# Romance Languages: Latin T



## ronanpoirier

This is a language evolution question.

There was this thread at the Portuguese forum about Latin expressions and it's meaning, There was an expression which had the word "patienta". I asked my dad if he knew that expression and he said he did and said it out loud. Since he studied Latin at school I guess it was correct. The T's in "patienta" were pronounced as TS. I didn't realize that time but now I see that the word in Portuguese is "paciência" (where the C which replaced the T sound like S) and there are a lot of word that in Italian are written with Z (and sound like TS) and in Portuguese they are written with C (before E or I) or Ç (before A, O or U). And then I remembered reading somewhere that Ç was originally created in the Spanish language and it had the TS sound. 

So, am I on the right track? My question is simple: did Latin T sounding TS envolve into other languages C/Ç/Z?


Thanks in advance  _o/


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## Outsider

Originariamente, o T latino pronunciava-se sempre [t]. Foi na Idade Média que passou a se pronunciar [ts] antes das vogais frontais [e] e _ (uma transformação fonética bastante comum, chamada palatalização). Em espanhol e português medievais, ç e c antes de e ou i ainda se pronunciavam [ts].

P.S. Vê só esta discussão. _


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## Namakemono

C before e or i used to be pronounced as [ts] in Spanish, and z was pronounced as in English. Then both sounds converged into a [th] sound.


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## modus.irrealis

Just to make a small correction to Outsider's post (and I apologize if I completely misunderstood it), but [t] became [ts] before [j], which is what [e] and _ became before other vowels. I'm currently reading a book on Vulgar Latin and it says this change pretty much occured everywhere, and almost everywhere the resulting sound was [ts] but this sound then later changed in the various languages, as the examples everyone has given show.

And just to add French, it has examples of this too, and this [t]/[ts] sound is now either [s] as in nation or patience (so it's spelt with both t and c), or [z] as in raison. I don't know why this voicing occured but my book says something similar happened in Italian as well where you have words like pozzo with [dz] from Latin puteum. (I think everything is also complicated even further depending on whether the word survived naturally in the various Romance language or was reintroduced later on from written Latin texts.)_


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## Outsider

modus.irrealis said:


> Just to make a small correction to Outsider's post (and I apologize if I completely misunderstood it), but [t] became [ts] before [j], which is what [e] and _ became before other vowels._


_You're probably right, I think I confused the palatalization of [t] before [j] with the more general palatalization of [k] before [e] and .



Namakemono said:



			C before e or i used to be pronounced as [ts] in Spanish, and z was pronounced as in English.
		
Click to expand...

What I have always read is that "z" was pronounced [dz] in medieval Ibero-Romance (as is still the case, usually, in Catalan)..._


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## robbie_SWE

In Romanian the sound "ts" is created by the letter "*ţ*". E.g. _pacienţă_. In all other constellations a single "t" is never pronounced as "ts", only the special letter "ţ" is used to express this sound. Kind of like the Ç, the same solution ayway. 

 robbie


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## jazyk

> There was this thread at the Portuguese forum about Latin expressions and it's meaning, There was an expression which had the word "patienta".


Just to clarify: patient*i*a.


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## BlueWolf

ronanpoirier said:


> I asked my dad if he knew that expression and he said he did and said it out loud. Since he studied Latin at school I guess it was correct. The T's in "patientia" were pronounced as TS.



Isso é a pronúncia da Igreja do latino, que é a mesma que a língua tinha na Idade Média. Nessa pronúncia, quasi tudo é pronúnciado como no italiano (por exemplo, "c" e "g" antes "e" e "i" são pronúnciados "tch" e "dj").


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## optimistique

In Dutch you can still find the 'ts'-sound in words we borrowed from French:

natie [na.tsi] = nation
politie [po.li.tsi] = police
plaats = place
gratie [gra.tsi] = grace
intelligentie [-tsi] = intelligence
ratio [ra.tsio] = ratio

and there are many, many other others. I don't know if the 'ts'-sound was still more or less present in French when we borrowed them, or that it was an adaption to the Dutch sound system.


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## Frank06

Hi,


optimistique said:


> In Dutch you can still find the 'ts'-sound in words we borrowed from French:
> natie [na.tsi] = nation
> politie [po.li.tsi] = police
> plaats = place
> gratie [gra.tsi] = grace
> intelligentie [-tsi] = intelligence
> ratio [ra.tsio] = ratio
> and there are many, many other others. I don't know if the 'ts'-sound was still more or less present in French when we borrowed them, or that it was an adaption to the Dutch sound system.



In Flemish Dutch, we don't say [ts] but [s] in all those cases (except in 'plaats', of course); the [ts] in the words that have clear Latin/Romance roots help us to determine that the speaker comes from the Netherlands .
I'm not sure at all, but I think that [ts] was also inspired by the (Late/Vulgar) Latin pronunciation which was popular till a few generations ago.

Really interesting in this list -- but that's another topic -- is the word 'plaats' (<place <L. platea < Gr. plateia) in this list.

Groetjes,

Frank


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