Bilingual English-Italian. 14 Neo-Romantic poems. Catalan Hunter.
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As a result, Italian outside of Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya , Eritrea and Somalia —it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. Romania did not establish a colonial empire, but beyond its native territory in southeastern Europe , the Romanian language is spoken as a minority language by autochthonous populations in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, and in some parts of the former Greater Romania before , as well as in Ukraine Bukovina , Budjak and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers.
The total native speakers of Romance languages are divided as follows with their ranking within the languages of the world in brackets: Catalan is the official language of Andorra. In addition, it is spoken by many residents of Alghero , on the island of Sardinia , and it is co-official in that city.
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The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as a potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them.
Sicilian and Venetian to "severely endangered" Arpitan , most of the Occitan varieties. Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages.
The classification of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum , and in some cases political biases can come into play. Along with Latin which is not included among the Romance languages and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. There are various schemes used to subdivide the Romance languages. Three of the most common schemes are as follows:. The main subfamilies that have been proposed by Ethnologue within the various classification schemes for Romance languages are:.
This controversial three-way division is made primarily based on the outcome of Vulgar Latin Proto-Romance vowels:. Italo-Western is in turn split along the so-called La Spezia—Rimini Line in northern Italy, which divides the central and southern Italian languages from the so-called Western Romance languages to the north and west.
The primary characteristics dividing the two are:. In fact, the reality is somewhat more complex. All of the "southeast" characteristics apply to all languages southeast of the line, and all of the "northwest" characteristics apply to all languages in France and most of Spain. However, the Gallo-Italic languages are somewhere in between. All of these languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and loss of gemination. Certain languages around the Pyrenees e. The usual solution to these issues is to create various nested subgroups.
Western Romance is split into the Gallo-Iberian languages, in which lenition happens and which include nearly all the Western Romance languages, and the Pyrenean-Mozarabic group, which includes the remaining languages without lenition and is unlikely to be a valid clade ; probably at least two clades, one for Mozarabic and one for Pyrenean.
Gallo-Iberian is split in turn into the Iberian languages e. Spanish and Portuguese , and the larger Gallo-Romance languages stretching from eastern Spain to northeast Italy. Probably a more accurate description, however, would be to say that there was a focal point of innovation located in central France, from which a series of innovations spread out as areal changes. The La Spezia—Rimini Line represents the farthest point to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of the Apennine Mountains , which cuts straight across northern Italy and forms a major geographic barrier to further language spread.
This would explain why some of the "northwest" features almost all of which can be characterized as innovations end at differing points in northern Italy, and why some of the languages in geographically remote parts of Spain in the south, and high in the Pyrenees are lacking some of these features. It also explains why the languages in France especially standard French seem to have innovated earlier and more completely than other Western Romance languages.
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Many of the "southeast" features also apply to the Eastern Romance languages particularly, Romanian , despite the geographic discontinuity. This has led some researchers to postulate a basic two-way East-West division, with the "Eastern" languages including Romanian and central and southern Italian.
Despite being the first Romance language to evolve from Vulgar Latin, [7] Sardinian does not fit well at all into this sort of division. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC. Italian acqua , lingua. The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most innovative least conservative among the Romance languages. In some ways, however, the Gallo-Romance languages are conservative.
The older stages of many of the languages preserved a two-case system consisting of nominative and oblique, fully marked on nouns, adjectives and determiners, inherited almost directly from the Latin nominative and accusative and preserving a number of different declensional classes and irregular forms. Some Romance languages have developed varieties which seem dramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages.
It is not always clear whether they should be classified as Romance, pidgins , creole languages , or mixed languages. Some other languages, such as Modern English , are sometimes thought of as creoles of semi-Romance ancestry. There are several dozens of creoles of French , Spanish , and Portuguese origin, some of them spoken as national languages in former European colonies.
Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called "neo-romantic languages". The concept was first developed in by Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano , under the title Latino sine flexione. Peano used Latin as the base of his language, because at the time of his flourishing it was the de facto international language of scientific communication.
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Other languages developed since include Idiom Neutral , Occidental , Lingua Franca Nova , and most famously and successfully, Interlingua. Each of these languages has attempted to varying degrees to achieve a pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages. There are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such as Talossan. Because Latin is a very well attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages.
The most significant changes between Classical Latin and Proto-Romance and hence all the modern Romance languages relate to the reduction or loss of the Latin case system , and the corresponding syntactic changes that were triggered. The case system was drastically reduced from the vigorous six-case system of Latin. Some of the older Gallo-Romance languages in particular, Old French , Old Occitan , Old Sursilvan and Old Friulian , and in traces Old Catalan and Old Venetian had an opposition between nominative and general oblique, and in Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in Italian see under Case , a couple of examples are found which preserve the old nominative.
As in English, case is preserved better on pronouns. Concomitant with the loss of cases, freedom of word order was greatly reduced. Classical Latin had a generally verb-final SOV but overall quite free word order, with a significant amount of word scrambling and mixing of left-branching and right-branching constructions. The Romance languages eliminated word scrambling and nearly all left-branching constructions, with most languages developing a rigid SVO, right-branching syntax. Old French , however, had a freer word order due to the two-case system still present, as well as a predominantly verb-second word order developed under the influence of the Germanic languages.
Some freedom, however, is allowed in the placement of adjectives relative to their head noun. In addition, some languages e.
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Spanish, Romanian have an "accusative preposition" Romanian pe , Spanish "personal a " along with clitic doubling , which allows for some freedom in ordering the arguments of a verb. The Romance languages developed grammatical articles where Latin had none. Articles are often introduced around the time a robust case system falls apart in order to disambiguate the remaining case markers which are usually too ambiguous by themselves and to serve as parsing clues that signal the presence of a noun a function that used to beserved by the case endings themselves.
This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system e. Latin had a large number of syntactic constructions expressed through infinitives, participles, and similar nominal constructs. Examples are the ablative absolute , the accusative-plus-infinitive construction used for reported speech , gerundive constructions, and the common use of reduced relative clauses expressed through participles.
All of these are replaced in the Romance languages by subordinate clauses expressed with finite verbs, making the Romance languages much more "verbal" and less "nominal" than Latin. Under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund , Romanian has progressed the furthest, largely eliminating the infinitive. It is being revived, however, due to the increasing influence of other Romance languages.
Every language has a different set of vowels from every other. Common characteristics are as follows:. Most Romance languages have similar sets of consonants. The following is a combined table of the consonants of the five major Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. Most instances of most of the sounds below that occur or used to occur, as described above in all of the languages are cognate.
Romance languages
Word stress was rigorously predictable in classical Latin except in a very few exceptional cases, either on the penultimate syllable second from last or antepenultimate syllable third from last , according to the syllable weight of the penultimate syllable. Stress in the Romance Languages mostly remains on the same syllable as in Latin, but various sound changes have made it no longer so predictable. Minimal pairs distinguished only by stress exist in some languages, e.
Erosion of unstressed syllables following the stress has caused most Spanish and Portuguese words to have either penultimate or ultimate stress: Most words with antepenultimate stress are learned borrowings from Latin, e. This process has gone even farther in French, with deletion of all post-stressed vowels, leading to consistent, predictable stress on the last syllable: This applies even to borrowings: Other than French with consistent final stress , the position of the stressed syllable generally falls on one of the last three syllables.
Exceptions may be caused by clitics or in Italian certain verb endings, e. Stress on verbs is almost completely predictable in Spanish and Portuguese, but less so in Italian. Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns can be marked for gender , number and case. Adjectives and pronouns must agree in all features with the noun they are bound to. Most Romance languages have two grammatical genders , masculine and feminine.
The gender of animate nouns is generally natural i. Although Latin had a third gender neuter , there is little trace of this in most languages. The biggest exception is Romanian , where there is a productive class of "neuter" nouns, which include the descendants of many Latin neuter nouns and which behave like masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural, both in the endings used and in the agreement of adjectives and pronouns e.
Latin digitus , pl. Such nouns arose because of the identity of the Latin neuter singular -um with the masculine singular, and the identity of the Latin neuter plural -a with the feminine singular. A similar class exists in Italian, although it is no longer productive e. Spanish also has vestiges of the neuter in the demonstrative adjectives: Portuguese also has neuter demonstrative adjectives: Remnants of the neuter, interpretable now as "a sub-class of the non-feminine gender" Haase Oppositions with masculine typically have been recategorized, so that neuter signifies the referent in general, while masculine indicates a more specific instance, with the distinction marked by the definite article.
In Southeast Umbrian , for example, neuter lo pane is 'the bread', while masculine lu pane refers to an individual piece or loaf of bread. Similarly, neuter lo vinu is wine in general, while masculine lu vinu is a specific sort of wine, with the consequence that mass lo vinu has no plural counterpart, but lu vinu can take a sortal plural form li vini , referring to different types of wine.
Phonological forms of articles vary by locale. Latin had an extensive case system, where all nouns were declined in six cases nominative , vocative , accusative , dative , genitive , and ablative and two numbers. In practice, some category combinations had identical endings to other combinations, but a basic adjective like bonus "good" still had 14 distinct endings.
In all Romance languages, this system was drastically reduced. In most modern Romance languages, in fact, case is no longer marked at all on nouns, adjectives and determiners, and most forms are derived from the Latin accusative case. Much like English, however, case has survived somewhat better on pronouns.
Most pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, genitive and possessive forms cf. English "I, me, mine, my". The system of inflectional classes is also drastically reduced. The basic system is most clearly indicated in Spanish, where there are only three classes, corresponding to the first, second and third declensions in Latin: The singular endings exactly track the plural, except the singular -e is dropped after certain consonants. The same system underlines many other modern Romance languages, such as Portuguese, French and Catalan.
In these languages, however, further sound changes have resulted in various irregularities. Noun inflection has survived in Romanian somewhat better than elsewhere. In addition, there is a separate vocative case, enriched with native development and Slavic borrowings see some examples here and the combination of noun with a following clitic definite article produces a separate set of "definite" inflections for nouns. The inflectional classes of Latin have also survived more in Romanian than elsewhere, e.
Many other exceptional forms, however, are due to later sound changes or analogy, e. In Italian, the situation is somewhere in between Spanish and Romanian. A different type of noun inflection survived into the medieval period in a number of western Romance languages Old French , Old Occitan , and the older forms of a number of Rhaeto-Romance languages. This inflection distinguished nominative from oblique, grouping the accusative case with the oblique, rather than with the nominative as in Romanian.
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The oblique case in these languages generally inherits from the Latin accusative; as a result, masculine nouns have distinct endings in the two cases while most feminine nouns do not. A number of different inflectional classes are still represented at this stage. For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine li voisins "the neighbor" and li pere "the father", and feminine la riens "the thing" vs. A number of synchronically quite irregular differences between nominative and oblique reflect direct inheritances of Latin third-declension nouns with two different stems one for the nominative singular, one for all other forms , most with of which had a stress shift between nominative and the other forms: A few of these multi-stem nouns derive from Latin forms without stress shift, e.
All of these multi-stem nouns refer to people; other nouns with stress shift in Latin e. Some of the same nouns with multiple stems in Old French or Old Occitan have come down in Italian in the nominative rather than the accusative e. As described above, case marking on pronouns is much more extensive than for nouns. Unlike in English, a separate neuter personal pronoun "it" generally does not exist, but the third-person singular and plural both distinguish masculine from feminine.
Also, as described above, case is marked on pronouns even though it is not usually on nouns, similar to English. As in English, there are forms for nominative case subject pronouns , oblique case object pronouns , and genitive case possessive pronouns ; in addition, third-person pronouns distinguish accusative and dative.
There is also an additional set of possessive determiners, distinct from the genitive case of the personal pronoun; this corresponds to the English difference between "my, your" and "mine, yours". The Romance languages do not retain the Latin third-person personal pronouns, but have innovated a separate set of third-person pronouns by borrowing the demonstrative ille "that over there " , and creating a separate reinforced demonstrative by attaching a variant of ecce "behold!
Similarly, in place of the genitive of the Latin pronouns, most Romance languages adopted the reflexive possessive, which then serves indifferently as both reflexive and non-reflexive possessive. Note that the reflexive, and hence the third-person possessive, is unmarked for the gender of the person being referred to.
Hence, although gendered possessive forms do exist—e. In spoken Brazilian Portuguese , these collocations are the usual way of expressing the third-person possessive, since the former possessive seu carro now has the meaning "your car". The same demonstrative ille is the source of the definite article in most Romance languages see below , which explains the similarity in form between personal pronoun and definite article.
When the two are different, it is usually because of differing degrees of phonological reduction. Generally, the personal pronoun is unreduced beyond normal sound change , while the article has undergone various degrees of reduction, beginning with loss of one of the two original syllables, e.
Object pronouns in Latin were normal words, but in the Romance languages they have become clitic forms, which must stand adjacent to a verb and merge phonologically with it. Originally, object pronouns could come either before or after the verb; sound change would often produce different forms in these two cases, with numerous additional complications and contracted forms when multiple clitic pronouns cooccurred.
Catalan still largely maintains this system with a highly complex clitic pronoun system.
Most languages, however, have simplified this system by undoing some of the clitic mergers and requiring clitics to stand in a particular position relative to the verb usually after imperatives, before other finite forms, and either before or after non-finite forms depending on the language. When a pronoun cannot serve as a clitic, a separate disjunctive form is used. These result from dative object pronouns pronounced with stress which causes them to develop differently from the equivalent unstressed pronouns , or from subject pronouns.
Most Romance languages are null subject languages. The subject pronouns are used only for emphasis and take the stress, and as a result are not clitics. In French, however as in Friulian and in some Gallo-Italian languages of northern Italy , verbal agreement marking has degraded to the point that subject pronouns have become mandatory, and have turned into clitics.
These forms cannot be stressed, so for emphasis the disjunctive pronouns must be used in combination with the clitic subject forms. Friulian and the Gallo-Italian languages have actually gone further than this and merged the subject pronouns onto the verb as a new type of verb agreement marking, which must be present even when there is a subject noun phrase.
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