Language Families Rock: Romance Languages

Written by Blackkdark on 8th March 2007

Many languages are part of a family. That is they come from the same parent language and they often share many similarities. Like all families, there are sometimes black sheep, crazy uncles, and the occasional scandal. The advantage of learning languages in a families, is you often can get 4 or 5 for the price of 2 or 3. Unfortunately most of my experience is based with European languages, so I will probably refer to those on the most part.

Here is a Circular chart:

Now, this way of mapping some language families is not the best, because it doesn't show languages which are two languages mixed together. Also remember that this is also general and might not even be accurate.

According to this chart (as well as according to the evidence at hand) the language which is the root of them all is Proto-Indo-European. There is a lot of interesting stuff on this, but we aren't going to focus on it (maybe another article).

I know the most about two language families, Romance and Germanic. Although I do know things about Slavic and a handful of others. This article will focus on Romance languages and Germanic in the next one.

In Italy there were many tribes with many different languages, all fighting for control. But the Roman tribe seemed to have won over the rest. They spread their culture, their language, and their troops all over Europe. They conquered the Greeks and took their language and religion. Many new words were introduced into Latin from Greek at this point.

Latin was spread all over in the Roman areas and words from it of course spread through things like religion, trade, conquest, etc. Over time the Roman empire went through a lot of ups and downs and eventually it fell. However, the Latin language was already all over the place and it began to mix with the local vernacular languages and began to morph. And over time they became different languages. However, the grammar, much of the pronunciation, and the vocabulary is still very similar. But French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are so different, you say? Yes, because each area had their own vernacular which helped develop new vocabulary and grammar. don't forget that from generation to generation the way the children hear a sound might change slightly and sound shifts might occur. The Latin <j> /j/ could have become a fricative in Spanish /ç/, and then velarized because of back vowels and became /x/.

The strangest thing for me about the change from Latin to most modern Romance languages is the fact that the grammar is so different. Latin was a heavily declined language, which means there were a lot of Noun cases (nominative, accusative, etc). However, most modern Romance languages, (at least amongst the major ones) except Romanian, don't really have such cases. Romanian might have had the advantage of being near the Slavic languages which also have those noun cases. Half of the verbs no longer are used as well, since Latin has Passive and Active forms of all it's verbs.

French is a strange character in itself. It's phonetics, maybe influenced by Frankish, are inconsistent with most Romance languages. It's grammar is similar to the rest of Modern Romance languages though. Spanish and Portuguese, are almost dialects of each other, and probably once were. However, in modern times Portuguese has more complex phonetics than Spanish. I've been told that the Portuguese understand Spanish better than the other way around. Strangely enough, Italian and Spanish are similar as well, and I'm also told that people can understand some of the things the other says.

Romanian on the other hand is the Black Sheep of the language family. It is somewhat like a mixture between Slavic and Romance. It can still sound much like a Romance language, and most Romanians might be proud of the fact that they have similar grammar and consider themselves the purest of the Romance languages.

English is like the wacky cousin. English is really Germanic, as it says in the chart, but because of the French influence it has a huge Latin based vocabulary.

Timothy