Development of flexions in European Langugages

[erinti]

As Greek in Cyprus or the Sardinian language is closer to Latin, Catalan is also more archaic in the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Eivissa) and in the city of L'Alghero (Sardinia). So it seems obvious that languages tend to follow a different way in an island...well, at least before TV and the Internet...

[Thissiry]

The evolution of romanic languages shows a lot of instances of this phaenomenon. E.g. the only romanic language who has still flexions is Rumanian, in the farest part of former roman empire. Portuguese is also very archaic. And Sardinian, whereas Sardinia is close to Italia, is also very archaic, because it is an island, with very few trading from or into it).

Romanian has still flexions ?? and what about Portuguese ?
I thought that all romanic languages had lost their flexions ...

[Sisyphe]

Yes, romanian do have flexions, but some romanian boy there will explain it to you better than I (for moreover : a. it's 1:43 AM, b. my english is still hugly).

Portugese do not have flexion, but remains some others archaic patterns. For instance the clitisation of pronoun inside the verb in the futur and imperfect tenses.

[mansio]

My idea is that the flexions of Indo-european are former suffixes. Is that right?

[Xavier[vp]]

Hi everyone.
I've just found this sentence on the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_nouns :

Ochii băiatului erau plini de lacrimi.
Which means :
The boy's eyes were full of tears
Now, I've tried to translate it into Latin :
Pueri oculi pleni lacrinorum erant.
(correct me if I'm wrong, Sisyphe)
Now we can see there's some similarity !

[Olivier]

yes but in băiatului there is both Pueri (genitive case = 's) and The (article)
-- Olivier
(edited: in English)

[Thissiry]

Is it true that Italian, Spanish,Catalan and Romanian are closer to Latin than French ?

[Sisyphe]

My idea is that the flexions of indo-european are former suffixes. Is that right?

At once, what was exactly indo-european is a quite a difficult question. The indoeuropeans roots and case endings that the linguists rebuild are hypothetical themselves, they are something like a chimical formula, not a tongue. So, rebuilding an hypothetical ancestor of an hypothecal ancestor drive us to be very cautious.

In the past, it was said that indo-european had eight cases, like sanscrit. We know yet that is must be more intricate. Perhaps some of casual endings of "8-cased indo-european" could have been iindependant particles.

(I promised i did lessons about indo-european linguistics on the french forum. Il will, but I lack time...)

Is it true that Italian, Spanish,Catalan and Romanian are closer to Latin than French ?

It depends on what you call "closer", and what you call "french" ( typical answer by linguists guys....)

About phonetics : yes, positively. BUT the part of realy inherited latin vocabulary in French is quite tight. Take for instance that sentence :

"Attacher sa signature (les signatures peuvent être modifiées dans le profil)"

The realy inherited word are : sa, les, peuvent, être, dans, le. They are all grammatical words.


"attacher" comes from ancient french "estache", itself from germanic "staka" = stake.

"signature, modifier" have been directly borrowed from latin (signatura, modificare. So that they must be quite the same in other romanic tongues.

"profil" has been created in ancient french.

So, considering the vocabulary, it is very hard to say that french is more far or not than italian.

Grammaticaly, the distance must be the same.

[Thissiry]

So If I understand well what you've written, Romanian,Spanish, Catalan Italian are closer to Latin only for phonetics ?

[Xavier[vp]]

Yeah, and I'd say it's even obvious !
For example, the very common sound "e" in French is quite rare in all other Latin languages. And it's common in Germanic languages...