Talk:Romance languages/Archive 3

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Ya'll need to consider the fact that Italian is considered a Romance Language and state it accordingly. Italian is NOT Latin, get it straight will you?

Cheers..

-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.5.63.10 (talk) 14:06, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Why english first?

Hello, Im spanish and I found quite amazing that when reading the article, the table where there is a comparassion of the romance languages with latin, english appears firs, before latin, I know this is the english version of wikipedia but... are not we taking latin as the original language?? So why dont we just set latin in the first column of the table??? Please Answer, I dont want to change anything before previous discussion. (Sorry for my english, I´m trying to do my best XD)

This is because we may safely assume that people who read the article understand English and would like to know what the word means in English, first. Unoffensive text or character 07:29, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I know what you mean, but if you put latin first and next to it the english column it wont change a thing, a latin-english comparission will be as easy and obvious as it is now but with the difference that in that way we´d point out the importance of latin as the "mater lingua" of all the rest romance languages, because its latin and not english (from my point of view) the most important language to study in this article.

You Know, this wikipedia its not just for british and USA people, not at all. This english wikipedia its a common job of all the people around the world that knows how to speak in english (the "modern latin" by the way) and colaborate here, I just imagined that putting latin first would be a kind of "piece of respect" to all the people who actually speak a romance language in here.

I actually started that comparison table. I admit that I didn't really think long and hard about. Clearly, both the English and Latin words need to be there, for reasons already stated - but which first? I don't have a strong view, but it seems to me that the advantage of the Latin being where it is is that the romance languages follow immediately after it, so it might make reading along the line a bit easier. I imagine this is the sort of the thing where you aren't going to get a clearcut consensus one way or the the other. πίππύ δ'Ω∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 11:43, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I was under the impression that there was a very good reason for the first column to be in english. You may notice that after the english column, the rest of the table contains romance languages. If Latin were the first column then the chart of Romance languages would be broken up by the non-romance english column. That seemed to be the main reason for the format, although here are two other ones: First, as you said, english today is a lingua franca that many people will be able to reference to if they do not know the other languages. Second, being that this is the english-language wikipedia, it might be assumed that the people reading it are among those people that understand english. Therefore more people using this page will be expected to understand english rather than any particular one of the other columns. RSimione 17:18, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Latin cultures

Hello everyone! You may want to go to Latin cultures an participate in the article and discussion. There are a lot of disputed statements... The Ogre 12:41, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Ter x Haver in Brazilian Portuguese

While "tem" often replaces "há" and "tinha" is used in lieu of "havia" in informal spoken Brazilian Portuguese, I believe it is quite rare for "teve" to replace "houve". Furthermore, I don't think it is correct to say that "há" and "havia" have disappeared completely from spoken BP. Could the author of that claim in the article please provide a reliable reference ? 161.24.19.82 18:10, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

This is a generic article which deals only with broad trends. Exceptions to the schemes that the article outlines no doubt can be found. Still, if you wish you can rewrite the paragraph to make it more accurate. I ask only that you avoid making it too detailed. Remember that this is a generic article about the Romance languages, not about Brazilian Portuguese alone. FilipeS 15:37, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Confusion in categories

I was trying to bring the categorization of Romance languages in the Hebrew Wikipedia in harmony with its English counterpart and ran into these strange things:

• Category:Gallo-Iberian languages is the only category under Category:Western Romance languages. Is there anything else to put directly under Western Romance languages? Or are those just two names for the same group?
• Category:Occitan language and Category:Catalan language are both categorized under Gallo-Romance languages and Iberian Romance languages. Is it a controversy between linguists or a mistake in Wikipedia?

I am not an an expert in the classification of Romance languages. I am doing as preparation for writing a real academic paper about it. I will eventually find my way to academic books about it. In the meantime, any help will be strongly appreciated. --Amir E. Aharoni 12:43, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

You are right - it's all confusing. Partly this is because linguists disagree, and therefore Wiki editors follow different authorities. The Occitan/Catalan categorisation boils down to different theories that place them either in a Gallo-Romance group or an Iberian Romance group. The Western Romance classification is primarily, I think, based on the Ethnologue system. According to article Italo-Western languages, Rhaeto-Romance and Pyrenean-Mozarabic would also be in Western Romance with Gallo-Iberian - other authorities classify otherwise. Hope this helps! Man vyi 13:08, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

It helps a little, but adds even more confusion. According to Italo-Western languages, the Rhaeto-romance group and the Gallo-Iberian group are both directly beneath the Western branch, but according to Wikipedia categories the Rhaeto-romance group is beneath the Gallo-Iberian group ... And there are more confusing things.

What can i trust? There are contradictions everywhere. --Amir E. Aharoni 13:16, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that there are some political sensibilities behind these contradictions. In particular, I've noticed that some wish to group Catalan with Occitan, while others prefer to describe it as an "Iberian" language (thus grouping it implicitly with Spanish rather than Occitan). Still, note also the caveats stated at Classification of the Romance languages. FilipeS 15:35, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the Classification link. It seems to describe the problem pretty well. I'll have to dig into more academic sources, but it looks credible.

It also solves the problem with the lonely Gallo-Iberian languages, as long as we trust Ethnologue. I created Category:Pyrenean-Mozarabic languages accordingly.

As for Catalan - i more or less understand the political controversy and i'd better not touch it :) . At this moment i am mostly concerned with Italian. --Amir E. Aharoni 16:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Concerning Occitan, Catalan and the Occitano-Romance subgroup, a response is there.--Aubadaurada 13:37, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Big Category cleanup

OK, i couldn't stand the temptation and did an even bigger clean-up in all of the Category:Romance languages category tree.

I am ready for an avalanche of reverts and complaints ("Ethnologue is crap!", "Sicilian is not Italian!", "Galician is not Portuguese!" etc.), but at least now there's some reference point.

Anyone who can make this even better and provide good sources is welcome to do it. --Amir E. Aharoni 17:43, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

If you have the time and the patience, there's a merger of Languages_of_Europe#Romance_languages into List_of_Romance_languages waiting to be made. The section in the first article needs to be simplified, and list only the Romance languages still spoken today throughout Europe (as is done for the other language groups). Everything else should be moved to the second article. FilipeS 18:01, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

That's it, done.

Thank you so much for pointing me to this task. I started studying Spanish in 1999, French in 2001, Italian in 2003 and Judeo-Italian in 2005, but these three days of working on the merge were the best lesson of Romance linguistics i ever had. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:53, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your work! I would like your opinion on another possible merger: what do you think of joining List of Romance languages with Classification of the Romance languages? FilipeS 14:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Haitian Creole

Haitian Creole is considered as one of the romance languages and should therefore be included on this page.

Creole languages are not normally included in the language family of their superstrata. FilipeS 14:37, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Diacritics

The section on diacritics says that diacritics "common across Romance languages are the acute accent (á), the grave accent (à), the circumflex accent (â), the diaeresis mark (ü), and the tilde (ã)." I'm not aware of tildes being used outside of Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician. Unless I am mistaken about that, it seems that the use of the tilde is not common across Romance languages, but rather is restricted to one small subdivision of the Romance family, Ibero-Romance (or an even smaller subdivision, Western Ibero-Romance, if you classify Catalan as an Ibero-Romance language). All of the other diacritics listed in that sentence are used across multiple subdivisions. Perhaps the tilde should be broken out of that sentence and discussed more like the mention of ligatures in French. PubliusFL 23:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll rephrase it. FilipeS 12:34, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

"about the nature of Vulgar Latin"

From: "There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin". Would there be any change in meaning if the above were changed to simply "about Vulgar Latin"? RedRabbit 13:51, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

There is quite a bit of evidence about vulgar Latin, there are volumes and volumes of ancient inscriptions that antiquarians have copied down, ancient grammar books that warn students what errors to avoid, legal documents, oaths, memoirs and the like. It's a lot more than people think. Vulgar Latin was different in different countries and the development of the different languages can be traced and dated by comparative analysis. Nineteenth century philologists worked it out in considerable detail.173.56.164.41 (talk) 03:13, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Vulgar Latin

Would anyone object if I changed the section Vulgar Latin to this:

There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and it is often hard to interpret or generalise upon what there is. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples and forced resettlers—more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. It is believed that Vulgar Latin already had most of the features that are shared by all Romance languages[citation needed] and that distinguish them from Classical Latin: such as the almost complete loss of the Latin declension system, and its replacement by prepositions; the loss of the neuter gender, comparative inflections, and many verbal tenses; the use of articles; and the initial stages of change in pronunciation of c and g before the front vowels e and i. There are some modern languages, such as Finnish, which have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form; which perhaps suggests that the Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was always there, spoken alongside the written Classical Latin reserved for official and formal occasions.?

I wouldn't suggest that is perfect, but it seems tidier than the previous version. I am not sure what to do with the last sentence. RedRabbit 14:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.

Doesn't this apply to any language? FilipeS 14:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

In short, no. Not all languages divide up their parts of speech the same way. PubliusFL 19:26, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Map of Europe

This is a good map over the distribution of the Romance languages in 1850 but should we perhaps use a more current map? Or does anybody claim that French is not spoken in Quimper, in Strassbourg, in Marseille, in Toulouse and in Lyon. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in those cities speaking Breton, Alsace-German or Provencal. JdeJ (talk) 09:22, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Romance 20c en.png (if that's what you're referring to) marks all of the French state as 9a (generalized French) and seems to cover all the cities you mention. Is it a different map, then, you mean? Man vyi (talk) 12:27, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Right you are! Stupidly enough, I completely missed that. Still, isn't there a risk that others are as stupid as I? :) I still think the map is a bit disambiguous. And perhaps some similar additions could be made to Spain and Italy, as there is after all a general Italian speech that is completely absent from the map. JdeJ (talk) 12:33, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The map's certainly not ideal. Generalized Italian and Spanish would probably be helpful, as well as better distinction of the Oïl languages, and probably other tweaks - but I'm not in a position to undertake that myself. Man vyi (talk) 13:30, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Same here. And I wouldn't even know how to do it, not very good with computers. :) Well, it's not a big problem provided the persons who read it know a bit about the Romance languages. If not, they will probably wonder if there isn't a language called Italian spoken anywhere in Europe. :) JdeJ (talk) 15:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Map of The world

someone should check the map, since equatorial guinea appear as a portuguese speaking country, while is a spanish speaking one (the only one in africa holding it as official language actually. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.32.56.2 (talk) 21:04, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

In fact, you are just partially right. Spanish is, as you say, the main official language but French and Portuguese are also official thought less used (I don't even know if Portuguese is spoken at all). However, Spanish is not the principal mother tongue. Aaker (talk) 20:24, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Sardinian cognate of dicere

I've commented out Sardinian from the table with the sample conjugations, because the verb does not seem to be a cognate of Latin dicere. Should anyone know of such a cognate, please add it to the table. FilipeS (talk) 14:40, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Current Map of Romance Languages in Europe

I would like to point out a few problems with this map: the MAP is very rough and contains several errors. For example in Alsace and Bretonia French is spoken as a first language by over 75% of the population (these areas are bilingual at most) but the map does not show that. In Spain, virtually less than 15% of the population speaks Basque and Catalonian and Spanish are both spoken in Catalonia. In Romania's Szeklerland, people are indeed bilingual however in Moldova's Transnistrian region bilingualism is only persistant in the centre of the region, not throughout as it is depicted on the map. Similarly in Gagauzia, Romanian is understood by just 5% of the population. The spread of the Romanian language is also slightly exagerated in Chernivtsi Oblast. Bellow is a map I propose based on the languages of Europe map as well as current wiki articles on Alsace, Chernivtsi Oblast, Gagauzia and Basque Country.

Romance languages, 20th century

Dapiks (talk) 20:31, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I highly support your changes which better reflect the actual/present state. Now, If you are able to do that, I would suggest 2 additional changes:

-1- Make the color for catalan closer to occitan (grey-green) than to western-ibero-roman (yellow-green), as to show that catalan and occitan are sister or even twin languages; and form a kind of bridge or medium stage (together with northern italian idioms). You may use the present color for gascon.

-2- Let the gascon variant of occitan appear in the occitan color. I know that some claim that it should be regarded as a separate language, but this is very rare, even among gascon activists -- who rather support the occitan combat. You can find similar claims for valencian distinct of catalan, or even andalucian of castilian. These claims are not wrong, but there is no limit in splitting, then... In the germanic family, think at dutch/plattdeutsch (low german), then dutch/flemish, then flemish/west flemish, etc.

--Denispir (talk) 11:35, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

English should be counted as a Romance language, not a Germanic language

I can see why they would say English is a Germanic language, there are many German words in English, But English is more related to French, there are more French words in English than in German.

In fact, English is more closely related to German than to French. An analogy: think of cousins who remain closely related genetically, regardless of the country of origin of whatever clothes they may have borrowed. Man vyi (talk) 05:23, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

English is definitely Germanic, even with the large Norman and French vocabulary. Studies have been done revealing that the 100 most common words in English are all of Germanic origin and 80 something percent of the 1,000 most common words are of Germanic origin. Many of the French words are used mostly in law and science and not everyday conversation. All linguistic books that I have state that it is Germanic. Kman543210 (talk) 06:16, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree to say that English is more a German language than a Romance one, especially because of its primal origin and of its grammar. However you can't say that Romance words (words from "Old French" or Latin) are almost not used in everyday conversation. Around 60% of the words are of french or Latin origin (see English Language in Wikipedia). For example in the post above : "definitely", "studies", "revealing", "origin", "Germanic", "large", "vocabulary" are all of French or/and Latin origin...

82.229.152.241 (talk) 15:37, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

You are correct that according to the English Wikipedia, 56% are either from Norman, French, or Latin. The 2 studies were of 80,000 and 10,000 English words. What I was stating was 100% of the 100 most common and over 80% of the 1,000 most common are Germanic in origin. I also said that many words are not used in everyday speech, not most or all. There are thousands of words from Latin and French, but many of them are used in law and science. Kman543210 (talk) 16:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Guys - let's not get sucked into idiotic discussions - if someone wants to pursue mad cap theories, they can go start their own blog. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 23:54, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

It is obvious for every romance speaker that English has nothing to see with a romance language. The fact that that language had borrowed many "intellectual" words from Latin doesn't change nothing. Being a romance language is not a question of proportion of words with Latin origins in an extended vocabulary. English is a germanic language because it is derived from proto-Germanic. other Germanic languages such as German also have Latin-based vocabulary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.224.59.166 (talk) 18:47, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

As a french native speaker & language lover, I guess that even if English would throw away all of its Germanic vocabulary and use only romance words instead, it would still not be a romance language -- and remain Germanic for a whole lot of sensible criteria.

--Denispir (talk) 11:41, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

The English Language is both Germanic and Romance could it be counted as the both the Germanic languages (particularly things like Frisian and Dutch) and The Romance languages (particularly French and other Langues d'oil) have laid foundations into modern day English ever since the various invasions of Germanic and Romance speaking Peoples into Britain i.e. Romans (Latin), Anglo-Saxons (Anglo-Saxon) Norse (Old Norse) Danes (Danish Variant) Normans (French). After the Norman Invasion French was used by the more well of and titled people and Anglo-Saxon was used by the poor and peasants until they ,merged together to form the Ancestor of Modern day English. So could it be put in as a descendant of both Romance and Germanic. --Lemonade100 (talk) 16:20, 8 January 2009 (GMT)

The Middle English creole hypothesis is of interest, but including English in encyclopaedic descriptions of the Romance languages is really giving far too much weight to a fringe theory. Man vyi (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Yet anyone who has learned English and French will agree that the Structure is very similar... but is that because they are both indo-european? --Lemonade100 (talk) 17:53, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't have said that the structure of the languages is really much more similar than any other two IE languages from different branches that have been in close contact for a long time. For example, the verb tense systems differ markedly; the differences in verb conjugation; agreement of adjectives; gender... But English is clearly Germanic (although supporters of the creole hypothesis would claim that loss of gender marking and agreement is evidence of creolisation). To take a somewhat comparable example: Romanian is clearly Romance despite the historical lexical influence from Slavonic (and since language reforms have removed many of the historical Slavonic borrowings from the modern standard language, and Italian and French have been more recent models for lexical development, the Romance character of Romanian is much more obvious to the casual eye). Man vyi (talk) 07:29, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

As a native french speaker I must say that English structure is nothing like french. One migt think so if these languages are the only ones he knows. We french people have precisely very hard time at shool when learning Enlgish to catch english language's logical structure and grammar whi is very distant to ours. Iversely, English speakers that learn french make a lot of important structural and gramatical mistakes (+vocabulary mistakes). No, sorry, English is really in no way nothing to see with a romance language, sorry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.224.59.166 (talk) 00:12, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Mutual intelligibility

It would be interesting to know more about how well Romance speakers from different places can understand each other, the especially written language. How well does a Brazilian understand written Romanian? Is it difficult for an Angolan to understand what a Spaniard says? Has anyone seen any studies? Aaker (talk) 21:30, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Sample section

I have re-introduced the sample section as I believe this adds a lot to the article. It's probably more useful than the other comparative section as it compares whole sentences rather than just words. --Gibmetal 77^talk 10:57, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. The sample section reveals little about each language's grammar (discussed in detail further down) or phonology; all it shows is the word for "window" in each language, followed by a discussion about how each language came to arrive at that word for window!--Yolgnu (talk) 12:35, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I think having a sample section does add to the article. I like being able to see the same sentence in several of the Romance languages together for comparison to see how they are similar and how they are different. If you object to the sample sentence that were recently removed, maybe we can put another one up, but I always think it adds to see comparative texts. Kman543210 (talk) 06:17, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yolgnu makes a good point - something instructive would be to come up with a sentence that showed some variation in prepositions, pronouns and maybe even the use of tenses (e.g. different takes on the use of the subjunctive and/or conditional, or the past tenses). E.g. (just for argument's sake): If she had arrived a minute earlier she may have noticed the small boy seated quietly at the table eating two slices of bread with his soup. or something that shows a variety of grammatical parts, which, hopefully, might highlight some differences (could also think abouth throwing in adjectives and adverbs, etc.). A sentence comparison will definitely be useful if we pick up a good one! πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 06:53, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yolgnu - I'm not sure if there is a consenus yet except that there is at least some support for something similar. Unless someone comes up with a better sample sentence (and mine above was just a very tentative suggestion) - then I don't think you should pull it out. I do agree with your general proposition that this particular objective, while worthy, could probably be better met. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 03:40, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with the above poster. If someone continues to remove it at this point, I shan't revert the edit as another user has been doing; however, I don't see a problem with keeping it in until something better is created. Is there anyone that can find an example sentence in the most common Romance languages? I don't think it needs to be long and complicated, but like I previously stated, I strongly think it adds to the article. Kman543210 (talk) 03:50, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but I'm still not convinced that this section adds anything to the article. I think it's ridiculous to try to explain the differences between these languages in one sentence, and if anything we should be showing the similarities between them, not the differences.--Yolgnu (talk) 09:33, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it should be used to "explain the differences between the languages", but it is very useful to be able to compare them. Where one can see both the differences as well as the similarities. --Gibmetal 77^talk 14:07, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I oppose this deletion. FilipeS (talk) 18:11, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

What deletion? We're discussing in what form it should be restored, but since it's agreed that the current version is bad, it's been temporarily removed. Please join the discussion, rather than edit warring.--Yolgnu (talk) 00:58, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree that these comparisons of the different languages should stay. I looked at this history of this, and it was deleted w/o consensus to delete. Consensus seems to be that it's a good idea to keep and could be improved, but it should stay until it's improved, not deleted. 66.53.210.194 (talk) 01:28, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

That it should stay until it's improved is your opinion, not consensus.--Yolgnu (talk) 02:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Users Gibmetal77, FilipeS, πιππίνυ δ, Kman543210, and I all agree that it should stay according to the above discussion. You're the only one who seems to be deleting it. Last time I checked, 5 to 1 is consensus. 66.53.210.194 (talk) 02:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

No, those users agreed that *a* sample section should be there, but not the current one.--Yolgnu (talk) 02:52, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Gibmetal77 reverted deletion first, so he agrees should stay. πιππίνυ δ states "I don't think you should pull it out." FilipeS reverted deletion and stated "oppose this deletion." Kman543210 stated "I don't see a problem with keeping it in until something better is created." That is clear to me that even though everyone agrees that you can improve it, they all agree that it should stay until then. Jabez2000 (talk) 03:18, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Well if you're serious about improving the article, rather than just looking to edit war, I'm sure you'll tell what your suggestions for improving the sample section are.--Yolgnu (talk) 07:51, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Yolgnu wrote: "No, those users agreed that *a* sample section should be there, but not the current one." Kindly do not put words in my mouth. My position is that, until such time as a better comparison is produced by some editor, the current one should stay where it is. FilipeS (talk) 12:14, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Does anyone else think that the super script numbers that were just added are a little distracting in trying to read the example sentences? I think the idea was good intended, but to me it's more of a distraction in a section that still may need improvement. Kman543210 (talk) 09:20, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Neuter Gender

I just noticed the recent edit stating that Romanian still has the neuter gender and that Italian has remnants of it. Doesn’t Spanish still have remnants of the neuter gender as well in the lo constructions such as lo mejor or lo bueno? I've been under the impression that this is a gender-neutral construction. Kman543210 (talk) 12:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

There are remnants of the neuter is several Romance languages, but they are usually minor. What I mean by this is that they are not usually visible in noun inflection — with the exception of Romanian, and, arguably, Italian. The thing is, it's also possible to analyse Italian neuter nouns as a mix of masculine and feminine (masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural). I don't think we should be too dogmatic about this. There are different ways to analyse it. FilipeS (talk) 12:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks...wasn't trying to be dogmatic, but when I read that it was just Italian and Romanian, it got my brain cells going back to the Spanish grammar days. Actually, I just confirmed that lo is considered the neuter definite article in Spanish, and it's actually quite common. Whether it comes from the Latin neuter gender, that I'm not sure of, but it is definitely a commonly used construction that I use all the time when I'm speaking Spanish. Kman543210 (talk) 12:42, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

It's generally agreed that languages on the conservative side of the La Spezia-Rimini Line retain features of the neuter, while languages on the innovative side have entirely lost them. Romanian is generally - whether correctly or incorrectly - regarded as having preserved the neuter more or less intact, while Italian is generally regarded as having mostly lost it, but preserved important features of it.--Yolgnu (talk) 12:53, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

The masculine-singular / feminine-plural analysis that Filipe mentions for Italian is equally applicable to Romanian. But in Romanian, the nouns that behave like this are much more numerous, they form a productive class, and they are traditionally referred to as neuter nouns. So this is more than just "residual traces" of neuter gender. At the same time, it cannot be said that Romanian "retains the neuter" from Latin: there are no neuter declensions, no specifically neuter endings. Could we please end the current edit war and focus on producing an accurate description? CapnPrep (talk) 22:24, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Of course, when I used the word "residual" I was not talking about Romanian, but evidently tat flew over everyone's heads. FilipeS (talk) 14:43, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The version that you restored several times did use "residual" in reference to Romanian. Anyway, I have edited the text because reverting back and forth is really not useful. To address (or rather, to sidestep) Kman's original question above, I made it explicit that the article is talking about noun gender here (and thus ignoring things like lo in Spanish). CapnPrep (talk) 15:16, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I reverted Yolgnu's edits, because they echoed the nationalistic fiction that Romanian is the only Romance language with any trace whatsoever of the neuter. I have no objection to a rewrite to make the article more accurate, but I do object to edits that push nationalistic and linguisticallly false agendas. FilipeS (talk) 16:00, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Ha ha ha! You've just given me the biggest laugh I've had in a long time! You probably don't appreciate the irony of calling me a Romanian nationalist, right after I went on a Wiki-crusade against Romanian nationalism[1][2][3]. It would have to be a pretty sad nationalism: "We're the greatest ethnic group in the world, because we've got the only language preserving traces of the Latin neuter!" And Filipe, kindly do not put words in my mouth: I said "Italian [has] preserved important features" of the neuter, not "Romanian is the only Romance language with any trace whatsoever of the neuter". All this makes it obvious you're nothing but a disruptive, moronic edit warrior: and your edits aren't even "linguisticallly" accurate.--Yolgnu (talk) 06:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:NPA. FilipeS (talk) 13:15, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Geographic Distribution (W. vs. S. Europe) of Origin

I've noticed a couple editors disagreeing as to whether the Romance languages originally were in Western or Southern Europe. I think the easiest solution would be just to change the info box to simply say Europe instead of originally Southern or Western Europe. If we need to be specific, according to the UN,[[4]] Romance countries in European regions are as follows: Western Europe: France; Southern Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Andorra; Eastern Europe: Romania, Moldova. I vote that we don't include the word originally in the info box because the origins and history of the languages is explained in the article so that it simply would read, "Europe, Latin America, Quebec, and much of Western Africa." Kman543210 (talk) 06:32, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Europe would make eminent sense. Southern Europe would appear to be justifiable based on Southern_Europe#Linguistic_definition. But I can't see how Western Europe can be justified as the area of origin of Romance languages, especially given our knowledge of the extinct Romance dialects of Europe. Man vyi (talk) 06:42, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought that Southern Europe nails it far better than either Western Europe or just Europe. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 07:24, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

If we're talking about where the Romance languages originated from, then absolutely it's Southern Europe because Latin was the language of Rome. I'm thinking, though, that the info box is meant for current distribution of the languages and not necessarily meant to teach a history. For that reason, I propose for the info box simply Europe, Latin America, Quebec, and much of Western Africa and not specifying in the box where it originated. I would not completely object to specifying that it originated from Southern Europe, but Romance languages are currently spoken throughout much of Europe. Kman543210 (talk) 07:31, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

But they aren't spoken in Northern Europe, that's why "Southern Europe" has some appeal to me (I should add that I wasn't the one who put it in there). I agree that Europe is better than Western Europe. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 07:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Romance languages are obviously originating from southern europe. All these languages have their roots in latin, which originated in Rome, which is obviously in southern Europe. Those languages in Europe are associated with southern Europe because it is where most of the roman empire lyed, and the lands where that are spoken represent the lands that were the most heavily romanized (latinized), that is too say mainly south-western Europe. "Western Europe" is much too vague, and also would exclude the romance language of south-east Europe that is Romanian, even "south-western" would be unfair for Romanian. I think recalling "southern Europe" is the best otion because it is the reality of how things are and how these languages are distributed in Europe and it speaks about where is located the origin of all of them. I think we can't say just "Europe" because it is way too general, and especially because we precise "latin America" when speaking of the America. In that case why not saying just "Europe, America and Asia" ? If we precise that they are spoken in latin-America (which would be better to say central and south America since "latin-America" doesn't define a geographic area but just say that it is the area of the Americas where romance languages are spoken), we sould alsoprecise that they are spoken in latin Europe or southern Europe.

I agree, I've changed it back to Southern Europe - please sign-off your comments. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 00:20, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Donare

Also, in the process, the Latin word "donare" was removed, something I couldn't understand, since it's the source of several modern Romance words such as "donner". Is the reasoning behind the edit, that the semantic connotaions are different? I think it'd make more sense to keep it. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 09:33, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Samples section overloaded with etymologies, unreadable

The Samples section is now unreadable, with all the irrelevant etymologies. Is anyone opposed to getting rid of the etymologies? FilipeS (talk) 13:19, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I absolutely agree. I actually posed the same question on June 7th under the Sample section above, but no one responded. I think it's there for comparison of the different languages, not for etymology. Kman543210 (talk) 13:45, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, yeah, I added it for emphasis on similarities and differences, but it might look a little stuffed, now. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 20:30, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

The vocabulary table already deals with etymology in detail... ;-) FilipeS (talk) 21:44, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to delete the etymology notes in the sample section. If anyone feels that strongly that they should remain, feel free to revert my edits. I just think it's a little too busy with all the numbers inserted. Kman543210 (talk) 01:52, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I understand you. Go ahead! 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 10:09, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Catalan

Catalan is an Ibero-Romance language. Check it out because there is a mistake. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.175.249.250 (talk) 09:11, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not necessarily a mistake; Catalan fits in both branches. The problem is making sure that this article, Catalan language, and Iberian Romance languages say the same thing (and also keep an eye on the development of the stubs Gallo-Iberian, Gallo-Romance languages). CapnPrep (talk) 09:22, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Catalan is ibero-romance, [5] or Catalan entry in wiki. This classification represented here is sometimes used by ultra-nationalists with no scientific value in order to force differences with Spanish speakers —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.57.192.25 (talk) 15:02, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Where are Moldavian and Valencian languages?

The division and the map of the Romance languages are not completely accurate, because there's no mentioning of the Valencian and the Moldavian languages. Accordingly to the article about the Slavic languages, where there are 3 names (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian) for one SAME language - Serbocroatian or Central South Slavic language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Slavic_languages_2000s.png it is the same situation with the division of the Romance languages, in which case the SAME languages for Romanians and Moldavians (plus the ones for Catalonians and Valencians) should list their separate languages - Moldavian, Romanian, Catalan and Valencian languages. All the rest in the article is well done, especially the divisions of the languages in Italy, France and the rest of Spain. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 17:32, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Picard

Why isn't this language included in this page - it is definitely a Romance language and very similar to French. Think we should put this in.

I guess it is because all langues d'oïl are often regarded as dialects of one single language. Aaker (talk) 22:00, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Official languages

hi, i just wanted to point out that spanish is not the official languago of mexico, as this country has no official language. it has many languages of "significant importance" but no official national language. it is of course the de facto national language, however communities that do not use the language at all are small but common. official documents can be obtained in many languages, most notably schoolbooks in the K-12 level. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.140.3.14 (talk) 01:16, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Why are Israel and Lebanon in the infobox?

There are not solid communities of first-language speakers in either country, in numbers which would be relevant for such a brief global summary... AnonMoos (talk) 13:24, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

The comparative square is very confuse --El estremeñu (talk) 22:55, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Israel appears there because of the presence of a vibrant community of Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardic Jews. The language is known as Ladino and it is a form of 16th-century Spanish traditionally used by the Sephardic ("Spanish" in Hebrew) community all over the world.

Lebanon has a large group of French speakers due to its history as a League of Nations French mandate. --Bxmuchacho (talk) 13:49, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Woefully inaccurate map

This map is so inaccurate, there's some legitimate question whether it should be in use at all. I'm going to try and find a more accurate one, but even if I can't find one (and I don't know how to make one myself; maybe I need to look into that), should a map that is so misleading (whether due to inaccuracy, or wishful thinking) really be included in an encyclopedia? I'm inclined to think not.

Some of the more glaring errors:

• U.S. state of New Mexico in dark green
• Southern Illinois in light green (northern Illinois is a stretch)
• Upstate New York in light green
• Northern Louisiana in light blue
• New Brunswick in dark blue

I also question the ongoing use of Romance tongues in North Africa and Indochina; are people really still speaking Italian in Tripoli, or French in Phnom Penh? Some shading for Spanish in far northern, coastal Morocco is probably warranted, but most of North Africa under a strong Romance language influence? Really? KevinOKeeffe (talk) 00:06, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't find any better maps at Commons (I did find one or two that were even more inaccurate). I'm thinking of substituting this map for a map that shows all the languages of the world ie., http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Languages_world_map.png

That's a far from perfect solution, but the present status quo, with a grossly inaccurate map, is pretty unacceptable. I don't even know if I have any software on my computer I can use to create a more accurate map of Romance language distribution, and it may well take me a while to complete such a project. I'm thinking of substituting the world languages map in the meantime. One issue I have with that map, however, is that the Persian languages are only a slightly different shade of blue than the Romance tongues. While most people are probably informed enough to work that out for themselves, we don't want relatively ignorant high school kids coming here, and thinking that Iran and Afghanistan speak Romance languages. This map has other issues as well (like making it appear that people in Wales speak mainly Welsh, as opposed to English, but at least it seems pretty accurate in so far as Romance languages go (although it does overstate the presence of French in southern Louisiana). So I'm not really certain what I'm going to do. Not that I wouldn't (gladly!) welcome input from others...but I suspect I'm basically talking to myself on this page, alas. KevinOKeeffe (talk) 05:18, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Why is New Mexico in dark green an error? Spanish is an official language of the state.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

the info box says "much of western africa" while in the map there's nothing to see of it.

or am i wrong? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.222.212.51 (talk) 07:31, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

This map is pretty ridiculous - it puts all the North region of Brazil as "green", that's absurd. Everyone speaks portuguese in Brazil, and portuguese is a romance language. The number of indiginous groups still speaking guarani or such other language is statistically insignificant (and the ones that do speak such language, in general, know portuguese too). The whole Brazilian map should be blue. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.80.62.37 (talk) 11:45, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Cite #68

There is an error with cite #68 (it shows up in the References section). I tried deleting cite #68, but the error just transfers to cite #69 or #67 (I forget which). There must be some text somewhere that is inadvertently messing with the REF tags, but I'll be damned if I can spot it. Perhaps someone else can. KevinOKeeffe (talk) 09:33, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Romanian in the 1st comparative table/sample

The word "cinare" is not in use in Romanian. The version "inainte de a cina" is the only correct one in written and spoken, non-poetic 21st century Romanian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.216.148.215 (talk) 05:50, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Please provide sources. According to at least that source pointed in the article, long infinitive and short infinitive are equivalent after "înainte de". But how do you know, sincerly, that "cinare" is not in use? It is odd to hear that. And how do you decide what is a valid word or not? The long infinitive is a form of the verb, but mostly it becomes a nominalisation of the action. Still, according to this source (see section 5.1.1) there are very rare cases where the long infinitive cannot be used (there is an example there, the reflexive verb a se preta). You can read more on this subject in Exprimarea numelui de acţiune prin substantive cu formă de infinitiv lung şi de supin, written by Magdalena Popescu-Marin and Elena Carabulea, p. 297. You can also have a look on Ion Diaconescu's "Infinitivul în limba română". But please don't decide on your own what is correct and what not, because there are 28 million speakers of Romanian, spread across some 300,000 sq. km, and I doubt you asked every one of them what they use or not. I assure you, incorrect it can't be, as the long infinitive (whether nominal or not) exists in Romanian and it is very correct to use it after înainte de (as pointed by Vasile Breban). Whether in use or not, I cannot make an accurate statistic, still I assure you this word is used (in the Greek-Catholic Church, the mass in the evening is called "după cinare"). --Danutz (talk) 09:54, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

About the comparative tables

I believe that the comparative tables are very consfuse, and I want to eliminate. --Der Künstler (talk) 18:39, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

WP:PRESERVE. By that token, just about everything you have written so far should be "eliminated". Seriously... --LjL (talk) 13:34, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Through of a votation may decide the elimination of the comparativ tables. I have two reasons

• excessive amount of languages, is enough to put few languages

• grammar confusions, in many Romance languages, the words proveed from accusative form, Ex: In Portuguese, the word cidade, proveed from Latin civitatem, but it don't proveed from civitatis (nominativre form). --Der Künstler (talk) 01:18, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Romanesci (also cited by Giuseppe Lazarini in other wikipedia articles) is NOT a hoax....

...Hello - first let me apologize for any trouble my inexperience in wikipedia my have caused. I experienced quite a bit of difficulty adding references to other articles that mention Romanesci (pronounced "Romaneshti"). Aromanian is within the same family as Romanesci since it most likely also originated from Latin-speaking settlers of the Eastern Roman Empire (Greece in the case of the Romanae). Romanesci, however, is distinct and provides a very interesting window into the cultural/linguistic history of the common Latin-speaking people that inhabited the Eastern half of the Empire. To not acknowledge Romanesci would be a significant loss in the quest to link what remnants of the common Roman's speech still exist and are alive today. My credentials include 25 years of formal study of Roman history and the Latin language, a B.A. in the Classics (Greek and Roman History and Literature) from North Central College in Naperville, an unpublished thesis on the similarities of Romanesci and Latin (in most ways it is just as close if not closer than any Romance language to Latin), and of course - a lifetime of speaking the authentic Romanesci spoken by the Greco-Romans still living in Greece and many other areas of the former Roman Empire. Please feel free to contact me if there is any interest in testing, proving, and documenting the living language of Romanesci (which literally means "knows Roman"). It would be a terrible shame to not share my findings on this language's link to the Roman past which shaped much of Western culture. As the Romanae still say - S'hai Sanitate (May You Have Health) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tchino (talk • contribs) 06:38, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is written on the basis of reliable sources that are verifiable. Can you provide bibliographic information on the language? I'm afraid Google/Google Scholar turn up nothing useful. Once you have a source for the material, it can be added to the relevant articles. — æk^Talk 10:31, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

"Romanesci"

The Romance language in Greece that you are referring to is normally called Megleno-Romanian. Be aware that the term Romanesci is also a politically charged term in the Balkans due to the controversy over linguistic and ethnic identity in Moldova.

--Bxmuchacho (talk) 13:38, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Translation of tall

I may be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that the translation for High is not the one's listed here, but belongs to the translation for tall.

Could some linguist, or a possessor of many dictionaries, check? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.147.90.103 (talk) 20:18, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Tall - Altus

English uses two different words for height. One is used to describe height for a person/thing and another for a place. The modern Romance languages do not. The word is correct for both tall and high. ex: Spanish - "El es más alto que yo." He is taller than me. "Un sitio muy alto." A very high place. --Bxmuchacho (talk) 12:23, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

May I indicate that in French 'grand' (normally 'big' in English') is normally used in common speech for either 'tall' or 'old'. To prevent confusion 'tall' can translate 'de grande taille' and 'old' 'âgé'?

Acsacal (talk) 15:36, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Albanian

Removed this reference "Albanian" because Albanian is not a member of the Romance subgroup of the Italic branch of Indo-European. While Albanian has numerous loanwords from Latin, the English language has even more, yet English is still clearly a member of West Germanic. Albanian's affinities lie with either ancient Illyrian or ancient Thracian (probably with both). Further, the link associated with it didn't link to a language article or research periodical, but to a rather shoddily written student term paper.

As a Romance philologist I find it disturbing that the average layman doesn't know how to tell the difference between what is and what is NOT a Romance language. The Romance languages are among the easiest of European languages to identify just by a cursory glance of their writing conventions.

Rule of thumb:

If a European language uses de or di to mean "of" or "from" (or variations with the contracted forms of the definite article) you can bet your bottom dollar that it's a member of the Romance group. ex: Curtea de Arges, Giro del Veneto, Santiago de Cuba, Notre Dame de Paris, Vilafranca del Penedes, Mogi das Cruzes.

Reference has moved to here, [6], but as stated, it's wrong, anyhow. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:31, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Picard

The translation for Picard seems to include both the forms "thou sayest" and "he says". Seems unnecessary since it's not the case for any other language. Could someone more familiar with Picard check it out? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:41, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

"Formal" vs. "register differences"

To some scholars, this suggests that (…) Vulgar Latin (…) was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. What distinction is this getting at? I'm not really grasping one. "Official and formal occasions" is after all one of the most typical areas of life to have a separate linguistic register. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:02, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Samples - Mozarabic

Just for curious, who did reconstruct it and how?, any source?. Ferrandi (talk) 14:33, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Sample - Dalmatian

Using current Wikipedia pages and links on the Dalmatian language, I have almost reconstructed the Dalmatian phrase:

Jala tot de el/la ______ fermua la finiastra aninč de cenur/kenur.

Lit: She all of the (time) secures (Fr: fermer) the window before dining.

Should this be included? Thanks for your input! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.118.61.80 (talk) 22:36, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

nonsense?

Cerlomin deleted the following text:

Catalan is unusual in that it is not the main language of any nation-state, other than Andorra (a European microstate between Spain and France), but nonetheless has been able to compete and even gain speakers at the expense of the dominant language of its primary nation (Spanish); in fact, Catalan is probably the only minority European language whose long-term survival is not under threat. This is due to a strong belief that the Catalan language is a critical component of the ethnic identity of the Catalan people. This has allowed them to resist the assimilationist urges that are in the process of destroying most of the remaining minority-language communities, even those that have strong government support (e.g. Irish language speakers).

It may be unreferenced, but I see no nonsense or pov. Has anybody some numbers about the gaining popularity of the Catalan language?--Sajoch (talk) 23:07, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I disagree, this is not nonsense and separatist at all. Catalan has more total speakers than some official languages of the European Union (total Catalan/Valencian speakers in Europe are not much less than Greek, Hungarian or European Portuguese speakers, and exceed Danish or Finnish speakers), Catalan is both a regional (in Spain, France and Italy) and national language (in Andorra), Catalan is not a threatened or endangered language, and the Catalan language is a true critical compoment of the ethnic identity of the Catalan people.

He was right, Catalan doesn't have 12 million native speakers... When I added 12 million they were mentioning total speakers, rather than native speakers... Jɑυмe (xarrades) 01:14, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

If you want to change that number, you have to provide reliable sources. Ethnologue reports 12 milions: http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size --Grifter72 (talk) 11:44, 11 December 2011 (UTC) The fact that Ethnologue reports 12 million speakers in a region with 7.5 million habitants only demonstrates that Ethnologue is not any reliable source. You should remove the statement and add reliable information when it is available. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.148.74.57 (talk) 07:04, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I wrote this text originally and I believe it's NPOV. Catalan is unusual as a case of a language with no (non-microstate) nation backing it that has held its own. In fact, it's often studied by sociolinguists looking to understand the processes of language decline and death and to see why some minority languages resist this pressure better than others. There are no other similar languages in Europe, AFAIK. Benwing (talk) 03:16, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

The POV being pushed here is "it's bad when a language disappears". I think most of us can live with that. The main problem in this passage is the total lack of references, although some of the statements are sourced in the main article on Catalan. CapnPrep (talk) 16:10, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

censorship

Can anything be done about the automated censorship of the Dante quotation in footnote 12, which now ends: "nam domus nova et dominus meus lo**censored**ur." The censored part is a "c" followed by a "u" followed by an "n" followed by a "t"; the original can be found, for example, here: http://www.greatdante.net/texts/vulgari/vulgari.html (chapter XI, paragraph 7). I wonder if the Automated Puritan, or whatever it's called, also censors the Latin word for "with," which is "c" followed by "u" followed by "m." GeckoFeet (talk) 01:00, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Origin of Romance Tenses chart — clarification on Italian Preterite

The idea that the Italian preterite is a "remote past" (including the name "passato remoto" itself) is entirely a conception of the Regional Standard Italian used in Northern Italy and not actual Standard Italian, which is literary Tuscan.

In Florence this morning, and yesterday, and a year ago, and 500 years ago, the Florentines used the preterite both in writing and in their normal day-to-day conversation — as explain the keepers of the Standard Italian Language, the Accademia della Crusca, here:

http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/faq/faq_risp.php?id=4697&ctg_id=93

I have updated the Origin of Romance Tenses chart to reflect this. That is, I updated it in the past, but it was not a punctual action. The state of being updated endures to the present. And hopefully the future.

The North is so dominant culturally today in Italy (and on Wikipedia) that Northerners are not even aware that indeed they are speaking and writing (and creating grammatically-incorrect Italian Wikipedia templates in) a distinct Regional Standard Italian, not "the" Standard Italian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.180.1.148 (talk) 17:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Digraphs and trigraphs (also h)

This section (Digraphs and trigraphs) at the beginning reads:
"Since most Romance languages have more sounds than can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resort to the use of digraphs and trigraphs – combinations of two or three letters with a single sound value. The concept (but not the actual combinations) is derived from Classical Latin, which used, for example, TH, PH, and CH when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "ϕ" (later "φ"), and "χ". These were once aspirated sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and the H represented what sounded to the Romans like an /ʰ/ following /t/, /p/, and /k/ respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:"
My understanding of this passage is that the Romans created all these digraphs and the letter h on their own, without influence, partially in order to represent as closely as possible the relevant Greek sounds as they sounded to them, transliterating single Greek letters.Can this be verified?I.e. sources?Cause although the Latin alphabet was derived from the Etruscan one (and the latter from the one of Chalcis-Euboea), wherein as far as I know (admittedly very limited knowledge) these digraphs were not present (though a form of h was), most (probably all except th) of these digraphs (and h) were already present, they already existed in Greek in one form or another in some variant of the Greek alphabet;please read -inter alia- this wiki-article.So what do the sources say: Did the Romans created them again on their own without being influenced, without copying (as this passage, at least as I understand it, claims) or did they copy other variants of the Greek alphabet?Does anybody know??? Thanatos|talk 01:40, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

thoughts — uh?

... The Gallo-Romance languages went even farther, merging final /e o/, and French has carried things to the logical extreme by deleting all post-stressed vowels and uniformly placing the stress on the final syllable (except for a more-or-less non-phonemic final unstressed [ə] that occasionally appears, like the almost unnoticeable "uh" after the word "thoughts.").

I get the feeling I'm missing some context here. Is there an English dialect (other than Chicomarxic) where final /ts/ commonly becomes /tsǝ/? —Tamfang (talk) 06:38, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

I've just wondered the same thing. Perhaps some more "exotic" dialects, but none that I have heard of. But with a French accent, the described phenomenon is possible or even likely to occur (it seems /ə/ is still present for many speakers, even in words such as dame, but devoiced or something, forming an ultrashort syllable – I believe I can also hear this trace of the schwa in their speech rhythm when they pronounce German words, especially in consonant clusters, because they sound distinctly slow and over-enunciated). Native speakers of Spanish and Italian may add an -e as well (and deny it or play it down, hence calling it "almost imperceptible"), and the editor who added the comparison seems to be Spanish-speaking. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:43, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

The problem evidently has been solved: "thoughts" is no longer found in the article. Is there a standard way to mark the "Talk" items that are no longer relevant? Kotabatubara (talk) 19:15, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Blacklisted Links Found on the Main Page

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linguistically independent at last, linguistically independent at last, thank God my language is linguistically independent at last

What does it mean to say a language "became linguistically independent"? That it diverged? That it ceased to belong to a dialect continuum? That it stopped letting other languages push it around? —Tamfang (talk) 02:23, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

It probably means in this case (Sardinian in the 1st century BC) that it diverged and began to develop in its own ways. It could also mean that it lost contact with the remainder of the family, but I'm sceptical that there was a period of complete isolation as early as that, especially considering early changes such as metaphony, the addition of short i- before word-initial sC clusters and perhaps a few other changes shared with Mainland Romance that are (to my knowledge) not attested in writing at all this early and so seem to have happened somewhat later (also, metaphony might follow the characteristic vowel changes of Sardinian vs. the rest of Romance, so the relative chronology seems to support that interpretation, but I'm not completely sure here). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:32, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

a missed window

“ Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window." ”

Note that this deletion (by 201.234.213.50 on January 26) overlaps a parenthesis. The edit summary ("Deleted inaccurate example of the Spanish language") suggests that the intended change was only this:

“ Portuguese, for example, has the word fresta, and Spanish fenestra/finiestra (which is a cognate of French fenêtre, Italian finestra, Romanian fereastra and so on, from Latin fenestra "window"), however it now means "skylight" and "slit" as opposed to "window." ”

I'll change it accordingly. —Tamfang (talk) 07:55, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Good that you mentioned it here, so I could catch it. I've undone both edits. This was yet another uninformed edit of the type "I'm a native speaker and I've never encountered this word so it doesn't exist" when Wiktionary does list the words as real but dated/obsolete. Because as a native speaker you are obviously automatically qualified as an expert for your language in all of its variants, dialects and stages, and you know automatically all of its vocabulary (myriads of words). Yeah, right. *rollseyes* Next time just revert. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:53, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

"Really? I thought support would be difficult."

... Italian also has /tʃ/ from Vulgar Latin -CY- and supported -TY- (elsewhere /ts/). Former French /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin C- before A; Spanish /tʃ/ is from Latin -CT- or supported PL, CL; former Portuguese /tʃ/ is from initial or supported Latin PL, CL, FL.

The word supported appears nowhere else in the article. What does it mean? —Tamfang (talk) 02:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the term "supported" is puzzling. On the basis of Spanish and Portuguese, I am willing to venture a guess that it means "following a consonant". If someone can confirm that this also accurately describes the French and Italian cases, we can replace the term. Kotabatubara (talk) 19:18, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I have replaced the term "supported". It was evidently a 1930s term with conflicting definitions. Mildred Pope's From Latin to Modern French (1934; p. 97) says "Final consonants preceded by another consonant are called supported[;] preceded by a vowel, unsupported." But in Standard English Speech: A Compendium of English Phonetics for Foreign Students, by George Ernest Fuhrken (1932; pp. 43, 78, 81), "supported by" seems to mean "followed by [a consonant]". Both books are available through Google Books. Kotabatubara (talk) 16:34, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Latin?

This article states that "Latin had no third person personal pronouns." I can only assume that the person who wrote this was misinformed, as Latin, quite clearly to any person who has ever studied it, most certainly had third person personal pronouns. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/is#Latin — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.68.5.3 (talk) 03:51, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Quite so. How do you like it now? —Tamfang (talk) 01:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

The original statement is correct. is ea id is normally considered a demonstrative pronoun, not a personal pronoun. Benwing (talk) 02:38, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

No. In classical Latin, is/ea/id is most definitely a personal pronoun. The use of is/ea/id as a demonstrative pronoun is secondary to its use as a personal pronoun—although admittedly, it is very rarely used in the nominative case. It is much more common to use ille/illa/illud as a demonstrative pronoun and since Latin is an inflected language, there is rarely need for pronouns in the nominative case. However, if you needed to use a personal pronoun in any other case besides nominative, you would definitely have to use a form of is/ea/id. Example: "I talked to him" would be Eī locutus sum. "I kissed her" would be Eam osculavi. "I sat on it" would be In eō sedi. And so forth…

You could if you wanted to I suppose use is/ea/id sort of like an article ("the"), when clarification or emphasis is needed, but that was not a standard usage in Classical Latin.--Antodav2007 (talk) 23:50, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

According to linguists, is ea id is an "anaphoric demonstrative", not a personal pronoun. The difference is arguable but that is what the sources say. BTW your examples aren't completely right. For one thing, Latin could just as easily use some form ille iste or hic to translate "he", "she" or "him". Furthermore, often the pronoun would be omitted entirely, as is still possible in Brazilian Portuguese. The fact that the words can be used adjectivally like other demonstratives should be another hint. Benwing (talk) 05:37, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced sentence

The sentence "Some modern languages, such as French, have similar, quite sharp, differences between their printed and spoken form." occurs as the last sentence in the middle paragraph of the section History ... Vulgar Latin. It seems to have tunneled there from some unknown home. The words "similar... differences" have no referent: they aren't being discussed in this paragraph or section. I don't know enough about the subject to correct it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnOFL (talk • contribs) 19:21, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I would suggest that the sentence could be deleted without diminishing the article. Kotabatubara (talk) 23:42, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Hearing no objection, I have deleted the sentence, as I threatened 12 days ago. Kotabatubara (talk) 16:00, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Uberian?

A language or dialect called "Uberian" was added to the list of samples on 26 January 2014, anonymously by "92.4.172.2". Can someone please supply two verifiable sources to show that this is not a misspelling or a fictitious dialect? Kotabatubara (talk) 16:33, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Problem solved. Uberia is a country on an elaborate fictitious planet that J. R. R. Tolkien or Jorge Luis Borges would have appreciated, but which doesn't belong in a factual encyclopedia. If you like this sort of thing, see <http://gaeawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page> and <http://gaeawiki.com/index.php?title=Languages_of_Uberia>. Kotabatubara (talk) 17:14, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Given the number of languages spoken in Europe Uberia, the amount of dialect variation reflected in those edits is surprisingly small. —Tamfang (talk) 10:03, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

To be precise, the fictitious language was first added to the article on 25 January by 92.4.160.100, and subsequently edited by several IP addresses in the 92.4.x.x range from then to 29 January. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:19, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I've just deleted the fictitious "Sarvarian" from the list of "Samples". It was inserted by one "92.4.167.180", indicating the same (?) geographical source as January's "Uberian". The only "Sarvarian" I found on the Web was a personal surname. In the language sample, six of the seven words were spelled the same as in the sample of "Uberian". Kotabatubara (talk) 21:05, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

For experts on French vowels

The section about phonology says: French, on the other hand, now allows all 12 of its phonemic vowels to occur either stressed or unstressed. French standard pronunciation has 12 oral vowels (ɛ e i œ ø y ɔ o u ɑ a ə), plus 4 nasal vowels (ɛ̃ œ̃ ɔ̃ ɑ̃). Of the former only eleven can be stressed, ə cannot. If we use a reduced vowel system, with three common mergers found possibly a majority of speakers (ø/ə, ɑ/a, ɛ̃/œ̃), we're left with altogether 13 phonems, all of which could be stressed and unstressed. Now, either I'm missing something, or the sentence cited must be changed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.140.186 (talk) 21:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't regard myself as an "expert on French vowels", but here are my thoughts on the matter. I agree with your concerns, and indeed I can see further reasons for being doubtful about the statement you quote. Any use of the word "stressed" in a phonological sense is questionable, as the accent in French is primarily a tonic one, not a stress one. The meaning of the word "phonemic" is unclear, too. Is the author of the sentence indicating that there are some which are non-phonemic, and that they cannot be "stressed", and if so, which? The reduced vowel system that you describe is certainly common in present-day colloquial French, and if the author of the sentence regards "ə" as non-phonemic, then the sentence is explained, but, even if we take "French...now" as meaning present-day colloquial French, rather than standard French, it is unclear that it is justifiable to regard "ə" as non-phonemic. While it is possible to argue that in English ə is merely a weakened non-phonemic version of several phonemic vowels, that view is not tenable in French, where words such as je and menée unambiguously contain the vowel ə, and substituting any other vowel produces a form which is not recognised in French. If we do accept the word "stressed", what exactly counts as a "stressed" vowel? If it means the vowel of the accented syllable of a word of more than one syllable, then I can't think of any situation in which the vowel ə could be "stressed". It is possible to take the view that the sole vowel of a monosyllable is "stressed", which could justify the statement in the article. However, monosyllables with the vowel ə are usually weak and unambiguously unstressed, the vowel often being completely elided in colloquial French.

The conclusion of these thoughts is that, whichever way one looks at it, the quoted statement is at best dubious. I propose to replace it with a statement that French allows all vowels other than ə to occur in an accented syllable. If anyone can think of a better version than that, then that will be great. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:40, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I now see that the paragraph after the one in question refers to "a more-or-less non-phonemic final unstressed [ə] that occasionally appears". This appears to be a reference to the fact that a word such as "chante" may be pronounced as /ʃɑ̃tə/ in some contexts, such as when reading verse. However, while it is reasonable to regard such a fleeting final ə, which is not normally pronounced in modern French, as non-phonemic, that does not in any way diminish the fact that ə is unambiguously phonemic in some other contexts. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:53, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I think I wrote that text. The "all 12" is referring to the 12 oral vowels, and should be changed accordingly. As to whether /ǝ/ can be stressed, it is claimed that it can, it phrases like faites-le "do it". The vowel when stressed has a pronunciation similar to [ø] and arguably should be considered to actually be /ø/, but I'm pretty sure that the article on French in Harris and Vincent still considers it to be /ǝ/ in this context and specifically states that it can be stressed.

Also, I wonder whether there really is a general merger of /ǝ/ and /ø/ in anyone's speech. In words like peser /pǝze/ vs. creuser /cʁøze/, do the vowels really merge? Benwing (talk) 05:29, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

I hope the OP meant ø~œ. —Tamfang (talk) 08:31, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Hmm. Is the ə in "faites-le" accented? I suppose it probably is. If so, then I see no grounds for making any exception at all to the principle that any vowel can be accented. Since we are now told that "phonemic vowels" was intended to mean "oral vowels", presumably in contrast to nasal vowels, then I cannot think of any reason whatsoever why the distinction was made. In "patron", for example, the final nasal vowel is just as much accented as any non-nasal vowel. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 20:24, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

It's not accented with default prosody. If you wanted to stress it, you'd probably substitute it with something like ça, wouldn't you? — kwami (talk) 04:45, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

If you wanted to stress it, yes, but I'm not so sure about the default situation. However, in the context of the statement in the article which is the subject of this discussion, I'm not sure that it matters whether it's default prosody or not: what matters is whether it can ever be accented. I am not a native speaker of French, and it's quite a while since I was last among French speakers, but I am almost certain that I have sometimes heard expressions of the "faites-le" type with the rising tone on the last syllable which is the typical French prosodic stress. However, I have enough doubt about it to be ready to bow to the superior knowledge of anyone who knows better than I do. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 10:59, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

A few thoughts: (1) I'm working on an MA thesis on French pronunciation, and [ǝ] can definitely be stressed in expressions such as the aforementioned faites-le as well as when used as a follow-up question. For example, if a person says something like J'aime le [indistinct word], the way way the interlocutor most commonly asks for the missing or misunderstood word is simply Le?. (2) As to the question of whether /ǝ/ and /ø/ are actually merged (as in the above example peser /pǝze/ vs. creuser /cʁøze/, I've heard it more often realized as the open [œ] than the closed [ø], although in some varieties of French (notably Quebec French), this merger cannot be said to have occurred at all. Even so, the colloquial deletion of unstressed /œ/ in expressions such as peut-être has led some researchers, such as those organizing the Projet Phonology du Français Contemporain, to treat /œ/ and /ǝ/ as one and the same. (3) I think there is something to be said for the questionable phonemicity of French schwa in any case; the argument could be made that from a phonetico-phonological point of view, schwa in modern French is really nothing more than an epenthetic vowel inserted as needed to avoid clusters of more than two consonants—so words like je /ʒǝ/ are really underlyingly just /ʒ/. (Or alternatively, it's nothing more than an inherent vowel that attaches to all consonants and is deleted whenever possible.) In any case though, the research for this is probably not well-known or accepted enough to be uncontroversially included in a Wikipedia article. Andrew John Bayles (talk) 22:18, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Doubtful map

The map "Romance languages in Europe in the 21st century" is obviously a historical map, and not at all a map "of 21st century". It includes some errors aswell, as Baskian language isn't a Roman language. To my knowlegde it isn't related to any other language. Also Hungarian (which neither is a Roman language) is a minority language in Romania, but in Transylvanis often a majority language. Boeing720 (talk) 20:03, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, for the Basque country, the map gives us "Roman language co-official and used by the majority", which is, no doubt, correct.

For Transsylvania we find "significant non-Romance language usage or bilingual". Also correct, I should say.

I find the map astonishingly accurate. I wished we had more of the kind. Unoffensive text or character (talk) 15:15, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

There shouldn't be any blue on the England map. If we talk about 21st century... French might have been used in a distant past by a tiny part of the nobility, England speaks only english, a germanic language. the same for the flemish part of Belgium. French used to be a nobility lingua france in most of Europe, not only in England. The map seem to imply that England is somehow parlty romance speaking, which is not at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.19.205.121 (talk) 09:59, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

A 'nobility lingua' in England like in most of Europe ? I do not think so. It depends when. French / Anglo-Norman were spoken by the middle class as well to the 13th / 14th century at least. That is the reason why a large part of the original Anglo-Saxon words were simply replaced by their French equivalent (OE earm / Norman paur > poor, etc.) or used in a secondary meaning (boil / seethe ; animal / OE deor > deer, etc.), such replacements can only be explained by a situation of bilinguism. This situation is unique in Europe, where the French words are only related to cultural or philosophical activities. In English, the French words concern all the different aspects of daily life.Nortmannus (talk) 11:25, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

It is quite significant that in the sample chosen to compare the different Romance languages, the two verbs contains in the English equivalent sentence are both from French.Nortmannus (talk) 11:50, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Please explain: Yes, English sentences often include words of Romance origin; but why is that "quite significant" in an encyclopedia article that is about the Romance languages, and not about English? Kotabatubara (talk) 15:32, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

England is light blue for the simple reason that there was 'significant unofficial / historic usage of a Romance language'. Even if this significant usage took place in the middle ages, the statement is still correct.Unoffensive text or character (talk) 11:13, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

"Romantique"?

What is "Romantique"? The list of samples has been "embellished" in the past by fictitious languages ("Uberian" and "Sarvarian"—see above). Is "Romantique" another one of these? Or is it one of the "auxiliary and constructed languages" that this article refers to as "so-called 'neo-romantic [sic] languages'"? And speaking of the latter, is there no other source citation available for them than the quasi-racist Eurocentric webpage to which this article is linked at present? Kotabatubara (talk) 18:23, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

If you search the Web for "Romantique language", you get only pages where the two words fall together by accident, or blogs written in "Franglais" by English-speakers who have learned a little French and are confused about the difference between the Romance languages and "romantic language". If you think I have deleted it in error, please give documentation here. Kotabatubara (talk) 01:16, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Dalby

What's with the prominent use of Dalby's classification on this and related pages? And the "reference" used is a link to the general page that has no proper links to the (supposed) content, which makes these claims unverifiable at present. --JorisvS (talk) 14:35, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

If no one can explain this, I may go on deleting some things as "failed verification". --JorisvS (talk) 15:54, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

If you can't fix it, DO NOT delete anything. If you want to do anything constructive, you may export the link I verified here into Western Romance languages, ref. 2. Many thanks. Eklir (talk) 18:44, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

If verification has failed, it is essentially unsourced and can therefore be challenged. WP:BURDEN tells that the burden of evidence is on the editor who adds or restores material, not on the one deleting it. I'd rather find out on the talk page, though. That's why I came here. However, no one responded and that's why I told about my intention if it were to remain that way. Thanks for adding it. --JorisvS (talk) 19:00, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

(1) This is not a case of "failed verification": you didn't know what to do with the home page to Dalby's classification of languages; (2) To verify a source, no internet link is required in the first place: most sources in linguistics do not have a www page; (3) If verification had really failed, the whole paragraph following the "Dalby lists...", eight lines all in all (as it is the whole classification into 8 branches), would have been to be deleted: which would have been a clear case where an alternate solution to deletion MUST be provided (unless you don't know enough about linguistics in which case a "", if at all, would have been amply sufficient). Best, Eklir (talk) 19:40, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

A home page is never a good source/link, unless it itself would contain the information sourced. Sources should be specific, otherwise it is may be essentially undistinguishable from OR by other editors. So I tagged it (yes, I did, though I admit it would have been clearer outside the <ref></ref>) and came here. No one responded for nearly two months. And only if I threaten to delete things, someone (you) comes here. Why didn't you come here after my first post and solved it then? --JorisvS (talk) 10:33, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

(1) You're confusing "unsourced" (which must fail verification) and "underspecified" (which needs to be specified, not deleted). (2) I came here by chance. Unfortunately, I don't have just that to do: Preventing you from deleting paragraphs that sport an underspecified reference note. You have to live with the fact that problems you earmark for solution most often won't get solved within two months. Eklir (talk) 04:14, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

If a source is "underspecified" it may be essentially indistinguishable from "unsourced", because the information may not be found. Anyway, thanks to my second post it now has been fixed, which is what matters. --JorisvS (talk) 11:03, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Your're really out on wasting my time: "underspecified" is always distinguishable from "unsourced". You just were not clever enough to fix it yourself though your record would indicate that you could do better than that. You cannot always rely on the chance that an expert will patrol your way to fix things subito presto. Anyway, let me be absolutely crystal clear on what is at issue. Your unwarranted action would have entailed the disappearance of the following material without anyone compensating for the loss of information:

Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility:

• Ibero-Romance: Portuguese and Galician, Mirandese and Asturian-Leonese, Spanish, Aragonese;
• Occitano-Romance: Catalan, Gascon, Occitan;
• Gallo-Romance: Langues d'oïl (including French), Franco-Provençal;
• Rhaeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian;
• Italo-Romance: Venetian, Gallo-Italic languages, Corsican, Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian;
• Sardinian;
• Dalmatian (extinct);
• Romanian: Daco-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian.

Believe me that, ultimately, I or someone else would have got around to get your deletion frenzy sanctioned. Eklir (talk) 18:02, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

You could just stop responding, if you think I'm wasting your time, because the issue has been fixed. I tried to find it, of course. Back then I failed, though a recent attempt was somehow easily successful. Maybe there was a bug in the website that has been fixed? I wasn't asking for an expert, just someone who could help out. Reverting would, of course, have been fine, because I wouldn't have liked to delete it anyway, though hopefully with the intended fix. --JorisvS (talk) 18:17, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Glad to hear of your good intentions hopefully garanteeing the future. Best, Eklir (talk) 19:25, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

South America

This article is not the place for Spanish and Portuguese to settle the squabble about "Who's Number One in South America?" Population figures vary by source and year, and the margin is too fuzzy to be set with a precise figure like "49%"—and besides, it's contradictory to say "approximately" in conjunction with such precision. Since the paragraph is about official status, nation by nation, we might (jokingly) say instead that Spanish is an official language in 69% of the 13 countries of South America. Kotabatubara (talk) 22:17, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Culture and Catalan

"Catalan was used for high-level culture in the Middle Age and early modern times, and again from the 21st century. Besides it, a rich and lively popular culture (songs, literature, theatre, newspapers) has always existed and evolved in accordance with times." I was first arrested by "Besides it", which is not easy-to-understand English (what is "it"? "high-level culture", I suppose, but unclear) But the more I read this chunk of text, the less I understood. What does "high-level culture" mean? Courtly speech, I suppose, but it's not clear that "theatre" (listed under popular culture), for example, isn't high culture. And I don't think newspapers have always existed, nor is the point that the _culture_ has always existed--this is supposed to be about the language. As for "evolved in accordance with the times", well, that's true of most any language.

Might be re-worded to something like "Catalan has a long tradition of use in popular culture, and was also important politically for much of the time since the Middle Ages, with the exception of the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was repressed/ less used/ less popular [or whatever]." But I'm vague on the last part (19th/20th century? repression? what domains was it less used for during that period), so I'll leave the change to someone who knows more. Mcswell (talk) 23:41, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Sicilian substrata

I'm deleting the paragraph on Sicilian substrata and incorporating its non-redundant information into the article Sicilian language. This Romance languages article has been tagged as too long, so this reduction is a small step toward solving that problem. No other language has its substrata treated in such detail in this article. The "non-redundant" information consists of the list of substratum languages. Phrases like "the first true Romance language" are meaningless unless we are talking about written records older than the Strasbourg Oaths of the year 842. I will preserve the list of Elymians, Siculians, Sicans, and Morgetes, and let editors of the destination article decide if there are documented loanwords from those languages. The fact that a statement "cannot be dis-proven" is not a sufficient basis for including it in the article. And the fact that Sicilian "is still in a state of flux, continuously evolving" makes it like every other language on earth, and thus redundant to say so. Kotabatubara (talk) 20:14, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

second person in Brazil

Brazilian Portuguese, however, has diverged from this system, and most dialects simply use você (and plural vocês) as a general-purpose second-person pronoun, combined with te (from tu) as the clitic object pronoun. [...] However that is the case only in the spoken language of central and northern Brazil, with the southern areas of the country still largely preserving the second-person verb form and the "tu" and "você" distinction.

The bolded words were recently swapped. Compare the map here. The article Portuguese language says tu has recently been revived (not preserved) in the far south; maybe this editor speaks that way. —Tamfang (talk) 21:27, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Romanian /l/ - /r/ change

In Phonology -> Consonants -> Notable changes, the fourth bullet point ends in: and changing of /l/ to /r/, for instance Latin schola/scola > Slav. школа, shkola > modern Romanian şcoală [ˈʃkoarə] "school".

Maybe I'm missing something, but my interpretation of this phrase is that present-day Romanian natives pronounce the word "școală" with an /r/, which is false. "l" is always pronounced /l/. Potestasity (talk) 15:40, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Intonation

The text added 2 July 2017 is unacceptable. In addition to presenting almost nothing having to do with actual intonation or any other aspect of prosody, it is replete with misinformation (e.g. Italian phonetics is very influenced by Greek); contradictory statements (claims, counterfactually, that [ʒ] is difficult for Italians -- many millions of whom use it in their native language all day every day -- then contradicts the counterfactual claim with speculation that Argentine/Uruguayan [ʒ] is due to Italian immigrants -- and adds some wild undocumentable speculation: may have come from the Celtic languages spoken in the territories that comprise France and Portugal/Galicia prior to Roman conquest); hopeless entanglement of graphemes, phones and phonemes without overtly mentioning any of the three (throughout, some accompanied by both phonetic and phonological miscues and/or untruths: Lh in Portuguese = Ll in Spanish = Gli in French/Italian); incomprehensible statements (Portuguese has the biggest rank of accents among Latin languages)... And much more. In truth, the text goes beyond being unacceptable for an encyclopedia article, in that rather than serving to inform and clarify, it misinforms and confuses. (Oh, my. I assure one and all that this critique is the polite, respectful, kid-gloved version. I don't know how to euphemize it further.) 96.42.57.164 (talk) 14:49, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

I removed the offending section. I agree that the content was mostly inappropriate. It is customary to add a template for required citation sin such cases, but in this particular case it was obvious that the section was of no use. If the author IP thinks the material included was correct, I recommend them to add proper citations and use technical language, or ask help to other users if needed. --SynConlanger (talk) 15:54, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for taking care of it. And agreed -- no amount of citation could rescue that text. The core of it could be re-cast as a section of possible interest entitled something like Graphemic representation of phonetics and phonology, but the author appeared to not be equipped to do that. 96.42.57.164 (talk) 13:57, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Population of Portugal

According to "Worldometers", the population of Portugal rose above 10,500,000 (which could be rounded up to 11 million) in 2006 and peaked in 2009, but has since fallen to 10,297,443, which must be rounded down to 10 million. Kotabatubara (talk) 16:02, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

please add the new data!--AlfaRocket (talk) 20:19, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Early Romance and mutual (un)intelligibility

This flies in the face of everything known of the early state of Romance: Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, Vulgar Latin, by this time highly dialectalized, broke up into discrete languages that were no longer mutually intelligible. Languages as far apart geographically as Castilian and Central Italian are mutually comprehensible to this day if speakers want them to be. The minimum of a precise reference to Glanville Price's claim is needed, so that his text can be quoted and contrasted with the more standard view in the literature. 96.42.57.164 (talk) 18:04, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

in short, what do you want to add or cut?.--AlfaRocket (talk) 20:20, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

In short, cut misinformation and add explanatory text. All evidence direct and indirect suggests that the claim of "no longer mutually intelligible" by 9th century overstates the case and thus is untrue as a generalization, while the concept of "broke up" mischaracterizes the linguistic character of the Romance diatopic continuum, some of which still exists even today. The reference to Price is not a useful or accurate reference without page number; citation of his statement would be ideal. 96.42.57.164 (talk) 11:54, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Problems in text on falling diphthongs

Italian lui syllabifies as /ˈlu.i/, thus normally pronounced [ˈluːi] (in more detail, [ˈluːʷi]), not *[ˈluj], negating an analysis of falling diphthong. cantai and finii suggest that potei should be analyzed as /po′tei/, not /po′tej/. In these examples and elsewhere in the presentation care should be taken to distinguish clearly between surface phonetics and phonological structure.96.42.57.164 (talk) 15:01, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

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Section on digraphs

Before making any change, I just wanted to flag the following:

• CI - in Sicilian this is commonly used for those words which derive from Latin FL-, e.g. ciumi, ciuri, etc. I think the IPA = [tʃ:]
• DD - this is correctly identified as the retroflex found in Sicilian and Sardinian, but when it says the modern usage is DDH', while that is occasionally used in Sicilian, in no way would you call that common, I can't speak for Sardinian. The modern Camilleri dictionary still uses DD, while the renowned Piccitto dictionaries use ḌḌ, and most recently, the latter use has been approved by the Cadèmia Siciliana. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 02:38, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

if I get the nod from anyone, I'm able to provide all of the above references and make the necessary changes. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 02:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Autochthonous?

Now that this word is spelled correctly—is it used correctly in the paragraph on Romanian? It means having originated where they are now found. Are Romanian-speaking communities in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary remnants of a former continuum, or are they transplanted islands? Kotabatubara (talk) 15:53, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Angola and Mozambique missing

Angola and Mozambique are missing from the Romance-language distribution map. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Copperheart0718 (talk • contribs) 20:05, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Missing languages

The language tree in the article is missing Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Codrinb (talk • contribs) 21:18, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Please add IPA to the written samples

Hi. Just wanted to ask someone to add pronunciation in IPA for the charts, otherwise an uninformed reader might not be able to understand how the modern languages are similar or different. Based only on written forms one could think they're still very similar, since all their spellings are based on Latin, even though pronunciation has changed a great deal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.53.121.230 (talk) 21:17, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

they sound very different from each other but each language has a lot of different accents. for examples, if you put ipa charts for european spanish and european portuguese, they would sound alike. if you would put ipa charts for brazilian portuguese and european spanish or even chilean spanish they would sound very differently. — Preceding unsigned comment added by KennedyBroseguini (talk • contribs) 06:05, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Latin words synonyms are not considered.

The charts in this article show many comparisons between romance languages. However it does not show the fact that Latin was a language full of synonyms (signifier) for the same signified. For instance the word woman in Latin was DOMINA, MULIER and FEMINA, which is the reason why in French is used Femme, in Italian Donna and Spanish Mujer. Even though some languages like Italian have the three evolved words (Donna, Moglie and Femmina), they have a completely different semantic meanings, and so is in the other Romance languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kotabatubara (talk • contribs) 15:53, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Vlach, is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe.

When referring to themselves, the Eastern Romance-speaking peoples, especially in the Balkans, use various words derived from “Romanus”: Români (Romanians), Rumâni, Rumâri, Aromâni (Aromanians), Arumâni, Armâni etc. Wallach or Vlach is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe. The word "Vlach" is etymologically derived from the Proto-Germanic Walhaz, which meant "stranger" and was adopted into Greek Vláhi (Βλάχοι) and Slavic Vlah. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.112.63.123 (talk) 08:22, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

I have removed this again from the article, as out of place. The Name section is about the name of the group of languages, i.e. "Romance". It may be that a group of Romance language speakers is called "Vlach", but another group is called "French", or "Spanish". There are many Romance languages, many speakers of them, and they are covered in the rest of the article, including Vlach.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 05:23, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Reference to Latin Languages

I have modified the reference to "Latin Languages". It should have be reworded, as it can could have caused confusion in the proper name for the group of languages originating from Vulgar Latin.

The phrase "Latin Language" specifically infers languages derived from Classical Latin, of which Romance Languages have a higher influence from the Vulgar Latin. This can proven by a mis-coordination of years when Classical Latin was in use and the formation of the Romance languages; between 900 and 1000 years apart. During these times Classical Latin became more inclusive of other language structures, especially the structure of Vulgar Latin, and the exit of spoken knowledge of Classical Latin with the split of the Roman Empire and the fall of the Western Roman Empire (we currently call the change Medieval Latin).

However, without a doubt, without importance of the change of Classical/Medieval Latin, Romance Languages were evolved by the common people of regions who spoke a mix of Vulgar Latin (by it's spread through the Roman Army) and their vernacular language, much less by elite government officials and clergymen, who even did not speak frequently nor fluidly in Medieval Latin. In many sources, Medieval Latin was simply a second language to writers who more often not mixed their vernacular language with the Medieval Latin.

This is obviously a simple technical change, however the phrase "sometimes called Latin Languages" may infer that it is proper to refer to Romance Languages as Latin Languages. This is acceptable in non-academic instances, yet not for the sake of technicality. Please make the distinction between the proper "Romance Language" phrase and the layman, incorrect phrase for Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc. being "Latin Language".

181.165.166.156 (talk) 22:40, 22 May 2018 (UTC) Benja Merzouk, 5th of May, of 2018

The Early Romance mutual unintelligibility red herring

For reasons unknown, this below was moved to archive. The inaccuracy and incomplete reference remain, however, so I'm reviving it.

Early Romance and mutual (un)intelligibility

This flies in the face of everything known of the early state of Romance: Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, Vulgar Latin, by this time highly dialectalized, broke up into discrete languages that were no longer mutually intelligible. Languages as far apart geographically as Castilian and Central Italian are mutually comprehensible to this day if speakers want them to be. The minimum of a precise reference to Glanville Price's claim is needed, so that his text can be quoted and contrasted with the more standard view in the literature. 47.32.20.133 (talk) 19:26, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

I've just attempted to repair this. The result is far from ideal, but at least perhaps it makes it relatively clear that mutual intelligibility was gradient. 47.32.20.133 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:26, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Listing of Latin and Latino-Faliscan languages before the Romance languages on article templates

Should I place Latin and Latino-Faliscan before the Romance languages on article templates of those languages, because the Romance languages are descended from Latin (specifically Vulgar Latin), which is a part of the Latino-Faliscan group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European languages? -- PK2 (talk) 11:34, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Romanian

" changing of /l/ to /r/, for instance Latin schola/scola > Slav. школа, școla > modern Romanian școală [ˈʃko̯alə] "school""

Ummm... so, where is this change from /l/ to /r/? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.146.97.33 (talk) 02:52, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Plurals of continent names

Correcting the figures I cited in de-pluralizing "Africas", "Asias", etc. It was not fair for me to compare the frequency of "America" directly with that of "Oceania". What is fair is to compare singular-to-plural ratios for each continent name. These are "America", 25; "Africa", 5,000; "Asia", 6,000; "Europe", 3,000; "Oceania", 6,000-12,000. In other words, it is relatively common, in English, to refer to "the Americas", and rare to refer to "the Africas", etc. The Ngram Viewer is at <https://books.google.com/ngrams>. Kotabatubara (talk) 17:47, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Good references needed for this: "It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder...

of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC." As it stands, it reads like peremptory declaration. If it's clear, respectable references are available and should be here. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 23:44, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Legends for chloropleths

Where are the legends for the choropleth maps? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.72.169.203 (talk) 05:23, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

"Ethnologue controversially considers Sardinian to be a macrolanguage"

How to classify Gallurese and Sassarese is a bit sticky, but it's uncontroversial that "Sardinian" can refer realistically only to a collection of closely-related distinct varieties, i.e. a macrolanguage for those who accept the term and concept. 2600:8800:A580:DAC0:3593:6DE5:7BD2:3522 (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

This has been here for months with no comment, so I'm going delete "controversially", along with the claim of Corsican being "the closest lect to Tuscan and Italian of all in the Neolatin panorama" (whoever wrote that might want to study Dalbera-Stefanaggi's Unité et diversité des parlers corses, then pop over to, say, Umbertide or Viterbo and keep ears open). Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 18:14, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

@Barefoot through the chollas: (or is that 'my feet really hurt'?), just my 2c. First, Ethnologue is not a RS for classification. They don't even remember where some of their classifications came from, they've been lost to mimeograph history. Also, 'macrolanguage' isn't a linguistic concept, but a coding one. A language cannot be a macrolanguage, only an ISO code can. — (talk) 20:27, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

kwami, fully agree re Ethnologue. Partially disagree re macrolanguage, i.e. that it's not a linguistic concept, although it's no fun to try to establish a foolproof definition. "A group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that are sometimes considered distinct languages" isn't too far off, though, and the Sardinian continuum is a pretty good example of that. Without the concept (choose a different label if you like), Sardinian as a singular subsuming all or most of the indigenous variety of the island either refers to a fantasy entity or is nonsense. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:57, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Barefoot, the thing with macrolanguage codes is that they aren't assigned for any linguistic reason, but rather for when an ISO 2 code corresponds to multiple ISO 3 codes. If Sardinian didn't have an ISO 2 code, it couldn't be a macrolanguage. Now that the DB software is better, the concept isn't needed any more and no new macrolanguages are being created.

I suppose the word could be repurposed for Dachsprache or some other opaque bit of jargon, if people wanted to redefine it, but until then its non-ISO use here on WP is usually misleading. I've been going around deleting it whenever it's being used with an OR definition -- especially since it tends to be used any time a language is difficult to define, without any consistency as to what it is. — kwami (talk) 18:41, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

kwami, not the same at all as a Dachsprache, very different concept. A Dachsprache is 'a language'; a macrolanguage is a collection of closely related varieties. In any case, it would be good to consider a) that not everyone is deeply into the ISO coding thang, b) that those who are deep into it can, without realizing it, fall into a mutatis mutandis version of what was once known as "theory-specific hand-waving." Macrolanguage is meaningful on its own, coding aside, and Sardinia is a good example. My humble request would be "Be nice" -- and not centrally relevant to the macrolanguage controversy (assuming there is one) from my own point of view, but if/when you find the term contradicted by the coding (or vice versa), don't forget to examine the accuracy of the coding, too. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:20, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

A macrolanguage is a 'language' too, at least sociolinguistically. But the word was invented by SIL or ISO specifically to solve coding issues. If you have a linguistic definition of the term, I'd be quite interested to see it. I agree it could be a useful concept. But it's not useful to misuse jargon on WP to fill a gap in our vocabulary. If we only look at how closely related a group of varieties is, Romance is a 'macrolanguage' too. Is there anything here that dialect cluster wouldn't cover? Anyway, I'd want to see a RS that the word has taken on a non-coding meaning (or that ISO coopted an existing word that has a linguistic meaning) before accepting it on WP. For one thing, we'd want to have an article on it so people would understand what it's supposed to mean. — kwami (talk) 19:31, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

There's a definition above, reasonably clear "A group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that are sometimes considered distinct languages". Not trying to be rude here, but just to be straight with this: using the term macrolanguage with that definition intended is accurate (once the quibbling about what 'mutually intelligible' means is over), neither misuse nor jargon, any more than calling this gadget I slide around on my desk a mouse is misuse or jargon (actually, much less so, since the morphemes of macrolanguage are analyzable). The concept is clear, and we have a good example: Sardinia. How coders use it is up to them. But if their coding reflects real-world relationships accurately, it shouldn't be troublesome -- quite the opposite.

"Romance is a macrolanguage, too" is an example of why it's so difficult to establish a watertight definition (a rabbit hole I'm not going to skitter down into now). A somewhat easier case, first: Can it be said that English (tout court, without further labeling, and not including the remnants of "ancient dialects" in Britain) is a macrolanguage? Presumably, for all the obvious reasons. Well, then, Romance? Ouch. The ol' brick wall of degree-not-kind. I would try to weasel out of it. Not by the same definition. True that a Romanian and a Brazilian can work themselves into a basic form of clumsy mutual intelligibility if they choose to, but it takes a good bit more effort and patience than any English-speaking pair I can think of.

Basta. I'm dangerously close to the rabbit hole. If the coding definition is something very similar to "A group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that are sometimes considered distinct languages", there's no problem in the fundamental conceptualization. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:59, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

See ISO 639 macrolanguage for the definition of macrolanguage that Kwamikagami is referring to. It is not equivalent to "a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that are sometimes considered distinct languages". For instance (as pointed out in the article), zh (Chinese) is a macrolanguage, but it corresponds roughly to a language family, and I think all the constituent language groups (ignoring lzh, Literary Chinese) are mutually unintelligible (for instance, cmn, Mandarin Chinese, and yue, Yue Chinese). Where have you gotten the "mutually intelligible" definition from? — Eru·tuon 21:33, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes, Barefoot, if you have reliable linguistic sources that use 'macrolanguage' in that sense, that's great. It would save us a headache. But if you don't, then it's really problematic to invent definitions to use on WP. What's to stop someone else from inventing a contrary definition? Linguistically, if Chinese is a macrolanguage (consisting of hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages per Norman), then so is Slavic, Germanic, Indic and Iranian. The Indo-European family would consist of just a dozen 'macrolanguages'. — kwami (talk) 21:43, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

It appears that there are two definitions of macrolanguage floating about (aside from the non-linguistic usage):

1. (linguistics) A language consisting of widely varying dialects.

2. (linguistics) A group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that are sometimes considered distinct languages

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/macrolanguage

The first is troublesome from the start as a result of the term dialect being profoundly ambiguous (see the Wikipedia page dialect). If that thorn is ignored (though always present and irritating), it seems to work for, for example, English or Spanish (obviously excluding for the nonce underlying autochthonous languages such as Scots, Asturian, etc.). Although there are difficulties, it might even be made to apply to cases like Sardinian or Mixtec – more than a bit iffy to claim that there is an entity identifiable as ‘a language’ that the numerous actual lects are varieties of, but – holding one’s breath like an EOD technician working on a rusted bomb -- the principles that permit conceptualizing the various Englishes as a unit can be applied... sort of. More trouble begins with cases like Slavic or Romance: can ‘a language’ be identified? No. And with “genetic” relationships ignored and mutual intelligibility (MI) completely irrelevant, the concept is open-ended. Chinese? Sure! For that matter, under 1 Indo-European is a macrolanguage. Nostratic, anyone?

The second definition refines and constrains the concept. Sardinia is handled reasonably well (at least it’s not “controversial” in any meaningful non-circular sense), and work on Mixtec MI suggests that it works with only slight discomfort for that case, too. There are two major glitches, though: work on both Mixtec and Slavic MI makes one common-sense observation clear: mutual intelligibility (MI) is gradient, not binary. Turkish and Navajo? MI zero. Finnish and Estonian? Well… Not Turkish-Navajo, obviously, but annoying to the point of switching to English or German. Italian-Spanish? Fairly high level of MI if the interlocutors want there to be.

Upshot: 1 and 2 are distinct. 2 could be viewed as, and I’d guess probably is, an attempt to refine and focus 1 so as to rein in its exuberance. 2 needs further refinement of the MI aspect. (Re-)consideration of and massaging in Hockett’s concepts L-Simplex and L-Complex would appear to supply crucial ingredients for a more satisfactory definition. (The real-world grounding of this might be a useful control mechanism for those who use macrolanguage not as a linguistic term but as “a book-keeping mechanism for establishing ISO 639 international standard for language codes”, with macrolanguages thus “established to assist mapping between different sets of ISO language codes.”) At this point, permit me a polite ça suffit. This doesn't seem the right forum for trying to make sense of a tug-of-war between the field of understanding and describing language relationships and the creation and labeling of codes that "aren't assigned for any linguistic reason." Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Oops, I looked at the Wiktionary entry but somehow missed the second Noun header with the human language–related definitions. — Eru·tuon 21:47, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to move content

Given the TOOLONG template, I propose to move the content of Romance_languages#Classification_and_related_languages to Classification of Romance languages. --SynConlanger (talk) 22:22, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

also called Romanic languages

I've been doing Romance Linguistics for 40 years, and I don't recall seeing "Romanic" as a label in English anywhere but here. Can someone supply a respectable reference to use of Romanic? If not, I suggest deleting this on grounds of being misinformation. 98.168.51.95 (talk) 18:58, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm not particularly enamored of the term "Romanic" either, but you can find examples online by following this link: <https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22romanic+languages%22+-romance>. The Google Ngram Viewer <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Romanic+languages%2CNeo-Latin+languages&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CRomanic%20languages%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CNeo%20-%20Latin%20languages%3B%2Cc0> shows that "Romanic" had its heyday in the 1860s. The same graph shows that "Neo-Latin" has always been even less frequent than "Romanic"! Kotabatubara (talk) 14:53, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion to split, move linguistic features to Romance Linguistics

I don't grasp the reason for the suggested split. Romance Linguistics is a field of scholarship. What's presented here is a brief descriptive sketch of linguistic features of the Romance languages. A Romance Linguistics article would outline the history of the field, contributions of major scholars, shifts in interests and theoretical approaches, tools (such as linguistic atlases), etc. 47.32.20.133 (talk) 02:43, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

It's not quite brief... What about "Linguistic features of the Romance languages"? --SynConlanger (talk) 16:56, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

It's brief in the sense of, for the most part, covering only a few languages; it's not brief at all in the sense that much that is done with long runs of prose text could be handled with tables and less text (almost random example: Nasalization in Fr and Po section). I suppose there could be even more minimal treatment here of phonology, morphology, syntax, then an article on each of those, synchrony and diachrony. The tricky bit would be deciding what comes out of the Romance languages article. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:40, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

For now, I moved the section describing general linguistic features of the Romance languages to Romance languages linguistics (which might be renamed) because it was the one with a split notice. We would need to write a brief paragraph in this article about these general features and add {{Main}} that links to the other article. The section on sound changes here is entirely unreferenced. Are there linguists/philologists expert in historical linguistics of the Romance languages here that could help? --SynConlangertalk) 16:55, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Various cans of worms here, beginning with the move being made "because it was the one with a split notice" -- placing of a split notice is not justification in itself; the entirely open question, not really discussed, was whether the split was necessary or advisable (that's not meant to be as rude as it may seem). Assuming that consensus would have been reached after appropriate discussion, I agree: Romance languages linguistics is odd at best, and needs replacement. If what is intended is comparison of (some) Romance languages by (some) linguistic features, then Romance languages (comparison) or Romance languages (typology) or some variant thereof might work. (My own opinion is that whatever the label, those would become unwieldy over time, thus better to have separate articles, such as Romance languages (phonology) or, restricted further, Romance languages (historical phonology).) As for no references to sound change, a guess is that that's possibly the result of the changes being so well known, and illustrated in the examples; in principle there's no call for a reference to each point (e.g. development of word-initial /pl/) -- perhaps a note near the top of subtopics pointing readers to specific references listed would helpful. Yes, there are experts who can help; their touch is evident throughout the article. The amount of time they might want to dedicate to creating accurate content that's subject to being edited by anyone who drops in? Don't know. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 18:33, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Ethnologue is not a reliable source for classification as per Wikipedia:Languages

As per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Languages#Interpreting_Ethnologue_data, SIL/Ethnologue is not considered a reliable source for classification, yet this article and most articles on the Romance languages are heavily based on SIL/Ethnologue claims. Being an academic linguist myself, I concur that SIL/Ethnologue is not used in linguistic as a source for classification. I am not opposed to a mention of it, but we should not rely entirely on just it. I propose a clean up of the relevant text in this and related articles. While everybody recognises that classification is hard, there are plenty of reliable academic sources that discuss classification. --SynConlanger (talk) 06:29, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Good point. Similar applies to Dalby (Linguasphere), or at least the use it's put to here in making a stab at a count of Romance languages. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 15:50, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Romance-speaking Africa

The old and somewhat problematic article Romance-speaking Africa was recently restored after a discussion at RfD. Some more eyes will definitely be needed there. – Uanfala (talk) 23:38, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Number of Romance languages needs factual cleanup

Fair enough to cite Dalby's 23 on the (spurious) basis of mutual intelligibility, and fair enough, too, to cite 35, but the latter is completely unsourced, in spite of a standing request for sourcing since September 2018. Once that's satisfied, some additional text is needed to explain that an accurate uncontroversial account is not possible, since any count is completely dependent upon the criteria adopted to determine if a Romance variety is "a language". Thus any count is to be taken as, at best, a rough approximation. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:10, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Of all Romance languages, Portuguese is the only official on the 5 continents: Europe (Portugal), America (Brazil), Africa (Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique), Asia (Macau) and Oceania (East Timor) 2804:7F7:A581:7117:9DBB:43CB:534D:2E19 (talk) 21:53, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

That's wrong, French is also official on the 5 continents (including in Asia: India in one Union territory, and semi-fficial in South East Asia with active support of the Francophonie); in Macau, it's now semi-official (theoretical support but only for specialists), as the administration no longer uses it, most public signalisation in Portuguese disappearing, while the Macanese creole remains active and it's not really standard Portuguese, and as most of its inhabitants no longer be educated to Portuguese and have creolized their usage with Macanese; Portuguese has lost a lot of its speakers. French remains active (and in fact is gaining again) in South East Asia (thanks to the SE-Asian community in Western Europe and Canada), and starts developping in China too (as a secondary language important for their business not just in Europe or America, but as well in Africa, with a growing Chinese community abroad in very large French-speaking area whose growth in terms of active speakers is booming and developping now faster than English and Arabic).

And you probably forget Arabic as well which is developping fast all around the world with Islam (and its wide communities of migrants). Anyway the "official" status is difficult to asses as the effective legal framework in eacyh country varies a lot (e.g. English is not even official in US, where it's jsut used de facto, along with Spanish and French still used in laws, and in some areas German, Swedish). Worldwide migrations and commerce are now changing the landscape very fast, as well as the importance of medias and access to education and culture (and on the way each language accepts to borrow and integrate terminologies for better understanding: French contributes a lot to many languages, and takes a lot from them, it is quite versatile and keeps its precision (that is difficult to assess in English), and that's why French is important in international treaties (the presence of France, but also Switzerland, Canada and Belgium, in many international organizations is also a major factor; as well there's many more bilingual resources with French than with Portuguese: French translators in both directions are not difficult to find, even if it is still not as developped as English translators, but much more developed than Portuguese translators, so translations to/from Portuguese is frequently adapted via intermediate French or Spanish translations, that give better results than via English). verdy_p (talk) 04:33, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Romance–Germanic language border

The map is at least seriously flawed and misleading because it fails to account for the Romania submersa, regions in the Central Alps (as far north as Lake Constance; compare Raetia Curiensis), around Salzburg, in the Black Forest (Schwarzwaldromania) as well on the Moselle (the Moselle Romance language island) and to some extent elsewhere (e. g. Basle, and Old Picard in Flanders, Flemish Brabant and the southwestern Netherlands) that were still Romance-speaking and at least heavily bilingual in the Early Middle Ages. On the other hand, Germanic (Frankish language or Westfränkisch) was also spoken to some extent in northern France at the time. The drawing of a line on the map suggesting a sharp language boundary is misleading in the first place. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:45, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure about what map do you exactly mean, but to include Romania submersa would be pretty problematic. The old boundaires of Romance might be more known in Western and Central Europe but if we included the old borders there, we would also have to do it in the Balkans, and pretty much everything there is speculation. Super Ψ Dro 22:04, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Super Dromaeosaurus: I am referring to this map, which shows only Central Europe, and explicitly claims to reconstruct the language border as it was in the early medieval period. At least the Romania submersa in the Central Alps was continuous with the Rhaeto-Romance of medieval Grisons and southern Tyrol that is shown in the map – which is partially submersa too. The green line should run further north – north of Liechtenstein, for example, which was definitely still Romance-speaking at the time. Compare this map, in Romansh language § Origins and development until modern times. Effectively, as late as 1100, medieval Romansh was spoken as far north as the Hirschensprung northeast of Rüthi, the area around which was still bilingual in Old Romansh and Old Alemannic (Old High German). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:33, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I agree with you then. Super Ψ Dro 10:26, 8 March 2021 (UTC)