PT Rethink Your Life: A New Hope - PT Social Thread

As I was taught, Romanian was the remains of Latin that naturalized into that area

 

Yes, but that's true of all Romance languages.

 

There's an art to it.

*eyes his Yoko Ono albums*

 

some inspiration for you:

 

great minds...

Edit: Here's a second edition especially suited for this thread:

 

That's great, but it's like AHHH AHHH AHHH

While I'm going for AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

How was that woman ever a smoker?

 

Ah, but the five others spread out and mixed with the people already settled there. That is not the case for Romanian

 

I don't think I understand. Do you mean that Romanian speakers are purely descendants of ancient Romans? I'm not sure that's correct.

 

I don't mind. But yes, I meant grammatically more conservative (at least with noun cases), hence Romanian.

Okay, we could tackle this systematically. Suppose there are three types of Latin affinity: morphological, phonological, and lexical. And I meant major Romance languages. I don't know enough about the twenty-whatever minority Romance languages in Spain, southern France, the Mediterranean etc. Do you know how Romanian is pronounced? Similar to Italian? I'm really asking; I honestly don't know. I guess I thought somehow it sounded like Polish or Russian. So Sardinian retains hard k's, do you know of any Romance language that still pronounces the Latinate "v" as /w/ (bilabial glide) like in classical Latin instead of /v/ (voiced fricative)? Does French have a higher percentage of words of native Latin origin than Romanian? Maybe, but at any rate, French is a historically dominant language of culture and science, I know it must have borrowed quite a bit--whereas, well, Romanian isn't. But I don't know what kind of protracted exposure Romanian has had with Slavic languages.

 

I agree - uninteresting characters

Likeable I guess, but not really relatable


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Romanian has /tʃ/ as a reflex of /k/ before i, e, and some(?) occurrences of a, so it is phonologically like Italian in that regard. No modern language has retained Latin /w/ as far as I know, at least intervocalically; they have all shifted to /v/ or /β/, though I believe the shift of /w/ to /β/ predates palatalization of c anyway.

Sardinian's phonology is only one reason I suggested it as closest to Latin. I believe the consensus is that it must have split off from Latin before the Common Era, well before any of the other forms of Romance.
But you're right, how you answer which language is "closest" to Latin depends on what criteria you employ.

 

This conversation is the sexiest. God I love languages

It's what our Latin teacher mentioned - granted, she could have been incorrect. Wouldn't be the first time a teacher has taught something incorrect

 

Well there is the fact that Romanian retains an unusual amount of Roman military language, and it is unique in that it represents the only form of Romance surviving in what was the Imperial frontier.

 

I gotta jump off the hypernerd train pretty soon. I'm not on the up and up on Romantic languages.

So is every other allophone of "c" in Romanian a sibilant, like in Spanish or French?

Can't speak to intervocalicity, but incidentally English itself has retained Latin /w/. English wine>Old English win>Latin vinum. Importantly, this also a dead giveaway it was a pre-Norman borrowing from Latin. Similar to the hard c in candle, from Lat. candela.

No idea about that. You know, it's a shame you don't teach.

Yeah, somehow I recall reading that somewhere once

Also Seagoat about the "Roman" in Romania... you know, up until the Ottoman Turkish invasion, I'm pretty sure the Byzantine Greeks commonly self-identified as "Roman" too. And at that point, very few of them spoke Latin anymore!

 

You know, I don't mean to dominate the thread. Other topics are always welcome.

 

Huttese 101, I just mean "soft" c. Hard c remains /k/ in Romanian.

 

Anyone else reminded that English used to have, to my knowledge, seven extra letters? I believe at least two of those were directly stolen from Greek

 

Bail B. Baobab don't get me wrong. I love this topic, I just feel like a dweeb when no one besides us is talking about it.

Seven? What are they? I can only think of five, and some of them were used at different times.

 

Well there are æ, œ, ð, ʒ, þ, and wynn (which looked like a p, but I don't have a way to type it handy), but I don't know which would be considered to be taken directly from Greek. Thorn (þ) and wynn were runes originally.

 

Oh I know.

For the record, everyone, I fully expect other conversations to take place around my nerdiness. I don't take offense to that at all. I like a robust, diverse, chaotic social thread.

 

But this thread embraces both HYPE trains and HYPERNERD trains!

and Love Trains for that matter ...

 

Whoops, forgot about that one

And I didn't realize this was used in English

The one I was thinking of you didn't list is "long s," ſ, like from the Declaration of Independence... so that brings us to a grand total of 7. Boom.

And the letter K is from kappa and Y is from upsilon. Both are Greek and neither were in the Roman alphabet... otherwise, I don't know which ones are from Greek.

 

Oh come on, this is a great discussion. Never thought I'd see it here.

I can only say, from personal experience, knowing some Latin didn't help me much when I was studying French. It helped me more with English. French kinda distorted Latin words.