Latin Lives • Hacker News Board

Re: Latin Lives

#31

Post by schoen » Mon, Feb 02, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #13

jacquesm wrote: post #6

The article doesn't seem to mention this at all, but Latin definitely lives: it's called modern day Romanian. There are many differences but if Latin survived anywhere into modern times it would have to be Romania. I had some Latin in high school and that came in surprisingly handy, much more so than in other Latin derived languages.

Using your way of putting it I think all Romance languages have a legit claim to "being Latin". [I seem to recall reading that there were time periods in which all the local languages were still casually called "Latin" while being quite distinct.] Some are more conservative than others in terms of preserved phonetics or grammar etc. But none of them "are Latin", and yet all descended from it quite naturally. Is Roman…

I think you're mostly right, though there is a notion of a "more conservative" or "less conservative" pronunciation.

For example, surely we could see Spanish "luna" as just closer to Latin "lūna" than the Portuguese "lua" is, and Spanish "consonante" as closer to "cōnsonāntem" than Portuguese "consoante" is. (But that doesn't make Spanish as a whole closer to Latin than Portuguese as a whole... but it's possible to imagine a language typically being more conservative in some respect, having fewer sound changes applied and so on, than another language.)

Re: Latin Lives

#32

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Feb 02, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #17

Leszek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sardinian is considered to be closer to Latin than Romanian, and arguably Italian and Spanish are closer to Latin too. According to a book that I haven't read[1], but is cited by Wikipedia[2], "A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation,…

I have heard similar anecdotal evidence on Italian, and it's linguistic similarity to Spanish would support that. I'm a little surprised that Portuguese strayed so far.

Portuguese has some influence from French in terms of character set as the first King was of French origin.

At the time of the country origin, Galician, Catalan, Spanish, Asturian, Arab were all spoken in the penisula, which might have contributed to such deviation.

At its roots Portuguese came from Galician mixed with some Arab.

Re: Latin Lives

#33

Post by asveikau » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:14 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #31

asveikau wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your way of putting it I think all Romance languages have a legit claim to "being Latin". [I seem to recall reading that there were time periods in which all the local languages were still casually called "Latin" while being quite distinct.] Some are more conservative than others in terms of preserved phonetics or grammar etc. But none of them "are Latin", and yet all descended from it quite naturally. Is Roman…

I think you're mostly right, though there is a notion of a "more conservative" or "less conservative" pronunciation. For example, surely we could see Spanish "luna" as just closer to Latin "lūna" than the Portuguese "lua" is, and Spanish "consonante" as closer to "cōnsonāntem" than Portuguese "consoante" is. (But that doesn't make Spanish as a whole closer to Latin than Portuguese as a whole... but it's possible to i…

Yes, I am aware of this. Even that strikes me as the wrong metric. For instance, AFAIK standard Italian is mostly conservative due to standardization efforts. I had known that it was largely based on the Tuscan dialect, but when I saw what actual Tuscans do to their consonants I couldn't believe it. Though this conservatism is now present in the native language of a country, it seems to have come about through somewhat artificial means, rather than a long unbroken chain to Rome.

I recall there were other such examples of a romance culture re-importing Latin words from literature, and it being fairly common to have two words with the same root, where one is conservative and another drops syllables, changes consonants, or both. Spanish is the one I know best, just to throw one out there from my head, you have "llave" and "clave", or "llano" "plano" and "plan". (All of this from the consonant + L -> ll change, then I presume a re-import from Latin happening later.)

Secondarily, who is to say some of the sound changes we see in Romance languages couldn't have somehow originated with regional or informal pronunciation of Romans? I am sure many have studied this question more than I have, but I will bet the answer here is nonzero.

Re: Latin Lives

#34

Post by schoen » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 7:15 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #33

schoen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're mostly right, though there is a notion of a "more conservative" or "less conservative" pronunciation. For example, surely we could see Spanish "luna" as just closer to Latin "lūna" than the Portuguese "lua" is, and Spanish "consonante" as closer to "cōnsonāntem" than Portuguese "consoante" is. (But that doesn't make Spanish as a whole closer to Latin than Portuguese as a whole... but it's possible to i…

Yes, I am aware of this. Even that strikes me as the wrong metric. For instance, AFAIK standard Italian is mostly conservative due to standardization efforts. I had known that it was largely based on the Tuscan dialect, but when I saw what actual Tuscans do to their consonants I couldn't believe it. Though this conservatism is now present in the native language of a country, it seems to have come about through somewh…

Those are good observations that I hadn't considered before -- thanks!