) > point > p[wɛ̃], iunium (CL) > juniu (OF) > juin > jɥɛ̃ 
_
In French also [l + consonant] was first vocalised:
_falsum > faux > fo, bèllum > b[eu] > bo, mèlius > mjèu >mjø, capillum > capéllu > cheveu > chevø, gentilem > gentiu > gentì, còlpum > coup > cu, vòlet > vuòu > vuèu > vø_

In French, after the loss of final unstressed vowel, also many (now) final consonants were lost, as you can see from these examples.

Said that, I think Spanish had less changes in consonants than French.
French has the most changes, both in vowels and in consonants.

Vowels: Italian, Galician, Spanish, Sicilian, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian and European Portuguese, French

Consonants: Italian, Catalan, Romanian, Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, French


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## Nino83

After studying Romanian vocalic system I report the number of vocalic changes in stressed and unstressed (countertonic and final) position.

French 39 3 3, Bolognese 15 2 2, Catalan 7 3 3, Piedmontese and Lombard 7 2 2, Romanian 5 3 2, Neapolitan 4 2 3, Venetian 4 0 2, Italian 4 0 0, Spanish 3 0 0, Portuguese 2 3 3, Sicilian 2 0 0, Galician 2 0 0, Roman 0 0 0

About stressed position, French is, by far, the most different, with 39 changes, Bolognese 15, Catalan and Gallo-Italic (Piedmontese and Lombard) 7, Romanian 5.
About Neapolitan, Venetian, Italian and Spanish, these changes (4) are about the diphthongization of
ɛ=jɛ (je in Spanish) ɔ=wɔ (we in Spanish), Portuguese and Galician have the ɔ>o metaphonetic change and the act>eit change (this also in Spanish, lacte > leite/leche), Sicilian the e>i and o>u change, Roman has no changes.

About unstressed position, we have three groups:
- languages which drop or reduce countertonic and final /e/ and /o/ and reduce final /a/ to schwa (Romanian reduces countertonic /a/, /e/ and /o/ and final /a/ and drop final /u/ except after consonant + liquid, like in duplu)
- languages which mantain countertonic /e/ and /o/ and drop final /e/ and /o/ only before /n, r, l/, like in mar, can, razón (instead of mare, cane, razone), Spanish and Galician also before /s, z/, like in vez
- languages which mantain all countertonic and final vowels, they are only three, Tuscan (Italian), Roman and Sicilian

1) French, Portuguese, Catalan 6 Romanian, Neapolitan 5 Piedmontese, Lombard, Bolognese 4
2) Venetian, Galician, Spanish 2 (only before n, r, l and also before s,z in Galician and Spanish)
3) Italian (Tuscan), Roman, Sicilian 0

In the end, French is very different because of phonetic changes and vowel reduction/dropping (plus the dropping of the new final consonants, amigo>amig>ami), also Bolognese has many changes.
Romanian has a mix of vowel reduction/dropping and a different vocabulary (about 75-80% of Romanian vocabulary derives from Latin, vs the more or less 95-98% of the other Romance languages) and a different evolution of some consonants.

Then there are Portuguese, Catalan, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Lombard, which have vowel reduction/dropping in unstressed position but limited changes in stressed position.

Venetian, Galician and Spanish have no vowel reduction/dropping in unstressed position but they drop final /e/ and /o/ after some consonants (n, r, l, for Venetian and also s, z for Spanish and Galician).

Italian (Tuscan), Roman and Sicilian are, phonetically, the most similar to the *Vulgar* Latin.

If you are interested, I can post these vocalic changes for each language.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all round



> But for fun, I would like to start a discussion on the romance language least related to Latin.



Well Testing1234567 seems already to have had his wish - for a lively discussion, that is.

But earnest and expert contributors to the Thread have lost touch, apparently, with the thrust of the original question.

To which - my halfpenny-worth - all the Romance legacy languages show differences, but methodologically it is an almost absurd question to ask which is the most "remote", without preciser criteria (lexic, accentual, morphological & no doubt much else).

Σ


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## merquiades

@Nino83 You have forgotten again that Spanish loses all unstressed syllables except those with /a/. Hominem>hombre, rapidus>raudo, civitatem>ciudad, capitalem>caudal, fabulare>hablar, regulare>reglar, possiblilis>posible, tabulam>tabla, digitum>dedo, cubitum>codo, feminam>hembra, masculum>macho, oculum>ojo, auriculam>oreja...etc...   The examples where it didn't happen are cultisms.


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## robbie_SWE

Nino83 said:


> [...]
> Romanian has a mix of vowel reduction/dropping and a different vocabulary (about 75-80% of Romanian vocabulary derives from Latin, vs the more or less 95-98% of the other Romance languages) and a different evolution of some consonants.
> [...]



Well, I've heard quite a few estimates as to the percentage of Latin vocabulary in Romanian, the latest being 80-85% of modern Romanian, but if we set that aside are you telling me that Spanish/Portuguese and even French have 95-98% Latin vocabulary?



> Quintana, Lucía; Mora, Juan Pablo (2002). "Enseñanza del acervo léxico árabe de la lengua española" (PDF). ASELE. Actas XIII: 705.: "El léxico español de procedencia árabe es muy abundante: se ha señalado que constituye, aproximadamente, _*un 8% del vocabulario total*_"



So 8% of the Spanish vocabulary is more or less of Arabic origin, and then we haven't even scratched the surface on vocabulary of Celtiberian, Basque, Nahuatl, Quechua, Guaraní, Carib and Germanic origin. The situation is similar for Portuguese and for French I found the following number:



> It is estimated that *12%* (4,200) of common French words found in a typical dictionary such as the Petit Larousse or Micro-Robert Plus (35,000 words) *are of foreign origin* (where Greek and Latin learned words are not seen as foreign) (Walter & Walter 1998.).



I personally believe that vocabulary is kind of secondary in this discussion, because we have to study inherited vocabulary and learned vocabulary separately. If we only choose to analyse inherited vocabulary then we're pretty much looking at similar numbers across all Romance languages.

Robbie


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## Hulalessar

Scholiast said:


> Well Testing1234567 seems already to have had his wish - for a lively discussion, that is.
> 
> But earnest and expert contributors to the Thread have lost touch, apparently, with the thrust of the original question.
> 
> To which - my halfpenny-worth - all the Romance legacy languages show differences, but methodologically it is an almost absurd question to ask which is the most "remote", without preciser criteria (lexic, accentual, morphological & no doubt much else).



I was going to say something similar. Even if you set up the criteria how are you going to measure them and decide what weight to give to each? I think the best that can happen is that Romance scholars (preferably not native Romance speakers) give an intuitive assessment. The problem with that of course is that academics are not keen on making intuitive assessments.


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## Hulalessar

robbie_SWE said:


> I personally believe that vocabulary is kind of secondary in this discussion, because we have to study inherited vocabulary and learned vocabulary separately. If we only choose to analyse inherited vocabulary then we're pretty much looking at similar numbers across all Romance languages.



Quite. What is being compared? Fat dictionary with fat dictionary? We are more likely to come to conclusions that tell us something if comparisons are restricted to narrowish areas


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> @Nino83 You have forgotten again that Spanish loses all unstressed syllables except those with /a/.



This happened during the Vulgar Latin period and it is a common feature.


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## merquiades

Nino83 said:


> This happened during the Vulgar Latin period and it is a common feature.


It was a little after Vulgar Latin, but early. That is also when the vowels were dropped in French too and so many of their words became one syllable.  Only in Portuguese is that happening currently.


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## guihenning

merquiades said:


> It was a little after Vulgar Latin, but early. That is also when the vowels were dropped in French too and so many of their words became one syllable.  Only in Portuguese is that happening currently.


Currently?


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> It was a little after Vulgar Latin, but early. That is also when the vowels were dropped in French too and so many of their words became one syllable.  Only in Portuguese is that happening currently.



civitatem>ciudad, città, cidade
fabulare>hablar, falar, parabolare>parlare
digitum>dedo, dito
masculum>macho, maschio
oculum>ojo, olho, occhio
auriculam>oreja, orelha, orecchia/o

Also:
Vetulum>vecchio, velho
Speculum>specchio, espelho
Macula>macchia
Ungula>unghia
And so on.


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## Nino83

robbie_SWE said:


> are you telling me that Spanish/Portuguese and even French have 95-98% Latin vocabulary?





> Aproximadamente un 94 % del español del uso diario proviene del latín.



https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idioma_español


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## Gavril

robbie_SWE said:


> I personally believe that vocabulary is kind of secondary in this discussion, because we have to study inherited vocabulary and learned vocabulary separately. If we only choose to analyse inherited vocabulary then we're pretty much looking at similar numbers across all Romance languages.



Learned vocabulary has had an effect on the basic vocabulary of some Romance languages, though. E.g. in Spanish, the restored forms _rápido_ "fast" and _quieto_ "still, not moving" seem to be much more commonly used than the corresponding older forms _raudo_ and _quedo_.

Something similar may have happened with e.g. Italian _rapido_ and French _rapide_ (I am not sure if these are the default terms for "fast" in these languages, but they were among the first results listed in the WR dictionary).

Then again, maybe a distinction should be made between "learned vocabulary" in the sense of sophisticated terminology (_electromagnético_, _metabolismo_, etc.) on the one hand, and restored vocabulary (i.e. vocabulary that co-exists with older etymological equivalents, like _raudo_/_rápido_, _reja_/_regla_, etc.) on the other.


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## Nino83

robbie_SWE said:


> Well, I've heard quite a few estimates as to the percentage of Latin vocabulary in Romanian, the latest being 80-85% of modern Romanian



About Italian, only 12% derives from foreign languages, while 85% is internal.
In Romanian, only 75% derives from Latin, while 14% from Slavic languages and 11% from other foreign languages.

http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lessico_(Enciclopedia_dell'Italiano)/
https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limba_română#Vocabular

@merquiades

Other examples of syncope (of Classical Latin *intertonic* vowels):

teg*u*la > teglia, vig*i*lare > vegliare, dom*i*na > domna > donna, cal*i*dum > caldo, bon*i*tatem > bontà.

This happened during the Vulgar Latin period.
In #142 I speak about vowel reduction/dropping in *countertonic* (pretonic with secondary stress) and postonic final syllables of *Vulgar* Latin words (which just lost the intertonic vowels in most proparoxytones), not of Classical Latin ones.
I.e, the starting point is Vulgar Latin (so, for example, the starting point is not _vetulum_ but _veclo_).


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> Then again, maybe a distinction should be made between "learned vocabulary" in the sense of sophisticated terminology (_electromagnético_, _metabolismo_, etc.) on the one hand, and restored vocabulary (i.e. vocabulary that co-exists with older etymological equivalents, like _raudo_/_rápido_, _reja_/_regla_, etc.) on the other.



Possibly, but the fact is that both have been consciously re-introduced and the re-introduction was made by the learned. Are you going to count doublets as one or two words?

I have a copy of _Grammaire: Cours supérieur_ published by Larousse (date of publication not given but circa 1930). It says that the latest edition of the _Dictionniare de l'Académie_ (1878) lists 32,000 words. It suggests that some 20,000 are words of learned formation from ancient languages and that, if you take away from the remaining 12,000 derived and compound words, you are left with 4,200 words of "popular origin" of which 3,800 come from Latin and 400 from Germanic sources. However many words the current edition of the _Dictionniare _has, the words of popular origin will naturally still be the same. What would be an interesting exercise would be to compare the words of popular origin of different Romance languages. That I think would be a better guide to how far the basic lexicon of each is derived from Latin. A borrowing is a borrowing even if it comes from a parent language and ought to be disregarded in any assessment of how far a language has moved away from its parent.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> Possibly, but the fact is that both have been consciously re-introduced and the re-introduction was made by the learned. Are you going to count doublets as one or two words?



Doublets are two different words if we are only talking about sound change (e.g. _rápido_ and _raudo_ have not undergone the same sound changes). Outside of sound change, I'm not sure. For example, my own speech contains doublets such as ['ow*l.n*i] versus ['ow*n.l*i] (_only_), ['*ow*.mowst] versus ['*al*.mowst] (_almost_) and ['fɛb.*j*u.e.ri] versus ['fɛb.*r*u.ᵊr.i] (_February_). The latter member of each pair could probably be termed a "learned borrowing" by the same logic used for Spanish _rápido_, but from my day-to-day perspective each pair is effectively a single word.

That doesn't mean that any Spanish speakers necessarily make the same kind of connection between _rápido _and _raudo_; however, the mere fact of _rápido_ being a borrowing does not disqualify it from such a connection.


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## robbie_SWE

Nino83 said:


> About Italian, only 12% derives from foreign languages, while 85% is internal.
> In Romanian, only 75% derives from Latin, while 14% from Slavic languages and 11% from other foreign languages.
> 
> http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lessico_(Enciclopedia_dell'Italiano)/
> https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limba_română#Vocabular
> 
> @merquiades
> 
> Other examples of syncope (of Classical Latin *intertonic* vowels):
> 
> teg*u*la > teglia, vig*i*lare > vegliare, dom*i*na > domna > donna, cal*i*dum > caldo, bon*i*tatem > bontà.
> 
> This happened during the Vulgar Latin period.
> In #142 I speak about vowel reduction/dropping in *countertonic* (pretonic with secondary stress) and postonic final syllables of *Vulgar* Latin words (which just lost the intertonic vowels in most proparoxytones), not of Classical Latin ones.
> I.e, the starting point is Vulgar Latin (so, for example, the starting point is not _vetulum_ but _veclo_).



The section you linked to in your post presents several studies all with different percentages (from 75-83%). My main objection to the study you're referring to is that it was conducted during the Communist era and the regime was politically inclined to accentuate the Slavic influence on Romanian. With that said, I do not doubt their findings but I have questions: were regionalisms included? Was specialised lexis analysed? Were archaisms taken into account?



> Since the 19th century, many modern words were borrowed from the other Romance languages, especially from French and Italian (for example: birou "desk, office", avion "airplane", exploata "exploit"). It was estimated that about 38% of words in Romanian are of French and/or Italian origin (in many cases both languages); and adding this to the words that were inherited from Latin, *about 75%–85% of Romanian words can be traced to Latin*.



Hulalessar raised an interesting question: are you going to count doublets as one or two words?

Romanian is filled with doublets – inherited words from Latin and then the same word borrowed again from French, Italian and/or Latin.

E.g.: *aceră *("eagle") < inherited from Latin _aquila_; *acvilă *< borrowed from Latin _aquila _through Italian _aquila_.
*repede *("fast, quick") < inherited from Latin _rapidus_, _rapide_; *rapid *< borrowed from Latin _rapidus _through French _rapide_.
*închide *("to close, to enclose") < inherited from Latin _includere_; *include *("to include") < borrowed from Latin _includere_.

I'm convinced that if all these doublets are taken into account, then the number for Romanian is much higher than previously estimated.

Robbie


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## Hulalessar

I do not think we can count words with variable pronunciations as doublets.  ['fɛb.*j*u.e.ri] and ['fɛb.*r*u.ᵊr.i] both mean exactly the same thing.

The question in the context of this thread is whether doublets, since they share the same etymology, should be counted as one word.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> I do not think we can count words with variable pronunciations as doublets.  ['fɛb.*j*u.e.ri] and ['fɛb.*r*u.ᵊr.i] both mean exactly the same thing.



['fɛb.*j*u.e.ri] and ['fɛb.*r*u.ᵊr.i] is not just a variable pronunciation. The pronunciation with [j] is the one I first learned; the [r]-pronunciation is one that I adopted later with reference to the written form of the word.

Analogously, _rápido _may have originated as a restoration of _raudo _(which still means "fast") to its older, "clearer" pronunciation, with reference to the Latin that was still available in written form.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> ['fɛb.*j*u.e.ri] and ['fɛb.*r*u.ᵊr.i] is not just a variable pronunciation. The pronunciation with [j] is the one I first learned; the [r]-pronunciation is one that I adopted later with reference to the written form of the word.



I see three possibilities:

a) Your first pronunciation was "correct" but you hypercorrected it when you saw how it written i.e. you adopted a "spelling pronunciation". (Many spelling pronunciations are now standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_pronunciation )

b) Your first pronunciation was "incorrect" but you corrected it when you saw how it written.

c) Both pronunciations are correct.

Whichever applies I cannot see the different pronunciations as doublets because there is only one way of writing the word and only one meaning.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> I see three possibilities:
> 
> a) Your first pronunciation was "correct" but you hypercorrected it when you saw how it written i.e. you adopted a "spelling pronunciation". (Many spelling pronunciations are now standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_pronunciation )



I think this one is the closest to the truth, although I'm not sure we have the same idea of what "correct" means here.

Spelling-pronunciation seems to be the same type of process as learned borrowing (from an ancestor language). The difference is that spelling-pronunciation is a purely phonetic borrowing -- it creates a doublet consisting of the "restored" (i.e. hypercorrect) pronunciation and the more "developed" pronunciation -- whereas the doublets created by learned borrowing are often semantically divergent as well (Spanish _regla_ "rule" vs. _reja_ "bars",_ amplio_ "spacious" vs. _ancho_ "wide", etc.), though not always.


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## Hulalessar

I think that all doublets have to be semantically divergent; there certainly has to be an idea that they are two different words. Just because a word has variant spellings or pronunciations does not make it a doublet.


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## merquiades

guihenning said:


> Currently?


Like when people nowadays drop syllables and weaken vowels to an extreme:
[ˈsrəʒɐ] for cereja,  [tlˈfon] for telefone, [ʃkudʃ] for escudos or  [mˈnin] for menino.


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## guihenning

merquiades said:


> Like when people nowadays drop syllables and weaken vowels to an extreme:
> [ˈsrəʒɐ] for cereja,  [tlˈfon] for telefone, [ʃkudʃ] for escudos or  [mˈnin] for menino.


This only happens in Lisbon and is considered not standard once it sounds very exotic. In other areas of Portugal it doesn't happen. Plus, in Brazil syllabes are never ever dropped out of a word.


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## Nino83

French: app*e*lle/ap*(ə)*lons, p*eu*x/p*ou*vons = EP: p*e*ço/p*(ɨ)*dimos, p*o*sso/p[*u*]demos; countertonic "e" is dropped, countertonic "o" becomes "u" both in French and European Portuguese.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> I think that all doublets have to be semantically divergent; there certainly has to be an idea that they are two different words.



To be a lexical doublet, yes, but a purely phonetic (i.e. pronunciational) doublet is also possible.

What I'm suggesting is that pairs like _rápido_ : _raudo_ and _quieto_ : _quedo _were not necessarily seen as lexical doublets (separate words) at the beginning. Instead, _rápido_ and _quieto_ may have originally been introduced as hypercorrect, "restored" pronunciations of _raudo_ and _quedo_. This would have been possible because _raudo_ and _quedo_ remained semantically close to their Latin ancestors, in contrast to pairs such as _reja_ : _regla_ and _yema_ : _gema_.

Of course, today _rápido, quieto, raudo _and _quedo _are all codified as fully separate words, with their own entries in the dictionary, but we can't assume (without evidence) that they were understood as separate words from the beginning.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> ...but we can't assume (without evidence) that they were understood as separate words from the beginning.



But the point is how they are considered today rather than how they arose. Whilst there are clearly cases of words which have more than one pronunciation, are they doublets? I think that for two forms to be a doublet there has to be some sense that they are two different words.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> But the point is how they are considered today rather than how they arose.



I thought that how they arose was the only important criterion here, according to the normal methodology?

It doesn't seem worth arguing about this much further, because for the purposes of this thread's question, I don't actually disagree with the exclusion of words like _rápido_/_quieto_/etc. from the "metric" of divergence from Latin. (I do have some disagreements/doubts about the terms in which the question is being asked, and other questions like it, but that seems beyond the scope of the thread.)


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## guihenning

Nino83 said:


> civitatem>ciudad, città, cidade
> *fabulare>hablar, falar, parabolare>parlare*
> digitum>dedo, dito
> masculum>macho, maschio
> oculum>ojo, olho, occhio
> auriculam>oreja, orelha, orecchia/o
> 
> Also:
> Vetulum>vecchio, velho
> Speculum>specchio, espelho
> Macula>macchia
> Ungula>unghia
> And so on.


In Portuguese there's also a verb related to speech which comes from _parabolare
fabulare > falar
parabolare > palrar_


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## Nino83

guihenning said:


> _parabolare > palrar_



Thank you for the info!



Hulalessar said:


> I think that for two forms to be a doublet there has to be some sense that they are two different words.





Exactly, like _piazza_ (square) and _platea_ (stalls, in the theatre) < _platea_ , which have two different meanings and are two different words.


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## Penyafort

Words usually considered are those which have undergone the local changes regarded as distinctive, even when sometimes they are not the common ones. That is why linguists talk about _hermoso _for 'beautiful' in Spanish, regardless of the fact that _bello _exists too (many think it entered the language via Occitan or Italian), or that words like _bonito _(or _lindo _in the Americas) are far more common.


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## Ronin81

Hulalessar said:


> Possibly, but the fact is that both have been consciously re-introduced and the re-introduction was made by the learned. Are you going to count doublets as one or two words?
> 
> I have a copy of _Grammaire: Cours supérieur_ published by Larousse (date of publication not given but circa 1930). It says that the latest edition of the _Dictionniare de l'Académie_ (1878) lists 32,000 words. It suggests that some 20,000 are words of learned formation from ancient languages and that, if you take away from the remaining 12,000 derived and compound words, you are left with 4,200 words of "popular origin" of which 3,800 come from Latin and 400 from Germanic sources. However many words the current edition of the _Dictionniare _has, the words of popular origin will naturally still be the same. What would be an interesting exercise would be to compare the words of popular origin of different Romance languages. That I think would be a better guide to how far the basic lexicon of each is derived from Latin. A borrowing is a borrowing even if it comes from a parent language and ought to be disregarded in any assessment of how far a language has moved away from its parent.




I totally agree, that would be a crucial study, but it's still waiting for someone to do it.


For instead, in Spanish those words coming directly from ancient Rome's Vulgar Latin are named "patrimoniales". Patrimonial words can be just around 20-30% of Spanish vocabulary, they are now not only different from Classical Latin (which was true since the start) but also has been deformed, almost tortured, by the use of native speakers throug millenia. Furtherly, there are like 40% of new Latin words, that is introduced during the Renaissance and the Illustration directly from Classical Latin, so that they have experienced lesser or no changes. These new Latinism are shared not only by Romance languages, but because they are associated to culture and science, they are found in other groups of languages. I've noticed these new Latinism change more among Romance languages that in other groups, maybe because Romance speakers know how to "deform" the classical words into something more familiar. The rest of Spanish words are coming mainly from Arabic, Greek and French, and other languages in a lesser degree.

The patrimonial lexicum is the nucleous, the soul of the language. They are used more often on a daily base, and are more genuine (they are the equivalent to Anglo-Saxon words in English). We need to know the current state of this core words in every Romance language.


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## killerbee256

There has been constant influence from Latin on western romance languages, even before the Renaissance. Look at eastern romance, it was cut off influence from classical latin until the late middle ages. They are very different from western romance, different vocabulary due to the "choice" of different root words from Latin, different foreign loan words etc. They are difficult for western speakers to read and understand, oddly the same isn't as true the other way around. This influence late isn't just in romance languages, look at amount of Latin influence and loans on English, German and dutch.


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