Romance Languages May Not Come From Latin

lvysaur

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Oh, where have you read about that?
Well it's not something I read, so much as realized after doing much reading.

Pretty much any classification system, whether it studies speciation, ethnogenesis, or linguistics, is trying to force a discrete model onto a naturally continuous process--although there are local periods in time or space of catalyzed change, so it's not gradual or perfectly contiguous either.

Good example is neanderthals. Nobody even entertained the idea of neander ancestry until DNA evidence made it irrefutable in 2010. Then suddenly we see the politically correct bandwagoning "well acktchyually, the neanderthals were pretty smart, here's why" (I'm not claiming neanders were dumb, just pointing out the absolute groupthink and hypocrisy of society)

Another example is big cats. Among the Panthera family, two species are genetically distant yet have more similar mitochondrial DNA than to their relatives. So they share a common maternal ancestor, even though there are closer relatives who don't share that ancestor.

To make this clearer, imagine a hypothetical future. Modern civilization collapses, making the Americas isolated. In 80,000 years, modernity is rebuilt, and Afroeurasians make first contact with the (relatively) Native Americans. These Natives (mix of today's Euro and Afro Americans) will be different from future peoples of Africa and Eurasia; latter will have mixed with each other due to proximity. But when future scientists analyze Y chromosome and mitochondria, the Americans will more closely resemble Europe and Africa...even if future Europeans become genetically closer to the Chinese than to these Americans.
 
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michael94

michael94

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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?


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).
Yep, like a language designed for war and administration purposes
 
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Well it's not something I read, so much as realized after doing much reading.

Pretty much any classification system, whether it studies speciation, ethnogenesis, or linguistics, is trying to force a discrete model onto a naturally continuous process--although there are local periods in time or space of catalyzed change, so it's not gradual or perfectly contiguous either.

Good example is neanderthals. Nobody even entertained the idea of neander ancestry until DNA evidence made it irrefutable in 2010. Then suddenly we see the politically correct bandwagoning "well acktchyually, the neanderthals were pretty smart, here's why" (I'm not claiming neanders were dumb, just pointing out the absolute groupthink and hypocrisy of society)

Another example is big cats. Among the Panthera family, two species are genetically distant yet have more similar mitochondrial DNA than to their relatives. So they share a common maternal ancestor, even though there are closer relatives who don't share that ancestor.

To make this clearer, imagine a hypothetical future. Modern civilization collapses, making the Americas isolated. In 80,000 years, modernity is rebuilt, and Afroeurasians make first contact with the (relatively) Native Americans. These Natives (mix of today's Euro and Afro Americans) will be different from future peoples of Africa and Eurasia; latter will have mixed with each other due to proximity. But when future scientists analyze Y chromosome and mitochondria, the Americans will more closely resemble Europe and Africa...even if future Europeans become genetically closer to the Chinese than to these Americans.

Yeah, this is the problem with archeology, geology, and other "forensics of the past". It's like trying to solve a crime that happened in a basketball arena a year ago, after an entire season of basketball has been played. You're going to get a very confusing picture of what happened at the scene of the crime. Moreover, the changes themselves are not a constant, either. Erosion can happen at a faster or slower pace or many reasons. Even sophisticated methods of dating at an atomic level could be altered by a stellar event or something similar.

The only way to perfectly understand an event is to actually observe it as it is happening. It is contemporaneous accounts vs the retroactive forensics we focus on today. This is the difference between watching a film and having every frame of a film overlaid into one single static image (time-lapse photography). We can say that the single image is an accurate representation of the past, as all of the information of the entire film is there in that one image. However, if we want to have any kind of precision in our understanding of the events, we're pretty much out of luck.

Thus, the usage of historical accounts is the most reliable method of understanding the past. There are some weaknesses like forgeries or false accounts, and the understanding of the observers may not be complete or decipherable to us. I prefer that instead of the false absolute certitude that we attribute to instruments.
 

Mauritio

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I have no idea if this is true or not ,but i have a little anecdote from when i was studying Latin in school :

I was one of only 2 students who picked an oral exam in Latin as part of my final exams . You have to pick a main topic for the exams. Mine was of course vulgar latin :D
After reading texts in that dialect I was thinking :" this is understandable for the first time ,like a normal language " this was after 8 years of reading Cicero, caesar etc, that I got the feeling that I'm actually reading something that could be used as a speakable language and not some weird science/ language construct . Latin always seemed like a language that was designed by someone and not something that would naturally form like this.
I was always wondering how people could actually speak a language that was that complicated...
Like it took us 30 minutes just to translate a few lines . And even then it was more like what is the most likely guess of what the author could have meant?
since theres so many possible translations and constructions that dont even exist in modern languages .
If anybody wants to read the vulgar Latin book I was referring to, it's called "cena trimalchiones" it's a about a former slave ,inheriting wealth and suddenly finding himself in the high society of Rome . Quite like ancient reality tv .
 

MatheusPN

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@Mauritio I had never read vulgar Latin, before, its as easy or more to understand than french. Almost every word, I understood. BTW if you know português you can talk with a spanish easily, like chatting with someone with the most different accent/ slang. If you know some romance language you can understand most very well, especially if you know the contexto.
Curiosamente even russian has lots of words very similhares to english. Like кофе sounds and is written almost exatamente like Coffee.
Ppl where I live were taught in the school as in the quote postado by:
 
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I was always wondering how people could actually speak a language that was that complicated...
Like it took us 30 minutes just to translate a few lines . And even then it was more like what is the most likely guess of what the author could have meant?
since theres so many possible translations and constructions that dont even exist in modern languages .

Do you speak any other languages beside English?

@Mauritio
Curiosamente even russian has lots of words very similhares to english. Like кофе sounds and is written almost exatamente like Coffee.

Usually nouns like that are borrowed from language to language. I call them international words. The Russians call baggage багаж because they probably got it from the French, just like us in English. Most coffee lingo/terminology is the same in all the European languages because it came from the Italians.

Verbs are rarely, if ever, borrowed. Perhaps a noun is borrowed and then later turned into a verb.
 

Mauritio

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Usually nouns like that are borrowed from language to language. I call them international words. The Russians call baggage багаж because they probably got it from the French, just like us in English. Most coffee lingo/terminology is the same in all the European languages because it came from the Italians.

Verbs are rarely, if ever, borrowed. Perhaps a noun is borrowed and then later turned into a verb.

Yes.
 

sjatte

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That written latin was highly stylicised and different from the spoken language isn't exactly something new.

If you read this he makes a lot of factual errors regarding etymology and the 10 000 years number is just ridiculous as well

Take this:

"Les mots PIED, MAIN, CHEVEU, LANGUE, BRAS et DOIGT sont identiques dans toutes les langues romanes et en latin, mais différents des mots des langues des autres familles indo-européennes."
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Of these words pied/foot and langue/tongue share the same etymological root
Digitus meaning both finger and toe is cognate with english toe and german Zeh
There is also a germanic word mundo, meaning hand, which is present in german mündig meaning "of age"

The difference in syntax between the inflective latin and modern romance languages is caused by phonological changes causing many of the different cases to become phonologically identical, f.e. in the first declension, (mensa mensae mensae mensam mensā, nom gen dat ack abl resp.) ae merges with e, the final nasal is lost and vowel length is lost, which suddenly makes the modern romance prepositions neccesary. These phonological changes are attested in ancient grafitti
 

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