Romance Languages May Not Come From Latin

[michael94]

Italian and french do not come from Latin - Le français ne vient pas du latin

Very interesting... If one can establish that Romance Languages indeed do not come from Latin then the entire origin of Latin itself becomes suspicious. Unfortunately most of Ives Cortes' work is in French

 

[chispas]

Latin isn't anything to be "suspicious" about. Latin is a dead language that was preceded by varied other languages prior to the Roman Empire. Languages are generally culturally "alive" - they change and adapt with the times that they are spoken. No one is forcing anyone to bow to the ancient limitations of Latin, far from it - try and find a high school curriculum today (private or public) that actually values the ancient languages. Once upon a time, it was the hallmark of a classical education to have fluency in Latin and Ancient Greek. Familiarity with them does help to learn other "similar" languages. Perhaps you should give Latin a shot, and you'll find learning French easier!

There's no linguistic conspiracy here. Why not be "suspicious" of Ancient Greek, considering it originated from the Phonetician alphabet circa 1000BC?

 

[yerrag]

Which languages came from Latin then? Spanish? Did English borrow from Latin or not? I've always wondered why Italian and Spanish sounded closer to each other, even if France separates these two countries. Perhaps the main Spanish language (not Catalan or Basque) came from Latin roots (if not, then maybe Vulgar Latin roots)?

 

[michael94]

Which languages came from Latin then? Spanish? Did English borrow from Latin or not? I've always wondered why Italian and Spanish sounded closer to each other, even if France separates these two countries. Perhaps the main Spanish language (not Catalan or Basque) came from Latin roots (if not, then maybe Vulgar Latin roots)?

Vulgar latin is none other than Italian, as the author I posted posits. If Romance Languages did not come from Latin, this is very important for historical revisionism because then the theory that Latin was invented very recently ( <600 or 700 years ) becomes possible.

 

[Ideonaut]

It seems moot to me to what degree Romance languages "came from" Latin. They all have a lot of Latin roots and cognates. Since over 90% of words in English of 2 syllables or more come from Latin and Greek--mostly Latin--why not call English "Romance"? I would need some convincing to believe that Italian is nothing other than vulgar Latin. The article doesn't contain enough info to convince and I'm not going to buy the French book to try to find out. The 1% of the day in Roman society is supposed to have spoken Greek. And we're to believe that they also had another language of their own to separate them from the masses? Maybe--an administrative language for the empire, a tool of oppression like in the Catholic church for so many centuries, a means of keeping the people in the dark in a very stratified society.

 

[yerrag]

It seems moot to me to what degree Romance languages "came from" Latin. They all have a lot of Latin roots and cognates. Since over 90% of words in English of 2 syllables or more come from Latin and Greek--mostly Latin--why not call English "Romance"? I would need some convincing to believe that Italian is nothing other than vulgar Latin. The article doesn't contain enough info to convince and I'm not going to buy the French book to try to find out. The 1% of the day in Roman society is supposed to have spoken Greek. And we're to believe that they also had another language of their own to separate them from the masses? Maybe--an administrative language for the empire, a tool of oppression like in the Catholic church for so many centuries, a means of keeping the people in the dark in a very stratified society.

It would be hard to be convinced without reading that book, I'll agree on that. But let's suppose that were the case, it wouldn't be implausible. If the French and the Romans were cousins, or competing tribes, sharing common Ind0-European roots in their language, the French would be likely not to adopt the Roman language, out of pride, even if they were under Roman dominion. Same could be said for the Italians. So, as Rome expanded, it would conquer distant territories, such as Spain and England. Spain and England, having no competing kinship with the Romans, would be less likely to resist the adoption of the Roman tongue. Seeing the might of Rome and being awed by it, with no prior history between them and Rome to give them pause, and being the conquered, they would be more ready to adopt the Roman tongue - Latin. So, it would make sense then for the Spanish language to develop based on Latin roots, and for English to develop adopting Latin as well as German, because of the Saxons having conquered England in later times.

I think for linguists and historians such distinctions are not considered trivial. It goes to the heart of identity with people and culture, given how language and semantics exert influence on a nation.

So it is that Japan and Korea had to develop its own script to be distinct from the Han Chinese, even as scholars in Korea and Japan ontinue to be versed in the Han script. Mainland China has also simplified the Han script, but scholars in China still stay versed in the traditional script, which Taiwan still uses.

 

[Queequeg]

Vulgar latin is none other than Italian, as the author I posted posits. If Romance Languages did not come from Latin, this is very important for historical revisionism because then the theory that Latin was invented very recently ( <600 or 700 years ) becomes possible.

I think a great deal of discernment is required when looking at alternative world views promoted on the Internet. Even though a great deal of official history as taught to us is loaded with BS, you have to be careful in your search that you don't get stuck in some other BS. There seems to be a concerted effort to keep people ignorant of the truth by overwhelming them with countless "alternative truths." That is what is meant by hidden in plain sight.

So I highly doubt that Latin was only developed 700 years ago when we have historical artifacts dating back 2500 years ago with Latin inscription, countless works written in Latin by Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Livy etc and 2,000 + year old public monuments still standing whose Latin inscriptions document historical events. Sometimes the word conspiracy theory is actually an appropriate term. And no the world isn't flat either.

 

[Queequeg]

I found this interesting.
The Grammarphobia Blog: Why is English a Germanic language?
Apparently our syntax is German but our vocabulary is mostly Latin and French.

"Where exactly does our modern vocabulary come from? The website AskOxford cites a computerized analysis of the roughly 80,000 words in the old third edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

The study, published in 1973, offered this breakdown of sources: Latin, 28.34 percent; French, 28.3 percent; Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch, 25 percent; Greek 5.32 percent; no etymology given, 4.03 percent; derived from proper names, 3.28 percent; all other languages, less than 1 percent."

 

[Richiebogie]

The latin words in English were added fairly recently. Before the Norman conquest the English spoke a Germanic language.

Some basic English words still sound identical in German:

here, house, mouse, boat

Here are some other words that are recognizable in German:

an apple is good, the sock is green, my friend gives me her fox, I cook a cake

 

[Rafe]

There's a detail that Umberto Eco put in The Name of the Rose which this thread reminds me of: he said there was a Catholic sect that developed in the Middle Ages that was persecuted for heresy because they sanctified things in the name of the "patrem, et filiam, et Spiritus Sancti" (father, daughter,. . .) when really they weren't being heretics they just didn't know Latin well enough to know what they were saying. (His book is fiction but even historians said they couldn't tell where Eco's historical knowledge left off & his fiction began in the details.)

Just reading history is the first step, but understanding whether things that were done the way they are reported & conveyed at the time they were written & rewritten is a product of ignorance & incompetence, or bad intent, is the real study. Just to be aware that something doesn't make sense is sometimes enough to protect yourself from its influence or to get you to find out more until it does make sense. Sort of a temporal "orienting reflex."

 

[michael94]

Just reading history is the first step, but understanding whether things that were done the way they are reported & conveyed at the time they were written & rewritten is a product of ignorance & incompetence, or bad intent, is the real study. Just to be aware that something doesn't make sense is sometimes enough to protect yourself from its influence or to get you to find out more until it does make sense. Sort of a temporal "orienting reflex."

It would theoretically be quite trivial to control what History was written and what wasn't if one controlled the printing presses. We have enough problem getting facts straight about current events let alone ones that happened hundreds of years ago. I don't know the exact origin of Latin but I posted this to see what others thought of it and enjoyed reading the replies. To answer some of the points brought up - I did read a few of the articles on the site linked ( with Google translate ) and Ives Cortes would say that words being of Latin root is merely evidence of sharing vocabulary and/or a common origin between Romance languages and Latin.

 

[arien]

I agree with @Queequeg

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the american public believes is false." - William Casey, former CIA director

I must recommend Joel van der Reijden for his excellent investigation of various disinfo operations, which provides useful context for navigating the muddy waters encountered when researching taboo topics:
Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM
The Grassroots Myth: ''Liberal CIA'' Network of ''New Left'' Foundations, Media, Activism

Similarly, New Chronology, the Flat Earth and the Fake Archaeology memes strike me at face value, though I haven't been motivated to do the diligence necessary to make a definitive claim, as coming from similar networks, the basic intention of which is to undermine sanity, distract from well-documented real conspiracies which can be used as a lens through which to interpret other events, and tar investigation of such real conspiracies with the stigma of goofy disinfo. The average man on the street won't even think about hidden motives for current politics for fear of being considered one of those Flat Earthers who believes that the pyramids were built by ancient aliens, which is what the Nephilim really were, etc. It is COINTELPRO writ large.

This seems to be a thorough and unsympathetic discussion of Cortez' thesis. More discussion here and here.

 

[michael94]

I agree that not knowing which way is up and even discussing actual conspiracies is part of the plan. At the end of the day the only way to destroy a web of lies is with Beauty, because Beauty is the ultimate Truth and needs no debate.

 

[Carrum]

Perhaps the main Spanish language (not Catalan or Basque) came from Latin roots (if not, then maybe Vulgar Latin roots)?

Catalan is a Romance language. It has loads of similarities with the other Romance languages and particulary with French and Spanish. It is the official language of Andorra and one of the official languages of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balaeric Islands (the other official language being what we call "Spanish" which is actually Castilian from central Spain).

 

[Carrum]

English words with Latin roots come largely from French (1066 Norman conquest onwards) rather than from the Romans when the Romans were in Britain.

 

[yerrag]

Catalan is a Romance language. It has loads of similarities with the other Romance languages and particulary with French and Spanish. It is the official language of Andorra and one of the official languages of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balaeric Islands (the other official language being what we call "Spanish" which is actually Castilian from central Spain).

I was cognizant not to refer to Spanish as a language, hence giving the term "main Spanish language" in describing the Castilian tongue. At the time, I wasn't sure if Castilian is the proper descriptor (although we in the Philippines would call the language Kastila). I just wanted to be sure I wasn't referring to Catalan or to Basque. It could be that Catalonians wouldn't agree that the Castilian tongue is the main Spanish tongue, to which I apologize if I didn't give Catalonia credit (as a main Spanish language).

Could you tell me why Italian and Spanish sounded so similar even if the countries are separated by France?

 

[Carrum]

The reason I mentioned Catalan is because I saw you had grouped Basque and Catalan together and thought you meant that neither of these two Spanish languages were from the Romance family (Basque isn't. Catalan is). I'm not saying Catalan is a main Spanish language. It's a regional language. All of the Spanish speak Castilian but not all speak Catalan even in Catalan speaking regions.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire people in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) still needed to be able to communicate with each other so they carried on using vulgar Latin but also various other languages (some Romance and some not) depending on what part of Spain they were in. The people of the Iberian peninsula appear to have retained more of the Latin language than the people of France where the language has a lot of Gaulish (A Celtic language) and other influences.

 

[yerrag]

Thanks for the short yet invaluable lesson!

 

[Steven Bussinger]

Latin always hit me as highly formalized. Sort of like newspaper headline writing, where verb tenses are changed, auxiliary verbs and articles are dropped. Headlines are shorthand "compressed" English designed to minimize the length of a sentence. This is to save space. The economy of space was even more important in the days before the printing press. Chiseling a sentence into stone is one place where you might want to be sparse with words, but did you know that in old manuscripts all the words on a page wereshovedtogetherlikethistherewerenopunctuationmarkseither

Latin seems more dense. I suppose that's because Latin relies on the case system to impart grammatical context far more than English does. In English, the morphology of words is externalized, whereas in languages with a highly developed case system like the Balto-slavic branch, the morphology is internalized. A very simple example: "to me" in English... that would just be the word "me" in a language with a dative case ("me" would morph into another version of itself). The grammatical meaning is included outside the word in English and inside the word with other languages.

Since pidgin languages have almost no grammatical morphology, for a long time I always felt that a language like English with minimal case construction and verbal conjugations was less "advanced" than other languages that maintained this grammar. English has shorn off the complexity of formal grammar and instead opted for a more informal free-wheeling linguistic evolution focused on speech.

E pluribus unum. "Out of many, one". That's the direct English translation of the Latin phrase, but something that sounds more comfortable and less Yoda-like would be "We create one thing from many things." The modern English translation uses twice as many characters. English is expanding and swelling up!

My point is that English and all other natural languages are quite informal and speech-driven, with an expansion of verbiage. Latin is concise and formalized: like a symbolic or note-taking system. And that is why this theory about Latin sounds pretty reasonable to me:

How Fake is Roman Antiquity?

However, the amateur historian and linguist M. J. Harper has made the following remark:

“The linguistic evidence mirrors the geography with great precision: Portuguese resembles Spanish more than any other language; French resembles Occitan more than any other; Occitan resembles Catalan, Catalan resembles Spanish and so forth. So which was the Ur-language? Can’t tell; it could be any of them. Or it could be a language that has long since disappeared. But the original language cannot have been Latin. All the Romance languages, even Portuguese and Italian, resemble one another more than any of them resemble Latin, and do so by a wide margin.”[20]

For that reason, linguists postulate that “Romance languages” do not derive directly from Latin, but from Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers, and merchants of the Roman Empire. What was Vulgar Latin, or proto-Romance, like? No one knows.

As a matter of fact, the language that most resembles Latin is Romanian, which, although divided in several dialects, constitutes by itself the only member of the Eastern branch of Romance languages. It is the only Romance language that has maintained archaic traits of Latin, such as the case system (endings of words depending on their role in the sentence) and the neutral gender

Latin may be a constructed international language like Esperanto. Like Esperanto, it may have borrowed words from the languages that its creators knew (the other Romance languages).

 

[lvysaur]

Makes sense. Kind of similar to how phylogenetic branching trees have been completely disproven, and instead all genesis can be modeled as mixing webs with localized peaks of distinctness.