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Proto-Romance
Proto-Romance is the comparatively reconstructed ancestor of all Romance languages. It reflects a late variety of spoken Latin prior to regional fragmentation. Phonology Vowels Monophthongs Diphthong The only phonemic diphthong was /au̯/. Allophony *Vowels were lengthened in stressed open syllables. *Stressed /ɛ, ɔ/ may have yielded the incipient diphthongs ͜ɛ, o͜ɔwhen followed by a syllable containing a close vowel. **Whatever the precise outcome, Maiden argues that this would have been limited, at the Proto-Romance stage, to open syllables. That is, it would have applied only to instances of /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ that had been subject to stressed-open-syllable lengthening. Constraints *Neither a distinct /ɛ/ nor /ɔ/ occurred in unstressed position on account of having merged into /e/ and /o/ respectively.Ferguson 1976: 76; Gouvert 2015: 78–81, 121–122 *Neither a distinct /i/ nor /u/ occurred in the second syllable of words with the structure �σσˈσ� ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Romance Languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (283 million), French (77 million), Italian (67 million) and Romanian (24 million), which are all national languages of their respective countries of origin. By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin. There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. The major Romance languages also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as linguae francae.M. Paul Lewis,Summary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reichenau Glossary
The Reichenau Glossary is a collection of Latin glosses likely compiled in the 8th century in northern France to assist local clergy in understanding certain words or expressions found in the Vulgate Bible. Background Over the centuries Jerome’s translation of the Bible (c. 382–405) became more difficult to read for novice clergy as a result of the various grammatical, lexical, and phonological changes that spoken Latin was experiencing. To facilitate interpretation, scribes would put together glossaries or collected explanations of words or phrases found in the Vulgate. The words used as glosses tended to be those that were destined to survive in Romance, while the words that needed glossing generally were not. What we now know as the Reichenau Glossary was compiled circa the eighth century at the Abbey of Corbie in Picardy. From there it eventually found its way to the Abbey of Reichenau, in southern Germany, where it was ‘discovered’ in 1863 by the philologist Adol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpart was a form of either Classical Latin or Late Latin, depending on the time period. Origin of the term During the Classical period, Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as ''sermo plebeius'' or ''sermo vulgaris'', meaning "common speech". The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance, when Italian thinkers began to theorize that their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect. The early 19th-century French linguist Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology. Observing that the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexical Changes From Classical Latin To Proto-Romance
As Classical Latin developed into Proto-Romance it gained and lost lexical items for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the new vocabulary came from contact with neighbouring languages, and other times it was coined from native elements. Much of the inherited Latin vocabulary also underwent semantic drift, regularization, or other linguistic changes. Overview Irregular nouns and verbs tended to be either regularized or replaced with preexisting regular equivalents; cf. the loss of ''esse'' 'to eat' in favour of its own regularized compound ''comedere.'' Similar motives underlie the general replacement of ''ferre'' 'carry' with ''portare'' or ''loqui'' 'speak' with ''parabolare'' and ''fabulare''. Semantic drift affected numerous words, notable examples of which are ''causa'' ('subject matter' ''→'' 'thing'), ''civitas'' ('citizenry' ''→'' 'city'), ''focus'' ('hearth' ''→'' 'fire'), ''mittere'' ('send' → 'put'), ''necare'' ('murder' ''→'' 'drown'), ''pacare'' ('placate' ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Appendix Probi
The ''Appendix Probi'' ("Probus' Appendix") is the conventional name for a series of five documents believed to have been copied in the seventh or eighth century in Bobbio, Italy. Its name derives from the fact that the documents were found attached to a copy of the Instituta Artium, a treatise named after (but probably not written by) the first-century grammarian Marcus Valerius Probus. The Appendix was likely composed in Rome around the first half of the fourth century AD. It is specifically the third of the five documents that has attracted scholarly attention, as it contains a list of 227 spelling mistakes, along with their corrections, which shed light on the phonological and grammatical changes that the local vernacular was experiencing in the early stages of its development into Romance. The text survives only in a carelessly transcribed water-damaged manuscript of the 7th or 8th century which is kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III as MS Lat. 1 (f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Latin
Old Latin, also known as Early Latin or Archaic Latin (Classical la, prīsca Latīnitās, lit=ancient Latinity), was the Latin language in the period before 75 BC, i.e. before the age of Classical Latin. It descends from a common Proto-Italic language; Latino-Faliscan is likely a separate branch from Osco-Umbrian with possible further relation to other Italic languages and to Celtic; e.g. the Italo-Celtic hypothesis. The use of "old", "early" and "archaic" has been standard in publications of Old Latin writings since at least the 18th century. The definition is not arbitrary, but the terms refer to spelling conventions and word forms not generally found in works written under the Roman Empire. This article presents some of the major differences. The earliest known specimen of Latin seems on the Praeneste fibula. A new analysis done in 2011 declared it to be genuine "beyond any reasonable doubt" and dating from the Orientalizing period, in the first half of the seventh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nominative Case
In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of English) the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. Generally, the noun "that is doing something" is in the nominative, and the nominative is often the form listed in dictionaries. Etymology The English word ''nominative'' comes from Latin ''cāsus nominātīvus'' "case for naming", which was translated from Ancient Greek ὀνομαστικὴ πτῶσις, ''onomastikḗ ptôsis'' "inflection for naming", from ''onomázō'' "call by name", from ''ónoma'' "name". Dionysius Thrax in his The Art of Grammar refers to it as ''orthḗ'' or ''eutheîa'' "straight", in contrast to the oblique or "bent" cases. Characteristics The reference form (more technically, the ''least marked'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thematic Vowel
In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and those without it are athematic. Used more generally, a thematic vowel is any vowel found at the end of the stem of a word. Outside Indo-European, the term "thematic vowel" is also used in the grammar of Kartvelian languages (see Georgian verb paradigm for more information on thematic vowels). Proto-Indo-European PIE verbs and nominals (nouns and adjectives) consist of three parts: :\underbrace_ The thematic vowel, if present, occurs at the end of the suffix (which may include other vowels or consonants) and before the ending: * 'heat' > Ancient Greek (''thérmos'') * '(he) bears' > Sanskrit ''bhárati'', Gothic Athematic forms, by contrast, have a suffix ending in a consonant, or no suffix at all (or arguably a null suffix): * ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demonstrative Adjective
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame of reference and cannot be understood without context. Demonstratives are often used in spatial deixis (where the speaker or sometimes the listener are to provide context), but also in intra-discourse reference (including abstract concepts) or anaphora, where the meaning is dependent on something other than the relative physical location of the speaker, for example whether something is currently being said or was said earlier. Demonstrative constructions include demonstrative adjectives or demonstrative determiners, which qualify nouns (as in ''Put that coat on''); and demonstrative pronouns, which stand independently (as in ''Put that on''). The demonstratives in English are ''this'', ''that'', ''these'', ''those'', and the archaic ''y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superlative
Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe. In languages that have it, the comparative construction expresses quality, quantity, or degree relative to ''some'' other comparator(s). The superlative construction expresses the greatest quality, quantity, or degree—i.e. relative to ''all'' other comparators. The associated grammatical category is degree of comparison. The usual degrees of comparison are the ''positive'', which simply denotes a property (as with the English words ''big'' and ''fully''); the ''comparative'', which indicates ''greater'' degree (as ''bigger'' and ''more fully''); and the ''superlative'', which indicates ''greatest'' degree (as ''biggest'' and ''most fully''). Some languages have forms indicating a very large degree of a particular quality (called ''elative'' in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossilization (linguistics)
In linguistic morphology, fossilization refers to two close notions. One is preserving of ancient linguistic features which have lost their grammatical functions in language. Another is loss of productivity of a grammatical paradigm (''e.g.'' of an affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...), which still remains in use in some words.''The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics'', by Robert Lawrence Traskp. 125/ref> Examples of fossilization include fossilized morphemes and fossil words. The term fossilization or interlanguage fossilization is also used in reference to the observation that most adult second language learners never reach a native-language learners' level of proficiency. These Second language learner routinely suffer from errors that can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
