The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period ofEuropean colonialism beginning in the 15th century. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in theAmericas,Europe, and parts ofAfrica. French, Spanish, and Portuguese also have many non-native speakers; they are widely used aslingua francas.[1] There are also numerousregional Romance languages and dialects. All five of the most widely spoken Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish are also official languages of the European Union.
The termRomance derives from the Vulgar Latin adverbromanice, "inRoman", derived fromromanicus: for instance, in the expressionromanice loqui, "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latinvernacular), contrasted withlatine loqui, "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, theconservative version of the language used inwriting and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and withbarbarice loqui, "to speak inBarbarian" (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire).[9] From this adverb the nounromance originated, which applied initially to anything writtenromanice, or "in the Roman vernacular".[10]
Most of the Romance-speaking part of Europe has traditionally been adialect continuum, where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences become so great that people from two remote locations unambiguously speak separate languages. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even the criterion ofmutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not.[11]
The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separatedgenetic clades in atree model:
French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of theEuropean Union.[15] Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunctLatin Union;[16] and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of theUnited Nations.[17] Outside Europe,French,Portuguese andSpanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respectivecolonial empires.[18][19][20]
With almost 500 million speakers worldwide,Spanish is an official language inSpain and in nine countries ofSouth America, home to about half that continent's population; in six countries ofCentral America (all exceptBelize); and inMexico. In theCaribbean, it is official inCuba, theDominican Republic, andPuerto Rico. In all these countries,Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa, Spanish is one of the official languages ofEquatorial Guinea. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional language.
Portuguese, in its homeland,Portugal, is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language ofBrazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people, making Portuguese the most spokenofficial Romance language in a single country. As Portuguese is also spoken in neighboringeastern Paraguay andnorthern Uruguay, this accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America.
Portuguese is the official language of six African countries (Angola,Cape Verde,Guinea-Bissau,Mozambique,Equatorial Guinea, andSão Tomé and Príncipe), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent.[21][unreliable source] In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages inEast Timor andMacau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000[22]—are inJapan due toreturn immigration ofJapanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants.[23]In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers inEast Timor. Its closest relative, Galician, has co-official status in theautonomous community ofGalicia inSpain, together with Spanish.[24]
Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province ofQuebec, and in parts ofNew Brunswick andOntario. Canada isofficially bilingual, with French and English being the official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such asHaiti, French has official status, but most people speakcreoles such asHaitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but large numbers of second language speakers.
AlthoughItaly also had some colonial possessions beforeWorld War II, its language did not remain official after the end of the colonial period. As a result,Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities inNorth andSouth America andAustralia. In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namelyLibya,Eritrea andSomalia—it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government.[citation needed]
Romania did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includesMoldova, where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, and neighboring areas in Serbia (Vojvodina and theBor District), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine (Bukovina,Budjak) and in some villages between theDniester andBug rivers.[25] As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian speakers form about two percent of the population inItaly,Spain, andPortugal. Romanian is also spoken inIsrael by Romanian Jews,[26] where it is the native language of five percent of the population,[27] and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. TheAromanian language is spoken today byAromanians in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece.[28]Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian andItalian languages, as well as their common Latin origin.[29]
The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows:[30]
Spanish 54% (475 million, plus 75 million L2 for 550 million in theHispanophones)
Portuguese 26% (230 million, plus 30 million L2 for 260 million in theLusophones)
French 9% (80 million, plus 230 million L2 for 310 million in theFrancophones)
The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source ofseparatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCORed Book of Endangered Languages, ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g.Sicilian andVenetian) to "severely endangered" (Franco-Provençal, most of theOccitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.[This paragraph needs citation(s)]
During the empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with the westerndialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence.[33][34] The dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established byPortugal,Spain, andFrance from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to the other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe.
Despite other influences (e.g.substratum from pre-Roman languages, especiallyContinental Celtic languages; andsuperstratum from laterGermanic orSlavic invasions), thephonology,morphology, andlexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have dropped the Latininflection system, instead making extensive use ofprepositions. Romance languages also normally haveSVO sentence structure.[35]By most measures,Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most.[36] However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than toclassical Latin.[37][38]
Duration of Roman rule and the spread of the Romance languages[39]Romance languages in Europe
Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replacedCeltic and otherItalic languages, which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated the adoption of Latin.[40][41][42]
To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of theRoman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. With the rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then throughsouthern,western,central, andsoutheastern Europe, andnorthern Africa along parts ofwestern Asia.[43]: 1
Latin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries.[44] After that time and within two hundred years, it became adead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them."[45] By the eighth and ninth centuries Latin gave way to Romance.[46]
During the politicaldecline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scalemigrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and theBalkans were occupied by Germanic andSlavic tribes, as well as byHuns.
British andAfrican Romance—the forms of Vulgar Latin used inBritain andthe Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as didMoselle Romance in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetratedRoman Italy,Gaul, andHispania eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of theculture of ancient Rome alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.[43]: 4
Over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, local changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon accumulated to the point that the speech of any locale was noticeably different from that of another. In principle, differences between any twolects increased the more they were separated geographically, reducing easy mutual intelligibility between speakers of distant communities.[48] Clear evidence of some levels of change is found in theReichenau Glosses, an eighth-century compilation of about 1,200 words from the fourth-centuryVulgate ofJerome that had changed in phonological form or were no longer normally used, along with their eighth-century equivalents in proto-Franco-Provençal.[49] The following are some examples with reflexes in several modern Romance languages for comparison:[citation needed]
In all of the above examples, the words appearing in the fourth century Vulgate are the same words as would have been used inClassical Latin of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of theGlosses; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language. By the 8th century, the situation was very different. During the late 8th century,Charlemagne, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt",[48]: 6 successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular forWestern Europe. Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing theCouncil of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into therustica romana lingua, an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin.[48]: 6
By this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984),[48]: 6 the Romancelects had split apart enough to be able to speak of separateGallo-Romance,Ibero-Romance,Italo-Romance andEastern Romance languages. Some researchers[who?] have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of theWestern Roman Empire rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the century. During the period between the 5th–10th centuries AD Romance vernaculars documentation is scarce as the normal writing language used wasMedieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th century. The earliest such texts are theIndovinello Veronese from the eight century and theOaths of Strasbourg from the second half of the ninth century.[53]
Romance – Germanic language border:[54] • Early Middle Ages • Early Twentieth Century
From the 10th century onwards, some localvernaculars developed a written form and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles.[55] In some countries, such asPortugal, this transition was expedited by force of law; whereas in others, such asItaly, many prominent poets and writers used the vernacular of their own accord – some of the most famous in Italy beingGiacomo da Lentini andDante Alighieri. Well before that, the vernacular was also used for practical purposes, such as the testimonies in thePlaciti Cassinesi, written 960–963.[56]
The invention of theprinting press brought a tendency towards greater uniformity ofstandard languages within political boundaries, at the expense of other Romance languages anddialects less favored politically. In France, for instance, the dialect spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread to the entire country, and theOccitan of the south lost ground.
Lexical and grammatical similarities among the Romance languages, and between Latin and each of them, are apparent from the following examples in various Romancelects, all meaning 'She always closes the window before she dines/before dining'.
Badiot:Ëra stlüj dagnora la finestra impröma de cenè. Centro Cadore:La sera sempre la fenestra gnante de disna. Auronzo di Cadore:La sera sempro la fenestra davoi de disnà. Gherdëina:Ëila stluj for l viere dan maië da cëina.
Some of the divergence comes fromsemantic change: where the same root words have developed different meanings. For example, the Portuguese wordfresta is descended from Latinfenestra "window" (and is thuscognate to Frenchfenêtre, Italianfinestra, Romanianfereastră and so on), but now means "skylight" and "slit". Cognates may exist but have become rare, such ashiniestra in Spanish, or dropped out of use entirely. The Spanish and Portuguese termsdefenestrar meaning "tothrow through a window" andfenestrado meaning "replete with windows" also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin.
Likewise, Portuguese also has the wordcear, a cognate of Italiancenare and Spanishcenar, but uses it in the sense of "to have a late supper" in most varieties, while the preferred word for "to dine" isjantar (related to archaic Spanishyantar "to eat") because of semantic changes in the 19th century. Galician has bothfiestra (from medievalfẽestra, the ancestor of standard Portuguesefresta) and the less frequently usedventá andxanela.
As an alternative tolei (originally the genitive form), Italian has the pronounella, a cognate of the other words for "she", but it is hardly ever used in speaking.
Spanish, Asturian, and Leoneseventana and Mirandese and Sardinianbentana come from Latinventus "wind" (cf. Englishwindow, etymologically 'wind eye'), and Portuguesejanela, Galicianxanela, Mirandesejinela from Latin *ianuella "small opening", a derivative ofianua "door".
Sardinianbalcone (alternative forventàna/bentàna) comes from Old Italian and is similar to other Romance languages such as Frenchbalcon (from Italianbalcone), Portuguesebalcão, Romanianbalcon, Spanishbalcón, Catalanbalcó and Corsicanbalconi (alternative forpurtellu).
Along with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up theItalic branch of theIndo-European family.[11] Identifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is adialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. A tree model is often used, but the selection of criteria results in different trees. Most classification schemes are, implicitly or not, historical and geographic, resulting in groupings such asIbero- andGallo-Romance. A major division can be drawn between Eastern and Western Romance, separated by theLa Spezia-Rimini line.
Romance languages and dialects
The main subfamilies that have been proposed byEthnologue within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:[57]
Italo-Western, the largest group, which includes languages such as Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.
Eastern Romance, which includes Romanian and closely related languages.
Southern Romance, which includes Sardinian and Corsican (even if Corsican is considered by some linguists to be a form ofTuscan, so Italo-Western). This family is thought to have included the now-vanished Romance languages ofNorth Africa (or at least, they appear to have evolved some phonological features and their vowels in the same way).
Another approach involves attempts to rank the distance of Romance languages from each other or from their common ancestor (i.e. ranking languages based on howconservative or innovative they are, although the same language may be conservative in some respects while innovative in others). By most measures, French is the most highly differentiated Romance language, although Romanian has changed the greatest amount of its vocabulary, while Italian[58][59][60] and Sardinian have changed the least. Standard Italian can be considered a "central" language, which is generally somewhat easy to understand to speakers of other Romance languages, whereas French and Romanian are peripheral and quite dissimilar from the rest of Romance.[11]
Some Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages. There are several dozens of creoles ofFrench,Spanish, andPortuguese origin, some of them spoken asnational languages and lingua franca in former European colonies.
Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called "Neo-Romance languages".[61][62]
The concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematicianGiuseppe Peano, under the titleLatino sine flexione.[63] He wanted to create anaturalistic international language, as opposed to an autonomous constructed language likeEsperanto orVolapük which were designed for maximal simplicity of lexicon and derivation of words. Peano used Latin as the base of his language because, as he described it, Latin had been the international scientific language until the end of the 18th century.[63][64]
Other languages developed includeIdiom Neutral (1902),Interlingue-Occidental (1922),Interlingua (1951) andLingua Franca Nova (1998). The most famous and successful of these is Interlingua.[citation needed] Each of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages. Some languages have been constructed specifically for communication among speakers of Romance languages, thePan-Romance languages.
There are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such asTalossan. Because Latin is a very well attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages. These includeBrithenig (which mirrorsWelsh), Breathanach[65] (mirrorsIrish),Wenedyk (mirrorsPolish), Þrjótrunn (mirrorsIcelandic),[66] and Helvetian (mirrorsGerman).[67]
There was a tendency to eliminate final consonants in Vulgar Latin, either by dropping them (apocope) or adding a vowel after them (epenthesis).
Many final consonants were rare, occurring only in certain prepositions (e.g.ad "towards",apud "at, near (a person)"), conjunctions (sed "but"), demonstratives (e.g.illud "that (over there)",hoc "this"), and nominative singular noun forms, especially of neuter nouns (e.g.lac "milk",mel "honey",cor "heart"). Many of these prepositions and conjunctions were replaced by others, while the nouns were regularized into forms based on their oblique stems that avoided the final consonants (e.g. *lacte, *mele, *core).
Final-m was dropped in Vulgar Latin.[68] Even inClassical Latin, final-am,-em,-um were oftenelided inpoetic meter, suggesting them was weakly pronounced, probably marking thenasalisation of the vowel before it. This nasal vowel lost its nasalization in the Romance languages except in monosyllables, where it became/n/ e.g. Spanishquien <quem "whom",[68] Frenchrien "anything" <rem "thing";[69] note especially French and Catalanmon <meum "my (m.sg.)" which are derived from monosyllabic/meu̯m/ > */meu̯n/,/mun/, whereas Spanish disyllabicmío and Portuguese and Catalan monosyllabicmeu are derived from disyllabic/ˈme.um/ > */ˈmeo/.[citation needed]
As a result, only the following final consonants occurred in Vulgar Latin:
Final-t in third-person singular verb forms, and-nt (later reduced in many languages to-n) in third-person plural verb forms.[70]
Final-s (including-x) in a large number of morphological endings (verb endings-ās/-ēs/-īs/-is,-mus,-tis; nominative singular-us/-is; plural-ās/-ōs/-ēs) and certain other words (trēs "three",sex "six",crās "tomorrow", etc.).
Final-n in some monosyllables (often from earlier-m).
Final-r,-d in some prepositions (e.g.ad,per), which wereclitics[citation needed] that attached phonologically to the following word.
Very occasionally, final-c, e.g.Occitanoc "yes" <hoc,Old Frenchavuec "with" <apud hoc (although these instances were possibly protected by a finalepenthetic vowel at one point).
Final-t was eventually lost in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period. For example, the reflex of-t was dropped inOld French andOld Spanish only around 1100. In Old French, this occurred only when a vowel still preceded thet (generally/ə/ < Latina). Henceamat "he loves" > Old Frenchaime butvenit "he comes" > Old Frenchvient: the/t/ was never dropped and survives into Modern French inliaison, e.g.vient-il? "is he coming?"/vjɛ̃ti(l)/ (the corresponding/t/ inaime-t-il? is analogical, not inherited). Old French also kept the third-person plural ending-nt intact.
In Italo-Romance and theEastern Romance languages, eventually all final consonants were either lost or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except for some articles and a few monosyllabic prepositionscon,per,in. Modern Standard Italian still has very few consonant-final words, although Romanian has regained them through later loss of final/u/ and/i/. For example,amās "you love" >ame > Italianami;amant "they love" > *aman > Ital.amano. On the evidence of "sloppily written"Lombardic language documents, however, the loss of final/s/ in northern Italy did not occur until the 7th or 8th century, after the Vulgar Latin period, and the presence of many former final consonants is betrayed by thesyntactic gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) that they trigger. It is also thought that after a long vowel/s/ became/j/ rather than simply disappearing:nōs >noi "we",crās >crai "tomorrow" (southern Italy).[71] In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified:canēs > */ˈkanej/ >cani "dogs";amīcās > */aˈmikaj/ >amiche/aˈmike/ "(female) friends", where nominativeamīcae should produce**amice rather thanamiche (note masculineamīcī >amici not*amichi).
CentralWestern Romance languages eventually regained a large number of final consonants through the general loss of final/e/ and/o/, e.g. Catalanllet "milk" <lactem,foc "fire" <focum,peix "fish" <piscem. In French, most of these secondary final consonants (as well as primary ones) were lost before around 1700, but tertiary final consonants later arose through the loss of/ə/ <-a. Hence masculinefrīgidum "cold" > Old Frenchfroit/'frwεt/ >froid/fʁwa/, femininefrīgidam > Old Frenchfroide/'frwεdə/ >froide/fʁwad/.
In Romance languages the term 'palatalization' is used to describe the phonetic evolution of velar stops preceding a front vowel and of consonant clusters involving yod or of the palatal approximant itself.[72] The process involving gestural blending and articulatory reinforcement, starting fromLate Latin and Early Romance, generated a new series of consonants in Romance languages.[73]
The voicedlabial consonants/b/ and/w/ (represented by⟨b⟩ and⟨v⟩, respectively) both developed africative[β] as an intervocalic allophone.[74] This is clear from the orthography; in medieval times, the spelling of a consonantal⟨v⟩ is often used for what had been a⟨b⟩ in Classical Latin, or the two spellings were used interchangeably. In many Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), this fricative later developed into a/v/; but in others (Spanish, Galician, some Catalan and Occitan dialects, etc.) reflexes of/b/ and/w/ simply merged into a single phoneme.[75]
Several other consonants were "softened" in intervocalic position in Western Romance (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Northern Italian), but normally not phonemically in the rest of Italy (except some cases of "elegant" or Ecclesiastical words),[clarification needed] nor apparently at all in Romanian. The dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called theLa Spezia–Rimini Line and is one of the most importantisogloss bundles of the Romance dialects.[76] The changes (instances of diachronic lenition resulting inphonological restructuring) are as follows:Single voiceless plosives becamevoiced:-p-, -t-, -c- >-b-, -d-, -g-. Subsequently, in some languages they were further weakened, either becomingfricatives orapproximants,[β̞],[ð̞],[ɣ˕] (as in Spanish) or disappearing entirely (such as/t/ and/k/ lost between vowels in French, but/p/ >/v/). The following example shows progressive weakening of original /t/: e.g.vītam > Italianvita[ˈviːta], Portuguesevida[ˈvidɐ] (European Portuguese[ˈviðɐ]), Spanishvida[ˈbiða] (Southern Peninsular Spanish[ˈbi.a]), and Frenchvie[vi]. Some scholars have speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence ofContinental Celtic languages,[77] while scholarship of the past few decades has proposed internal motivations.[78]
The voiced plosives/d/ and/ɡ/ tended to disappear.
The plainsibilant-s-[s] was also voiced to[z] between vowels, although in many languages its spelling has not changed. (In Spanish, intervocalic[z] was later devoiced back to[s];[z] is found only as anallophone of/s/ before voiced consonants in Modern Spanish.)
Thedouble plosives became single:-pp-, -tt-, -cc-, -bb-, -dd-, -gg- >-p-, -t-, -c-, -b-, -d-, -g- in most languages. Subsequently, in some languages the voiced forms were further weakened, either becoming fricatives or approximants,[β̞],[ð̞],[ɣ˕] (as in Spanish). In French spelling, double consonants are merely etymological, except for -ll- after -i (pronounced [ij]), in most cases.
The double sibilant-ss-[sː] also became phonetically and phonemically single[s], although in many languages its spelling has not changed. Double sibilant remains in somelanguages of Italy, like Italian, Sardinian, and Sicilian.
The sound /h/ was lost but later reintroduced into individual Romance languages. The so-calledh aspiré "aspirated h" in French, now completely silent, was a borrowing fromFrankish. In Spanish, word-initial /f/ changed to /h/ during itsMedieval stage and was lost afterwards (for examplefarina >harina).[79] Romanian acquired it most likely from the adstrate.[80]
Consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages. However somelanguages of Italy (Italian,Sardinian, Sicilian, and numerous other varieties of central and southern Italy) do have long consonants like/bb/,/dd/,/ɡɡ/,/pp/,/tt/,/kk/,/ll/,/mm/,/nn/,/rr/,/ss/, etc., where the doubling indicates either actual length or, in the case ofplosives andaffricates, a short hold before the consonant is released, in many cases with distinctive lexical value: e.g.note/ˈnɔte/ (notes) vs.notte/ˈnɔtte/ (night),cade/ˈkade/ (s/he, it falls) vs.cadde/ˈkadde/ (s/he, it fell),caro/ˈkaro/ (dear, expensive) vs.carro/ˈkarro/ (cart, car). They may even occur at the beginning of words inRomanesco, Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e.g. Siciliancchiù (more), andccà (here). In general, the consonants/b/,/ts/, and/dz/ are long at the start of a word, while thearchiphoneme|R|[dubious –discuss] is realised as atrill/r/ in the same position. In much of central and southern Italy, the affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ weaken synchronically to fricative [ʃ] and [ʒ] between vowels, while their geminate congeners do not, e.g.cacio/ˈkatʃo/→[ˈkaːʃo] (cheese) vs.caccio/ˈkattʃo/→[ˈkattʃo] (I chase). In Italian the geminates /ʃʃ/, /ɲɲ/, and /ʎʎ/ are pronounced as long [ʃʃ], [ɲɲ], and [ʎʎ] between vowels, but normally reduced to short following pause:lasciare 'let, leave' orla sciarpa 'the scarf' with [ʃʃ], but post-pausalsciarpa with [ʃ].
A few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants. The double consonants ofPiedmontese exist only after stressed/ə/, writtenë, and are not etymological:vëdde (Latinvidēre, to see),sëcca (Latinsicca, dry, feminine ofsech). In standard Catalan and Occitan, there exists a geminate sound/lː/ writtenŀl (Catalan) orll (Occitan), but it is usually pronounced as a simple sound in colloquial (and even some formal) speech in both languages.
InLate Latin aprosthetic vowel /i/ (lowered to /e/ in most languages) was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with/s/ (referred to ass impura) and a voiceless consonant (#sC- > isC-):[81]
status "state" > Sardistadu, Sp/Pgestado, Catestat, OFrestat (mod.état).
While Western Romance words fused the prosthetic vowel with the word, cognates in Eastern Romance and southern Italo-Romance did not, e.g. Italianscrivere,spada,spirito,Stefano, andstato, Romanianscrie,spată,spirit,Ștefan andstat. In Italian, syllabification rules were preserved instead by vowel-final articles, thus femininespada asla spada, but instead of rendering the masculine*il stato,lo stato came to be the norm. Though receding at present, Italian once had a prosthetic/i/ maintaining /s/ syllable-final if a consonant preceded such clusters, so that 'in Switzerland' wasin[i]Svizzera. Some speakers still use the prothetic[i] productively, and it is fossilized in a few set locutions such asin ispecie 'especially' orper iscritto 'in writing' (a form whose survival may have been buttressed in part by the wordiscritto < Latinīnscrīptus).
1 Traditional academic transcription in Latin andRomance studies, respectively.
One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of itsvowel system.[82] Classical Latin had five short vowels,ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ, and fivelong vowels,ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, each of which was an individualphoneme (see the table in the right, for their likely pronunciation in IPA), and fourdiphthongs,ae,oe,au andeu (five according to some authors, includingui). There were also long and short versions ofy, representing therounded vowel/y(ː)/ in Greek borrowings, which however probably came to be pronounced/i(ː)/ even before Romance vowel changes started.
There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels excepta differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts.[83] So, for exampleē was pronouncedclose-mid/eː/ whileĕ was pronouncedopen-mid/ɛ/, andī was pronouncedclose/iː/ whileĭ was pronouncednear-close/ɪ/.
During the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost. Vowels came to be automatically pronounced long in stressed,open syllables (i.e. when followed by only one consonant), and pronounced short everywhere else. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian:cade[ˈkaːde] "he falls" vs.cadde[ˈkadde] "he fell".
The Proto-Romance loss of phonemic length originally produced a system with nine different quality distinctions in monophthongs, where only original/aaː/ had merged.[84] Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced:
The simplest outcome was inSardinian,[85] where the former long and short vowels in Latin simply coalesced, e.g./ɛeː/ >/ɛ/,/ɪiː/ >/i/: This produced a simple five-vowel system/aɛiɔu/.[86]
In most areas, however (technically, theItalo-Western languages), the near-close vowels/ɪʊ/ lowered and merged into the high-mid vowels/eo/. As a result, Latinpira "pear" andvēra "true", came to rhyme (e.g. Italian and Spanishpera, vera, andOld Frenchpoire, voire). Similarly, Latinnucem (fromnux "nut") andvōcem (fromvōx "voice") become Italiannoce, voce, Portuguesenoz, voz, and Frenchnoix, voix. This produced a seven-vowel system/aɛeiɔou/, still maintained in conservative languages such as Italian and Portuguese, and lightly transformed in Spanish (where/ɛ/>/je/,/ɔ/>/we/).
In theEastern Romance languages (particularly,Romanian), the front vowels/ĕēĭī/ evolved as in the majority of languages, but the back vowels/ɔoːʊuː/ evolved as in Sardinian. This produced an unbalanced six-vowel system:/aɛeiou/. In modern Romanian, this system has been significantly transformed, with/ɛ/>/je/ and with new vowels/əɨ/ evolving, leading to a balanced seven-vowel system with central as well as front and back vowels:/aeiəɨou/.[87]
Sicilian is sometimes described as having its own distinct vowel system. In fact, Sicilian passed through the same developments as the main bulk of Italo-Western languages. Subsequently, however, high-mid vowels (but not low-mid vowels) were raised in all syllables, stressed and unstressed; i.e./eo/>/iu/. The result is a five-vowel/aɛiɔu/.[86]
Further variants are found in southern Italy and Corsica, which also boasts a completely distinct system.
Outcome of stressed Classical Latin vowels in dialects of southern Italy, Sardinia and Corsica[citation needed]
Classical Latin
Proto-Romance
Senisese
Castel-mezzano
Neapolitan
Sicilian
Verbi-carese
Caro-vignese
Nuorese Sardinian
Southern Corsican
Taravo Corsican
Northern Corsican
Cap de Corse
ā
*/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
/a/
ă
au
*/aw/
/ɔ/?
/o/?
/ɔ/?
/ɔ/?
/ɔ/?
/ɔ/?
/ɔ/
/o/?
/ɔ/?
/o/?
ĕ,ae
*/ɛ/
/ɛ/
/e/
/ɛ/
/ɛ/
/ɛ/
/ɛ/
/ɛ/
/e/
/e/
/ɛ/
/e/ (/ɛ/)
ē,oe
*/e/
/e/
/i/
/ɪ/ (/ɛ/)
/e/
/e/
ĭ
*/ɪ/
/i/
/ɪ/
/i/
/i/
/ɛ/
ī
*/i/
/i/
/i/
/i/
/i/
/i/
/i/
ŏ
*/ɔ/
/ɔ/
/o/
/ɔ/
/ɔ/
/ɔ/
/ɔ/
/ɔ/
/o/
/o/
/ɔ/
/o/
ō, (au)
*/o/
/o/
/u/
/ʊ/ (/ɔ/)
/o/
ŭ
*/ʊ/
/u/
/u/
/ʊ/
/u/
/u/
/ɔ/
ū
*/u/
/u/
/u/
/u/
/u/
/u/
The Sardinian-type vowel system is also found in a small region belonging to theLausberg area (also known asLausberg zone; compareNeapolitan language § Distribution) of southern Italy, in southernBasilicata, and there is evidence that the Romanian-type "compromise" vowel system was once characteristic of most of southern Italy,[88] although it is now limited to a small area in western Basilicata centered on theCastelmezzano dialect, the area being known asVorposten, the German word for 'outpost'. TheSicilian vowel system, now generally thought to be a development based on the Italo-Western system, is also represented in southern Italy, in southernCilento,Calabria and the southern tip ofApulia, and may have been more widespread in the past.[89]
The greatest variety of vowel systems outside of southern Italy is found in Corsica, where the Italo-Western type is represented in most of the north and center and the Sardinian type in the south, as well as a system resembling the Sicilian vowel system (and even more closely the Carovignese system) in theCap Corse region; finally, in between the Italo-Western and Sardinian system is found, in theTaravo region, a unique vowel system that cannot be derived from any other system, which has reflexes like Sardinian for the most part, but the short high vowels of Latin are uniquely reflected as mid-low vowels.[90]
Gallurese andSassarese appear to belong to the southern dialects of Corsica historically, but have a notableLogudorese Sardinian substratum – or adstratum – that is significantly stronger in Sassarese than in Gallurese.
The Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was phonemicized in theGallo-Romance languages as a result of the loss of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages (e.g.Friulian) still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels.
French phonemicized a third vowel length system around AD 1300 as a result of the sound change /VsC/ > /VhC/ >/VːC/ (whereV is any vowel andC any consonant). This vowel length began to be lost in Early Modern French, but the long vowels are still usually marked with a circumflex (and continue to be distinguished regionally, chiefly in Belgium). A fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: All nasal vowels as well as the oral vowels/ɑoø/ (which mostly derive from former long vowels) are pronounced long in all stressedclosed syllables, and all vowels are pronounced long in syllables closed by the voiced fricatives/vzʒʁvʁ/.
The Latin diphthongsae andoe, pronounced/aj/ and/oj/ in earlier Latin, were early on monophthongized.[91]
ae became/ɛː/ by[citation needed] the 1st centurya.d. at the latest. Although this sound was still distinct from all existing vowels, the neutralization of Latin vowel length eventually caused its merger with/ɛ/ < shorte: e.g.caelum "sky" > Frenchciel, Spanish/Italiancielo, Portuguesecéu/sɛw/, with the same vowel as inmele "honey" > French/Spanishmiel, Italianmiele, Portuguesemel/mɛl/. Some words show an early merger ofae with/eː/, as inpraeda "booty" > *prēda/preːda/ > Frenchproie (vs. expected **priée), Italianpreda (not **prieda) "prey"; orfaenum "hay" > *fēnum[feːnũ] > Spanishheno, Frenchfoin (but Italianfieno /fjɛno/).
oe generally merged with/eː/:poenam "punishment" > Romance */pena/ > Spanish/Italianpena, Frenchpeine;foedus "ugly" > Romance */fedo/ > Spanishfeo, Portuguesefeio. There are relatively few such outcomes, sinceoe was rare in Classical Latin (most original instances had become Classicalū, as in Old Latinoinos "one" > Classicalūnus[92]) and sooe was mostly limited to Greek loanwords, which were typically learned (high-register) terms.
au merged withō/oː/ in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st centuryb.c.[citation needed] A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g.Cicero's taunt that the populist politicianPublius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name fromClaudius to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety ofo in many languages. For example, Italian and French have/ɔ/ as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of/ɔ/ and the French-specific palatalization/ka/ >/tʃa/ (hencecausa > Frenchchose, Italiancosa/kɔza/ not **cuosa). Spanish has/o/, but Portuguese spelling maintains⟨ou⟩, which has developed to/o/ (and still remains as/ou/ in some dialects, and/oi/ in others).[93] Occitan, Dalmatian, Sardinian, and many other minority Romance languages still have/au/ while in Romanian it underwent diaresis like inaurum >aur (a-ur).[94] A few common words, however, show an early merger withō/oː/, evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation:[citation needed] e.g. Frenchqueue, Italiancoda/koda/, Occitanco(d)a, Romaniancoadă (all meaning "tail") must all derive fromcōda rather than Classicalcauda.[95] Similarly, Spanishoreja, Portugueseorelha, Frenchoreille, Romanianureche, and Sardinianolícra,orícla "ear" must derive fromōric(u)la rather than Classicalauris (Occitanaurelha was probably influenced by the unrelatedausir <audīre "to hear"), and the formoricla is in fact reflected in theAppendix Probi.
An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees wasmetaphony (vowel mutation), conceptually similar to theumlaut process so characteristic of theGermanic languages. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian. In many languages affected by metaphony, a distinction exists between final /u/ (from most cases of Latin-um) and final /o/ (from Latin-ō,-ud and some cases of-um, esp. masculine "mass" nouns), and only the former triggers metaphony.
Some examples:
InServigliano in theMarche of Italy, stressed/ɛeɔo/ are raised to/eiou/ before final /i/ or /u/:[96]/ˈmetto/ "I put" vs./ˈmitti/ "you put" (< *metti < *mettes < Latinmittis);/moˈdɛsta/ "modest (fem.)" vs./moˈdestu/ "modest (masc.)";/ˈkwesto/ "this (neut.)" (< Latineccum istud) vs./ˈkwistu/ "this (masc.)" (< Latineccum istum).
Calvallo inBasilicata,southern Italy, is similar, but the low-mid vowels/ɛɔ/ are diphthongized to/jewo/ rather than raised:[97]/ˈmette/ "he puts" vs./ˈmitti/ "you put", but/ˈpɛnʒo/ "I think" vs./ˈpjenʒi/ "you think".
Metaphony also occurs in most northern Italian dialects, but only by (usually lost) final *i; apparently, final *u was lowered to *o (usually lost) before metaphony could take effect.
Some of theAstur-Leonese languages in northern Spain have the same distinction between final /o/ and /u/[98] as in the Central-Southern Italian languages,[99] with /u/ triggering metaphony.[100] The plural of masculine nouns in these dialects ends in-os, which does not trigger metaphony, unlike in the singular (vs. Italian plural-i, which does trigger metaphony).
Sardinian has allophonic raising of mid vowels/ɛɔ/ to[eo] before final /i/ or /u/. This has been phonemicized in theCampidanese dialect as a result of the subsequent raising of final /e o/ to /i u/.
Raising of/ɔ/ to/o/ occurs sporadically in Portuguese in the masculine singular, e.g.porco/ˈporku/ "pig" vs.porcos/ˈpɔrkus/ "pig". It is thought that Galician-Portuguese at one point had singular /u/ vs. plural /os/, exactly as in modern Astur-Leonese.[99]
In all of the Western Romance languages, final /i/ (primarily occurring in the first-person singular of thepreterite) raised mid-high/eo/ to/iu/, e.g. Portuguesefiz "I did" (< *fidzi < *fedzi < Latinfēcī) vs.fez "he did" (< *fedze < Latinfēcit). Old Spanish similarly hadfize "I did" vs.fezo "he did" (-o by analogy withamó "he loved"), but subsequently generalized stressed /i/, producing modernhice "I did" vs.hizo "he did". The same thing happened prehistorically in Old French, yieldingfis "I did",fist "he did" (< *feist < Latinfēcit).
A number of languagesdiphthongized some of the free vowels, especially the open-mid vowels/ɛɔ/:[101]
Spanish consistently diphthongized all open-mid vowels/ɛɔ/>/jewe/ except for before certain palatal consonants (which raised the vowels to close-mid before diphthongization took place).
Eastern Romance languages similarly diphthongized/ɛ/ to/je/ (the corresponding vowel/ɔ/ did not develop from Proto-Romance).
Italian diphthongized/ɛ/>/jɛ/ and/ɔ/>/wɔ/ in open syllables (in the situations where vowels were lengthened in Proto-Romance), the most salient exception being /ˈbɛne/bene 'well', perhaps due to the high frequency ofapocopatedben (e.g.ben difficile 'quite difficult',ben fatto 'well made' etc.).
French similarly diphthongized/ɛɔ/ in open syllables (when lengthened), along with/aeo/:/aːɛːeːɔːoː/ >/aɛiɛeiuɔou/ > middle OF/ejeɔiweeu/ > modern/ejewaœ~øœ~ø/.
French also diphthongized/ɛɔ/ before palatalized consonants, especially /j/. Further development was as follows:/ɛj/>/iej/>/i/;/ɔj/ > /uoj/ > early OF /uj/ > modern /ɥi/.
Catalan diphthongized/ɛɔ/ before /j/ from palatalized consonants, just like French, with similar results:/ɛj/>/i/,/ɔj/>/uj/.
These diphthongization had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages. In Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely.[102] Portuguese is the most conservative in this respect, keeping the seven-vowel system more or less unchanged (but with changes in particular circumstances, e.g. due tometaphony). Other than before palatalized consonants, Catalan keeps/ɔo/ intact, but/ɛe/ split in a complex fashion into/ɛeə/ and then coalesced again in the standard dialect (Eastern Catalan) in such a way that most original/ɛe/ have reversed their quality to become/eɛ/.
In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. In French, /e/ and/ɛ/ merged by the twelfth century or so, and the distinction between/ɔ/ and/o/ was eliminated without merging by the sound changes/u/>/y/,/o/>/u/. Generally this led to a situation where both[e,o] and[ɛ,ɔ] occur allophonically, with the close-mid vowels inopen syllables and the open-mid vowels inclosed syllables. In French, both[e/ɛ] and[o/ɔ] were partly rephonemicized: Both/e/ and/ɛ/ occur in open syllables as a result of/aj/>/ɛ/, and both/o/ and/ɔ/ occur in closed syllables as a result of/al/>/au/>/o/.
Old French also had numerous falling diphthongs resulting from diphthongization before palatal consonants or from a fronted /j/ originally following palatal consonants in Proto-Romance or later: e.g.pācem /patsʲe/ "peace" > PWR */padzʲe/ (lenition) > OFpaiz /pajts/; *punctum "point" > Gallo-Romance */ponʲto/ > */pojɲto/ (fronting) > OFpoint /põjnt/. During the Old French period, preconsonantal /l/ [ɫ] vocalized to /w/, producing many new falling diphthongs: e.g.dulcem "sweet" > PWR */doltsʲe/ > OFdolz /duɫts/ >douz /duts/;fallet "fails, is deficient" > OFfalt >faut "is needed";bellus "beautiful" > OFbels[bɛɫs] >beaus[bɛaws]. By the end of the Middle French period,all falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: proto-OF/ajɛjjɛjejjejwɔjojujalɛlelilɔlolul/ > early OF/ajɛjiejyjojyjawɛawewiɔwowy/ > modern spelling⟨ai ei i oi ui oi ui au eau eu i ou ou u⟩ > mod. French/ɛɛiwaɥiwaɥiooøiuuy/.[citation needed]
In both French and Portuguese,nasal vowels eventually developed from sequences of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (/m/ or /n/). Originally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped. In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were subsequently denasalized, but not before causing the vowels to lower somewhat, e.g.dōnat "he gives" > OFdune/dunə/ >donne/dɔn/,fēminam >femme/fam/. Other vowels remained nasalized, and were dramatically lowered:fīnem "end" >fin/fɛ̃/ (often pronounced[fæ̃]);linguam "tongue" >langue/lɑ̃ɡ/;ūnum "one" >un/œ̃/,/ɛ̃/.
In Portuguese, /n/ between vowels was dropped, and the resultinghiatus eliminated through vowel contraction of various sorts, often producing diphthongs:manum, *manōs > PWR *manu, ˈmanos "hand(s)" >mão, mãos/mɐ̃w̃,mɐ̃w̃s/;canem, canēs "dog(s)" > PWR *kane, ˈkanes > *can, ˈcanes >cão, cães/kɐ̃w̃,kɐ̃j̃s/;ratiōnem, ratiōnēs "reason(s)" > PWR *raˈdʲzʲone, raˈdʲzʲones > *raˈdzon, raˈdzones >razão, razões/χaˈzɐ̃w̃,χaˈzõj̃s/ (Brazil),/ʁaˈzɐ̃ũ,ʁɐˈzõj̃ʃ/ (Portugal). Sometimes the nasalization was eliminated:lūna "moon" > Galician-Portugueselũa >lua;vēna "vein" > Galician-Portuguesevẽa >veia. Nasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised (rather than lowered, as in French):fīnem "end" >fim/fĩ/;centum "hundred" > PWRtʲsʲɛnto >cento/ˈsẽtu/;pontem "bridge" > PWRpɔnte >ponte/ˈpõtʃi/ (Brazil),/ˈpõtɨ/ (Portugal).[103]
Romanian shows evidence of past nasalization phenomena, the loss of palatal nasal [ɲ] in vie < Lat. vinia, and the rhotacism of intervocalic /n/ in words like mărunt < Lat. minutu for example. The effect of nasalization is observed in vowel closing to /i ɨ u/ before single /n/ and nasal+consonant clusters. Latin /nn/ and /m/ did not cause the same effect.[104]
Characteristic of theGallo-Romance andRhaeto-Romance languages are thefront rounded vowels/yøœ/. All of these languages, with the exception ofCatalan, show an unconditional change /u/ > /y/, e.g.lūnam > Frenchlune/lyn/, Occitan/ˈlyno/. Many of the languages in Switzerland and Italy show the further change /y/ > /i/. Also very common is some variation of the French development/ɔːoː/ (lengthened inopen syllables) >/weew/ >/œœ/, with mid back vowels diphthongizing in some circumstances and then re-monophthongizing into mid-front rounded vowels. (French has both/ø/ and/œ/, with/ø/ developing from/œ/ in certain circumstances.)
1 Traditional academic transcription in Romance studies.
Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables.
In Sardinian, they coalesced into five vowels in the same way as in stressed syllables.
In Italo-Western Romance, they coalesced into seven vowels, as in stressed syllables, but then unstressed low-mid/ɛɔ/ merged into the high-mid vowels/eo/, resulting in a five-vowel system in unstressed syllables.
Word-final short-u appears to have been raised to/u/, rather than lowered to/o/. However, it is possible that in reality, final/u/ comes fromlong *-ū <-um, where original final-m caused vowel lengthening as well as nasalization. Evidence of this comes fromRhaeto-Romance, in particularSursilvan, which preserves reflexes of both final-us and-um, and where the latter, but not the former, triggersmetaphony. This suggests the development-us >/ʊs/ >/os/, but-um >/ũː/ >/u/.[105]
In final unstressed syllables, most Italo-Western Romance languages show further coalescence, although the original five-vowel system was preserved as-is in some of the more conservative central Italian languages:
InTuscan (including standard Italian), /u/ merged into /o/ in final unstressed syllables, producing the four-vowel system of/aeio/.
In theWestern Romance languages, /i/ eventually merged into /e/ in final unstressed syllables (although /i/ triggeredmetaphony before that, e.g. Spanishhice, Portuguesefiz "I did" <*fize < Latinfēcī). In Spanish, /u/ merged into /o/ in final unstressed syllables, producing the three-vowel system of/aeo/; the vowel/e/ was dropped after single coronal consonants, e.g. /r/, /l/, /n/, /d/, /dz/ (< palatalizedc).
In theGallo-Romance languages (part of Western Romance), /e i o u/ were dropped entirely in final unstressed syllables unless that produced an impossible final cluster (e.g. /tr/), in which case a "prop vowel" /e/ was added. This left only two vowels in final unstressed syllables: /a/ and prop vowel /e/. Catalan preserves this system.
Loss of final stressless vowels inVenetian shows a pattern intermediate between Central Italian and theGallo-Italic branch, and the environments for vowel deletion vary considerably depending on the dialect. In the table above, final /e/ is uniformly absent inmar, absent in some dialects inpart(e) /part(e)/ andset(e) /sɛt(e)/, but retained inmare (< Latinmātrem) as a relic of the earlier cluster *dr.
Various later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.:
In French, most final consonants were dropped, and then final/ə/ was also dropped. The/ə/ is still preserved in spelling as a final silent-e, whose main purpose is to signal that the previous consonant is pronounced, e.g.port "port"/pɔʁ/ vs.porte "door"/pɔʁt/. These changes also eliminated the difference between singular and plural in most words:ports "ports" (still/pɔʁ/),portes "doors" (still/pɔʁt/). Final consonants reappear inliaison contexts (in close connection with a following vowel-initial word), e.g.nous[nu] "we" vs.nous avons[nu.za.ˈvɔ̃] "we have",il fait[il.fɛ] "he does" vs.fait-il ?[fɛ.til] "does he?".
In Portuguese, final unstressed /o/ and /u/ were apparently preserved intact for a while, since final unstressed /u/, but not /o/ or /os/, triggeredmetaphony (see above). Final-syllable unstressed /o/ was raised in preliterary times to /u/, but always still written⟨o⟩. At some point (perhaps in late Galician-Portuguese), final-syllable unstressed /e/ was raised to /i/ (but still written⟨e⟩); this remains inBrazilian Portuguese, but has developed to/ɨ/ in northern and centralEuropean Portuguese.
In Catalan, final unstressed/as/ >/es/. In many dialects, unstressed/o/ and/u/ merge into/u/ as in Portuguese, and unstressed/a/ and/e/ merge into/ə/. However, some dialects preserve the original five-vowel system, most notably standardValencian.
Examples of evolution of final unstressed vowels: From least- to most-changed languages
The so-calledintertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels, i.e. not in the initial, final, ortonic (i.e. stressed) syllable, hence intertonic. Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. Already in Vulgar Latin intertonic vowels between a single consonant and a following /r/ or /l/ tended to drop:vétulum "old" >veclum > Dalmatianvieklo, Sicilianvecchiu, Portuguesevelho. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels.
Generally, those languages south and east of theLa Spezia–Rimini Line (Romanian and Central-Southern Italian) maintained intertonic vowels, while those to the north and west (Western Romance) dropped all except /a/. Standard Italian generally maintained intertonic vowels, but typically raised unstressed /e/ > /i/. Examples:
septimā́nam "week" > Italiansettimana, Romaniansăptămână vs. Spanish/Portuguesesemana, Frenchsemaine, Occitan/Catalansetmana, Piedmontesesman-a
quattuórdecim "fourteen" > Italianquattordici, Venetiancuatòrdexe, Lombard/Piedmontesequatòrdes, vs. Spanishcatorce, Portuguese/Frenchquatorze
metipsissimus[106] >medipsimus /medíssimos/ ~ /medéssimos/ "self"[107] > Italianmedésimo vs. Venetianmedemo, Lombardmedemm, Old Spanishmeísmo,meesmo (> modernmismo), Galician-Portuguesemeesmo (> modernmesmo), Old Frenchmeḍisme (> latermeïsme > MFmesme > modernmême)[108]
bonitā́tem "goodness" > Italianbonità ~bontà, Romanianbunătate but Spanishbondad, Portuguesebondade, Frenchbonté
collocā́re "to position, arrange" > Italiancollocare vs. Spanishcolgar "to hang", Romanianculca "to lie down", Frenchcoucher "to lay sth on its side; put s.o. to bed"
commūnicā́re "to take communion" > Romaniancumineca vs. Portuguesecomungar, Spanishcomulgar, Old Frenchcomungier
carricā́re "to load (onto a wagon, cart)" > Portuguese/Catalancarregar vs. Spanish/Occitancargar "to load", Frenchcharger, Italiancaricare, Lombardcargà/caregà, Venetiancarigar/cargar(e) "to load", Romanianîncărca
disjējūnā́re "to break a fast" > *disjūnā́re > Old Frenchdisner "to have lunch" > Frenchdîner "to dine" (but *disjū́nat > Old Frenchdesjune "he has lunch" > French(il) déjeune "he has lunch")
adjūtā́re "to help" > Italianaiutare, Romanianajuta but Frenchaider, Lombardaidà/aiuttà (Spanishayudar, Portugueseajudar based on stressed forms, e.g.ayuda/ajuda "he helps"; cf. Old Frenchaidier "to help" vs.aiue "he helps")
Portuguese is more conservative in maintaining some intertonic vowels other than /a/: e.g. *offerḗscere "to offer" > Portugueseoferecer vs. Spanishofrecer, Frenchoffrir (< *offerīre). French, on the other hand, drops even intertonic /a/ after the stress:Stéphanum "Stephen" > SpanishEsteban but Old FrenchEstievne > FrenchÉtienne. Many cases of /a/ before the stress also ultimately dropped in French:sacraméntum "sacrament" > Old Frenchsairement > Frenchserment "oath".
The Romance languages for the most part have continued to use the Latin alphabet while adapting it to their evolution.One exception was Romanian, where before the nineteenth century, theRomanian Cyrillic alphabet was used due to Slavic influence after the Roman retreat. A Cyrillic alphabet was also used for Romanian (then called Moldovan) in theUSSR. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions (Arabic andHebrew) to write Romance languages such asJudaeo-Spanish andMozarabic inaljamiado.
Theclassical Latin alphabet of 23 letters –A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,V,X,Y,Z – wasmodified and augmented in various ways to yield the spelling systems of the Romance languages. In particular, the single Latin letterV split intoV (consonant) andU (vowel), and the letterI split intoI andJ. The Latin letterK and the new letterW, which came to be widely used inGermanic languages, are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words. Indeed, in Italian prosekilometro is properlychilometro. Portuguese and Catalan eschew importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. Thus Wikipedia isViquipèdia in Catalan butWikipedia in Spanish; chikungunya, sandwich, kiwi arechicungunha,sanduíche,quiuí in Portuguese butchikunguña,sándwich,kiwi in Spanish.
While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notablyH andQ, have been variously combined indigraphs ortrigraphs (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions. Most languages added auxiliary marks (diacritics) to some letters, for these and other purposes.
The spelling systems of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language.Spelling rules are typicallyphonemic (as opposed to being strictlyphonetic); as a result of this, the actual pronunciation of standard written forms can vary substantially according to the speaker's accent (which may differ by region) or the position of a sound in the word or utterance (allophony).
The following letters have notably different values between languages, or between Latin and the Romance languages:
B, V: Merged in Spanish and some dialects of Catalan, where both letters represent a single phoneme pronounced as either[b] or[β] depending on position, with no differentiation betweenB andV.
C: Generally a "hard"[k], but "soft" (fricative oraffricate) beforee,i, ory.
G: Generally a "hard"[ɡ], but "soft" (fricative or affricate) beforee,i, ory. In some languages, like Spanish, the hardg, phonemically/ɡ/, is pronounced as a fricative[ɣ] after vowels. In Romansch, the softg is avoiced palatal plosive[ɟ] or a voicedalveolo-palatal affricate[dʑ].
H:Silent in most languages; used to form variousdigraphs. But represents[h] in Romanian, Walloon and Gascon Occitan.
J: Represents the fricative[ʒ] in most languages, thepalatal approximant[j] in Romansh and in several of the languages of Italy, and [x] or [h] in Spanish (depending on thevariety). Italian does not use this letter in native words, replacing it withgi before a vowel.
Q: As in Latin, its phonetic value is that of a hardc, i.e.[k], and in native words it is almost always followed by a (sometimes silent)u. Romanian does not use this letter in native words, usingch instead.
S: Generallyvoiceless[s], but in some languages it can be voiced[z] instead in certain contexts (especially between vowels). In Spanish, Romanian, Galician and several varieties of Italian, it is always pronounced voiceless between vowels. If the phoneme /s/ is represented by the letterS, predictable assimilations are normally not shown (e.g. Italian/ˈslitta/ 'sled', spelledslitta but pronounced[ˈzlitta], never with[s]). Also at the end of syllables it may represent specialallophonic pronunciations. In Romansh, it also stands for a voiceless or voiced fricative,[ʃ] or[ʒ], before certain consonants.
W: No Romance language uses this letter in native words, with the exception ofWalloon.
X: Its pronunciation is rather variable, both between and within languages. In the Middle Ages, thelanguages of Iberia used this letter to denote thevoiceless postalveolar fricative[ʃ], which is still the case in modernCatalan andPortuguese. With the Renaissance the classical pronunciation[ks] – or similarconsonant clusters, such as[ɡz],[ɡs], or[kθ] – were frequently reintroduced inlatinisms and hellenisms. InVenetian it represents[z], and inLigurian thevoiced postalveolar fricative[ʒ]. Italian does not use this letter in native words for historical reasons.
Y: This letter is not used in most languages, with the prominent exceptions of French and Spanish, where it represents[j] before vowels (or various similar fricatives such as thepalatal fricative[ʝ], in Spanish), and the vowel[i] orsemivowel[j] elsewhere.
Z: In most languages it represents the sound[z]. However, in Italian it denotes the affricates[dz] and[ts] (which are two separate phonemes, but rarely contrast; among the few examples of minimal pairs arerazza "ray" with[ddz],razza "race" with[tts] (both are phonetically long between vowels); in Romansh the voiceless affricate[ts]; and in Galician and Spanish it denotes either thevoiceless dental fricative[θ] or[s].
Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems.
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 phonemic value. The concept (but not the actual combinations) is derived from Classical Latin, which used, for example,TH,PH, andCH when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "ϕ" (later "φ"), and "χ". These were onceaspirated sounds in Greek before changing to corresponding fricatives, and theH represented what sounded to the Romans like an/ʰ/ following/t/,/p/, and/k/ respectively. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:
CI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent/tʃ/ beforeA,O, orU.
CH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh andSardinian to represent/k/ beforeE orI (including yod/j/);/tʃ/ inOccitan, Spanish, Astur-leonese and Galician;[c] or[tɕ] in Romansh beforeA,O orU; and/ʃ/ in most other languages. In Catalan it is used in some old spelling conventions for/k/.
GI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican and Romanian to represent/dʒ/ beforeA,O, orU, and in Romansh to represent[ɟi] or/dʑi/ or (beforeA,E,O, andU)[ɟ] or/dʑ/
GH: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romanian, Romansh andSardinian to represent/ɡ/ beforeE orI (including yod/j/), and in Galician for thevoiceless pharyngeal fricative/ħ/ (not standard sound).
GL: used in Romansh before consonants andI and at the end of words for/ʎ/.
GLI: used in Italian and Corsican for/ʎʎ/ and Romansh for/ʎ/.
GN: used in French, some Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romansh Walloon for/ɲ/, as inchampignon; in Italian to represent/ɲɲ/, as in "ogni" or "lo gnocco".
GU: used beforeE orI to represent/ɡ/ or/ɣ/ in all Romance languages except Italian, Romance languages in Italy, Corsican, Romansh, and Romanian, which useGH instead.
IG: used at the end of word in Catalan for/tʃ/, as inmaig,safareig orenmig.
IX: used between vowels or at the end of word in Catalan/Aragonese for/ʃ/, as incaixa/caixa orcalaix/calaixo.
JH: used in Walloon for /ʒ/ or /h/.
LH: used in Portuguese and Occitan/ʎ/.
LL: used in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Astur-leonese, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for/ʎ/ which has merged in some cases with/j/. Represents/l/ in French unless it followsI (i) when it represents/j/ (or/ʎ/ in some dialects). As in Italian, it is used in Occitan for along/ll/.
L·L: used in Catalan for a geminate consonant/ɫɫ/.
NH: used in Portuguese and Occitan for/ɲ/, used in official Galician for/ŋ/ .
N-: used in Piedmontese and Ligurian for/ŋ/ between two vowels.
NN: used inLeonese for/ɲ/, in Italian for geminate/nn/.
NY: used in Catalan, Aragonese and Walloon for/ɲ/.
QU: represents/kw/ in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Romansh;/k/ in French, Astur-leonese (normally beforee ori);/k/ (beforee ori) or/kw/ (normally beforea oro) in Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese;/k/ in Spanish (always beforee ori).
RR: used between vowels in several languages (Occitan, Catalan, Spanish) to denote atrilled/r/ or aguttural R, instead of theflap/ɾ/.
SC: used beforeE orI in Italian, Romance languages in Italy as/ʃ/or/ʃʃ/, in European Portuguese as/ʃs/ and in French, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan andHispanic American Spanish as/s/ in words of certain etymology (notice this would represent/sθ/ in standard peninsular Spanish)
SCH: used in Romansh for[ʃ] or[ʒ], in Italian for/sk/ beforeE orI, including yod/j/.
SCI: used in Italian, Romance languages in Italy, and Corsican to represent/ʃ/or/ʃʃ/ beforeA,O, orU.
SH: used inAranese, Spanish (almost only in foreign words), Occitan and Walloon for/ʃ/.
SS: used in French, Portuguese, Piedmontese, Romansh, Occitan, and Catalan for/s/ between vowels, in Italian, Romance languages of Italy, and Corsican for long/ss/.
TS: used in Catalan for/ts/.
TSH: used in Walloon for /tʃ/.
TG: used in Romansh for[c] or[tɕ]. In Catalan is used for/dʒ/ beforeE andI, as inmetge orfetge.
TH: used in Jèrriais for/θ/; used in Aranese for either/t/ or/tʃ/.
TJ: used between vowels and beforeA,O orU, in Catalan for/dʒ/, as insotjar ormitjó.
TSCH: used in Romansh for[tʃ].
TX: used at the beginning or at the end of word or between vowels in Catalan for/tʃ/, as intxec,esquitx oratxa.
TZ: used in Catalan for/dz/.
XH: used in Walloon for /ʃ/ or /h/, depending on the dialect.
While the digraphsCH,PH,RH andTH were at one time used in many words of Greek origin, most languages have now replaced them withC/QU,F,R andT. Only French has kept theseetymological spellings, which now represent/k/ or/ʃ/,/f/,/ʀ/ and/t/, respectively.
Gemination, in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated. InJèrriais, long consonants are marked with an apostrophe:s's is a long/zz/,ss's is a long/ss/, andt't is a long/tt/. The phonemic contrast between geminate and single consonants is widespread inItalian, and normally indicated in the traditional orthography:fatto/fatto/ 'done' vs.fato/fato/ 'fate, destiny';cadde/kadde/ 's/he, it fell' vs.cade/kade/ 's/he, it falls'. The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. In Catalan, the gemination ofl is marked by apunt volat ("flying point"):l·l.
Romance languages also introduced various marks (diacritics) that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes. In some cases, diacritics are used as an alternative to digraphs and trigraphs; namely to represent a larger number of sounds than would be possible with the basic alphabet, or to distinguish between sounds that were previously written the same. Diacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation (homophones).
Depending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e.g. for the purposes oflexical sorting. This is the case, for example, of Romanianș ([ʃ]) and Spanishñ ([ɲ]).
The following are the most common use of diacritics in Romance languages.
Vowel quality: the system of markingclose-mid vowels with anacute accent,é, andopen-mid vowels with agrave accent,è, is widely used (e.g. Catalan, French, Italian). Portuguese, however, uses thecircumflex (ê) for the former, and the acute (é), for the latter. Some minority Romance languages use anumlaut (diaeresis mark) in the case ofä, ö, ü to indicate fronted vowel variants, as inGerman. Centralized vowels (/ɐ/,/ə/) are indicated variously (â in Portuguese,ă/î in Romanian,ë inPiedmontese, etc.). In French, Occitan and Romanian, these accents are used whenever necessary to distinguish the appropriate vowel quality, but in the other languages, they are used only when it is necessary to mark unpredictable stress, or in some cases to distinguish homophones.
Vowel length: French uses a circumflex to indicate what had been along vowel (although nowadays this rather indicates a difference in vowel quality, if it has any effect at all on pronunciation). This same usage is found in some minority languages.
Nasality: Portuguese marksnasal vowels with atilde (ã) when they occur before other written vowels and in some other instances.
Palatalization: some historicalpalatalizations are indicated with thecedilla (ç) in French, Catalan, Occitan and Portuguese. In Spanish and several other world languages influenced by it, the graphemeñ represents apalatal nasal consonant.
Separate pronunciation: when a vowel and another letter that would normally be combined into adigraph with a single sound are exceptionally pronounced apart, this is often indicated with adiaeresis mark on the vowel. This is particularly common in the case ofgü /ɡw/ beforee ori, because plaingu in this case would be pronounced /ɡ/. This usage occurs in Spanish, French, Catalan and Occitan, and occurred before the 2009 spelling reform in Brazilian Portuguese. French also uses the diaeresis on the second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that both are pronounced separately, as inNoël "Christmas" andhaïr "to hate".
Stress: the stressed vowel in a polysyllabic word may be indicated with an accent, when it cannot be predicted by rule. In Italian, Portuguese and Catalan, the choice of accent (acute, grave or circumflex) may depend on vowel quality. When no quality needs to be indicated, an acute accent is normally used (ú), but Italian and Romansh use a grave accent (ù). Portuguese puts a diacritic on all stressed monosyllables that end ina e o as es os, to distinguish them from unstressed function words:chá "tea",más "bad (fem. pl.)",sé "seat (of government)",dê "give! (imperative)",mês "month",só "only",nós "we" (cf.mas "but",se "if/oneself",de "of",nos "us"). Word-final stressed vowels in polysyllables are marked by the grave accent in Italian, thusuniversità "university/universities",virtù "virtue/virtues", resulting in occasional minimal or near-minimal pairs such asparlo "I speak" ≠parlò "s/he spoke",capi "heads, bosses" ≠capì "s/he understood",gravita "it, s'/he gravitates" ≠gravità "gravity, seriousness".
Homophones: words (especially monosyllables) that are pronounced exactly or nearly the same way and are spelled identically, but have different meanings, can be differentiated by a diacritic. Typically, if one of the pair is stressed and the other isn't, the stressed word gets the diacritic, using the appropriate diacritic for notating stressed syllables (see above). Portuguese does this consistently as part of notating stress in certain monosyllables, whether or not there is an unstressed homophone (see examples above). Spanish also has many pairs of identically pronounced words distinguished by an acute accent on the stressed word:si "if" vs.sí "yes",mas "but" vs.más "more",mi "my" vs.mí "me",se "oneself" vs.sé "I know",te "you (object)" vs.té "tea",que/quien/cuando/como "that/who/when/how" vs.qué/quién/cuándo/cómo "what?/who?/when?/how?", etc. A similar strategy is common for monosyllables in writing Italian, but not necessarily determined by stress: stresseddà "it, s/he gives" vs. unstressedda "by, from", but alsotè "tea" andte "you", both capable of bearing phrasal stress. Catalan has some pairs where both words are stressed, and one is distinguished by a vowel-quality diacritic, e.g.os "bone" vs.ós "bear". When no vowel-quality needs distinguishing, French and Catalan use agrave accent: Frenchou "or" vs.où "where", Frenchla "the" vs.là "there", Catalanma "my" vs.mà "hand".
Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet:majuscule ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, andminuscule ("lowercase"), derived fromCarolingian writing and Medievalquill pen handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In particular, all Romance languages capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each completesentence, most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizesFrancia ("France") andFrancesco ("Francis"), but notfrancese ("French") orfrancescano ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.
The tables below[citation needed] provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages. Words are given in their conventional spellings. In addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation. (French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation ofOld French, c. 1200 AD.)
^The (Luxembourgish) Law of 24 February 1984 on the language regime[13] designates Luxembourgish as the national language and French and German as official languages for legislation and administration.
^"Languages". European Union. Retrieved9 November 2023.
^1993 Statistical AbstractArchived 2013-06-19 at theWayback Machine of Israel reports 250,000 speakers of Romanian in Israel, while the 1995 census puts the total figure of the Israeli population at 5,548,523
^Djuvara Neagu, "La Diaspora aroumaine aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles " In: Les Aroumains, Paris : Publications Langues'O, 1989 (Cahiers du Centre d'étude des civilisations d'Europe centrale et du Sud-Est; 8). pp. 95–125.
^Maiden, Martin (2010). "Italian's long-lost sister: the Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it". The Italianist. 30 (sup2): 29–43. doi:10.1080/02614340.2010.11917476. S2CID 149202032.
^"Ethnologue". SIL Haley. 2022. Archived fromthe original on 11 May 2019. Retrieved25 February 2022.
^«if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated and French most (though in vocabulary Romanian has changed most).»Sala & Posner
^Kabatek, Johannes; Pusch, Claus D. "The Romance languages".The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide.If we look at the Romance languages from a morphological, syntactic or content-oriented synchronic perspective, there are several features common to all of them that justify the assumption of a more or less coherent Romance type different from Latin.
^Metzeltin, Miguel. "Tipología convergente de las lenguas románicas".Las Lenguas románicas estándar: historia de su formación y de su uso (in Spanish). p. 45.Pese a la gran variación que ofrecen los idiomas románicos, su evolución y sus estructuras presentan tantos rasgos comunes que se puede hablar de un tipo lingüístico románico.
^Bereznay, András (2011).Erdély történetének atlasza [Atlas of the History of Transylvania]. Méry Ratio. p. 63.ISBN978-80-89286-45-4.
^Stefan Zimmer, "Indo-European," inCeltic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2006), p. 961
^Curchin, Leonard A. (1995). "Literacy in the Roman Provinces: Qualitative and Quantitative Data from Central Spain".The American Journal of Philology.116 (3): 461–476 (464).doi:10.2307/295333.JSTOR295333.
^"Na" is acontraction of "em" (in) + "a" (the), the form "em a" is never used, it is always replaced by "na". The same happens with other prepositions: "de" (of) + o/a/os/as (singular and plural forms for "the" in masculine and feminine) = do, da, dos, das; etc.
^A more accurate translation for "in the mouth" would be "în gura / în buca", while "în gură / în bucă" would be "in mouth", it depends on the context / formulation. The word "bucă" is somewhat archaic, considered slightly vulgar, mostly used as a slang version of the word "mouth". The term "kitchen" translates as "bucătărie".
^Allen (2003) states: "There appears to have been no great difference in quality between long and shorta, but in the case of the close and mid vowels (i andu,e ando) the long appear to have been appreciably closer than the short." He then goes on to the historical development, quotations from various authors (from around the second century AD), as well as evidence from older inscriptions where "e" stands for normally shorti, and "i" for longe, etc.
^Technically, Sardinian is one of theSouthern Romance languages. The same vowel outcome occurred in a small strip running across southern Italy (theLausberg Zone), and is thought to have occurred in the Romance languages of northern Africa.
^abPenny, Ralph (1994). "Continuity and Innovation in Romance: Metaphony and Mass-Noun Reference in Spain and Italy".The Modern Language Review.89 (2):273–281.doi:10.2307/3735232.JSTOR3735232.
^The outcome of-am -em -om would be the same regardless of whether lengthening occurred, and that-im was already rare in Classical Latin, and appears to have barely survived in Proto-Romance. The only likely survival is in "-teen" numerals such astrēdecim "thirteen" > Italiantredici. This favors the vowel-lengthening hypothesis-im >/ĩː/ >/i/; but notice unexpecteddecem > Italiandieci (rather than expected*diece). It is possible thatdieci comes from *decim, which analogically replaceddecem based on the-decim ending; but it is also possible that the final /i/ indieci represents an irregular development of some other sort and that the process of analogy worked in the other direction.
^The Latin forms are attested;metipsissimus is the superlative of the formative -metipse, found for example inegometipse "myself in person"
^Ralph Penny,A History of the Spanish Language, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 144.
^Initialh- due to contamination of Germanic*hauh "high". Although no longer pronounced, it reveals its former presence by inhibitingelision of a precedingschwa, e.g.le haut "the high" vs.l'eau "the water".
^abcdefCognate with Latinmē, notego. This parallels the state of affairs in Celtic, where the cognate ofego is not attested anywhere, and the use of the accusative form cognate tomē has been extended to cover the nominative, as well.
^abcDeveloped from an assimilated form *nossum rather than fromnostrum.
^Ethnologue, Languages of the World, 15th edition, SIL International, 2005.
Ledgeway, Adam; Maiden, Martin, eds. (2022).The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics. New York: Cambridge.ISBN978-1-108-48579-1.
Posner, Rebecca (1996).The Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gerhard Ernst et al., eds.Romanische Sprachgeschichte: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen. 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003 (vol. 1), 2006 (vol. 2).
Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith & Adam Ledgeway, eds.,The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Vol. 1:Structures, Vol. 2:Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011 (vol. 1) & 2013 (vol. 2).
Christoph Gabriel & Conxita Lleó, eds.Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic: Cross-Linguistic and Bilingual studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011.
Philippe Martin.The Structure of Spoken Language: Intonation in Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
Rodney Sampson.Vowel Prosthesis in Romance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Lexicon
Holtus, Günter; Metzeltin, Michael; Schmitt, Christian (1988).Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik. (LRL, 12 volumes). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
French
Price, Glanville (1971).The French language: present and past. Edward Arnold.
Kibler, William W. (1984).An introduction to Old French. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Lodge, R. Anthony (1993).French: From Dialect to Standard. London: Routledge.
Portuguese
Williams, Edwin B. (1968).From Latin to Portuguese, Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Portuguese Language (2nd ed.). University of Pennsylvania.
Wetzels, W. Leo; Menuzzi, Sergio; Costa, João (2016).The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
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