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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Nicodene (talk | contribs) at 04:44, 11 September 2020. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Acute accent as a stress marker

This article uses the acute accent as a stress marker in order to avoid having to make syllable divisions (as one is forced to do with the ˈ symbol). None of the sources give an overview of this issue, so any attempt at making a syllable division is mere guesswork unless one copies over one of the (very few) transcriptions that actually show it. This usage of the acute accent is in line with Americanist phonetic notation, which is used throughout Hall (1976) and (1983).

Incidentally, the DERom states that Proto-Romance did indeed have a high tone (which is what the acute accent conveys in IPA) on stressed vowels, giving ['páː.t̪ɾè] 'father' as an example. (Gouvert 2014, pp. 18-9) --Excelsius (talk) 22:30, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 17 May 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) ~SS49~ {talk} 14:16, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proto-Romance Language → Proto-Romance language – The reason I'm requesting a move to the new article, along with its associated talk page, is because I want the word 'language' to be in lower case, in line with the other language's and proto-language's articles. PK2 (talk) 10:43, 17 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Xavier references unclear

Xavier is referenced many times both as Xavier (2014) and Xavier (2016). While Gouvert Xavier is in the bibliography as the co-editor of the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (2016 edition), it's not clear if the 2016 references are to this. Xavier is not listed as a co-editress of the 2014 edition. If "Xavier" is code for something, that's beyond me. 94.21.252.238 (talk) 02:14, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@94.21.252.238: For some reason I used his first name, it should be Gouvert. He co-edited both editions. Should be all fixed now. --Excelsius (talk) 00:45, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Huh?

As conceived in the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman, Proto-Romance most closely reflects Latin as spoken around the sixth century AD. This should not be confused with the actual attested speech of that era, which is generally called Vulgar Latin.

How can "Latin as spoken" be different from "actual attested speech"? If the idea is that attested speech is not representative, then how can it be Vulgar Latin? Or is this just an error for "actual attested Latin", i.e. written Latin? Srnec (talk) 01:28, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, the statement saying how not to confuse them is confusing. It's probably best just to cut the whole of the second sentence. 94.21.219.127 (talk) 03:41, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. It wasn't helpful.--Excelsius (talk) 08:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. The article does need to make clear what the difference is between this and Vulgar Latin. Srnec (talk) 18:46, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Also, the sixth century AD sounds unrealistically late. In fact, the divergence with which the Proto-Romance stage ended could have started as early as the early first century BC – or even the late second century (in view of the lexical archaisms specifically found in Sardinian), after the merger of [eː] (< [eɪ̯], as in DEIVOS > dīvus) into [iː] and the first attestations of the monophthongisation of [ae̯] > [ɛː], perhaps under Umbrian or other Sabellic influence –; I'm specifically thinking of the period after the Social War, as the Sardinian-type vocalism could plausibly have been due to Koine Greek influence, but the Italian/Spanish-type (Western Romance) and asymmetric Romanian-type vocalism could each have arisen under Sabellic influence, and in view of the Lausberg zone, still in central and southern Italy, in fact. Compare the discussion here.
In view of its archaic traits, Sardinian might have even diverged directly from Old Latin in the second century BC, when quality differences between long and short vowels were only incipient; Romance dialects probably still influenced each other in the following centuries, or converged independently, muddling the picture. We know from literary texts that in the 11th century, Sardinian was more archaic than most of its modern dialects, except Nuorese, especially in Bitti and the Barbagia; and half a millennium or even a full millennium earlier, it could possibly have been even much more archaic, looking a lot like Old Latin, and later losing these traits either independently or as a result of contact with mainland Romance languages, so that now only few tantalising traits pointing to Old Latin are left that indicate that Sardinian split off early.
In any case, Sardinian must have diverged from the remainder of Romanian by the third century AD, per this source. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:22, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Florian Blaschke: I agree that the stated date is speculative at best, and open to revision. However, I do not consider it likely that the (incipient) varieties of Romance trace any of their major divisions to the 1st century bc. My view on Sardinian is close to that stated by Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger in The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages:
"Scholars from the nineteenth century onwards (e.g. Gröber 1884:210f.) claimed that, because of the early conquest of Sardinia, Sardinian conserved elements from archaic Latin. Yet the survey in Mensching (2004b) shows that this hypothesis cannot be maintained, since most of the relevant features (e.g. lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before /e/ and /i/) were still common in Latin during the first centuries AD. It thus seems that the Latin of Sardinia was not significantly different from that spoken elsewhere until at least the end of the third century AD. The striking conservative elements of Sardinian are not sufficient to classify it as archaic, since it also shows numerous innovations."
Your comment on vowel quality alludes to an ongoing debate between the Allen model, which is the one this article uses, and the Calabrese model, which posits the following vowels for classical Latin: /i ɛ a ɔ u/ ± /ː/. According to this view, Sardinian and Southern Lucanian (presumably also African) kept this system intact- except for abandoning phonemic vowel length- while other Romance varieties merged /i/ and /ɛː/ to /e/; later on of course a parallel merger occurs in the back vowels, except in (Proto-)Romanian and Lausberg's 'vorposten'. The majority of romanists continue to support Allen's model though, as the evidence he presents for quality differences in Classical Latin is difficult to dismiss.
A partial reconciliation can be had by positing a modified Allen model, such that Classical Latin had /ĭ/ [i~ɪ], and likewise /ŭ/ [u~ʊ]. (Whether there would already have been significant regional differences already in the distribution of these allophones is hard to say.) Later on, speakers in different would have merged the allophones in different ways, such that /ĭ/ came to always be [i] in Sardinia, S. Lucania, Africa, and always [ɪ] in the rest of 'Romània'; likewise for the back vowels. I'll admit that's just a pet theory of mine, though. Excelsius (talk) 12:23, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Excelsius: In the discussion with Benwing linked above, he notes: "Possibly the development of the Sardinian and North African vowel systems were independent: Early Latin apparently pronounced its short and long vowels with the same quality (this is noted in Ringe's newest book)." This would mean that Sardinian split off prior to Classical Latin, still in the Old Latin period, as I suggested above. The differences between the Latin of Sardinia and the Latin on the mainland may have been slight in the 3rd century AD, but they were there, and thus significant, regardless of how small. Similarly, the differences between North, West, and East Germanic were still small at the time, yet they were not insignificant. If there were differences, however tiny, Sardinia's Latin had effectively split off (even if it kept interacting with mainland Latin – which it kept doing throughout its history). The idea that Sardinia's Latin had to diverge so starkly as to be mutually unintelligible with mainland Latin until it could be said to have split off makes no sense.
Also, Benwing notes: "There are words in Spanish that pre-date Classical Latin (cueva "cave" < Old Latin cova, cf. Classical cava), and a bunch of words in Sardinian that stem from [lexemes that] were already obsolete in Classical times. In the Harris/Vincent "Romance languages" it's claimed that Sardinian may have split off as early as the 1st century BC. The claim that Proto-Romance cannot be derived completely from Classical Latin is common BTW."
The Corsican situation is even more complicated, as laid out here (with detail in the following comments), and Corsican cannot simply be described as a descendant of Old Tuscan (of Pisa) with a Sardinian-like substratum. Rather, the vocalism of the various dialect groups is so bafflingly diverse, even exhibiting a type that fits neither of the three well-known main types of Romance vocalism (Italian-type, Romanian-type, Sardinian-type), that "Proto-Corsican" may be effectively identical with Proto-Romance. I haven't ever seen the Corsican evidence discussed anywhere else.
In any case, the sixth century is definitely implausibly late a dating for Proto-Romance. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Florian Blaschke: Regarding the supposed archaism of Spanish, I will quote Adams (The Regional Diversification of Latin, p. 714):
"It is mainly in Spain that investigators have claimed to find archaisms. I went through the evidence at VI.2 and dismissed almost all of it; note too the discussion of acina at VI.2.13. There remained as likely Spanish archaisms the adjective cuius (VI.2.2), and the frequentative incepto (VI.2.11). Couus for cauus is possibly another such case. [This is the example that you mentioned.] Vaciuus, an early Latin equivalent of uacuus, disappears after Terence but turns up again in Romance dialects away from the centre, including Ibero-Romance, and it is to be assumed that it reached some provincial regions before falling out of use at Rome (VI.2.10). These regional archaisms do not amount to much. In the history of Latin they are no more than a curiosity, like their equivalents in other Imperial languages. The date of colonisation of (e.g.) Spain did not determine the character of Spanish Latin or of Ibero-Romance, though one or two early usages did linger on."
Other than Africa, the 'Sardinian' type vocalism can also be found in Lucania, as you mentioned; Sardinia isn't unique in resisting an ĭ-ē merger. Notably, solid evidence of said merger only accumulates from the fourth century AD onwards (Social Variation and the Latin Language, pp. 51, 61-2), and the corresponding back-vowel merger appears at an even later period (pp. 65-7). That evidence is consistent with the fact that the latter merger failed to penetrate not only Sardinia, Africa, and Lucania, but also Lausberg's 'vorposten' and Eastern Romance in general.
I agree that a sixth century cut-off is too late. For now I will replace it with the approximate date given by Mensching & Remberger, which Adams' data agrees with. Excelsius (talk) 20:04, 31 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No doubt Sardinia wasn't the only region not reached by the early vowel mergers in question. It's not completely clear what happened; I've wondered if the earliest dialectal splits within Romance didn't all occur in mainland Italy and were then imported to other regions from there.
In the discussion with Benwing, I noted:
"[...] If nom. pl. *-ās, as noted in Romance plurals#Origin of plural -s, is indeed an archaism, this would, along with the occasional appearance of specifically Mainland or Italo-/Western-Romance traits in Pompejan and other Imperial Latin inscriptions, such as Z for /j/ and the disappearance or assimilation of final /t/, make the traditional view that Romance as a whole evolved from post-classical or "Vulgar" Latin, in any case something substantially younger than Classical Latin, finally obsolete[.]"
The Pompejan evidence alone suggests that Proto-Romance unity ended already before the first century AD. The vocalic changes and mergers may have happened later, it doesn't really matter. (That said, considering the likely Osco-Umbrian triggers, it probably wasn't very late, and probably already started before the end of the third century AD.) In any case, it doesn't matter if there are archaisms in Hispania; the Sardinian archaisms alone suffice for the conclusion that Proto-Romance unity likely ended before the Classical Latin period. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:40, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"The striking conservative elements of Sardinian are not sufficient to classify it as archaic, since it also shows numerous innovations." I also missed the occasion above to point out that this is a fallacy, in more than one way. First off, only languages that literally represent a temporarily older stage are considered archaic. Classical Latin, as an ancient language, is archaic; Plautus' Old Latin is even more archaic, especially compared to modern Romance languages. Sardinian is a modern language and therefore cannot be archaic. However, it is a conservative Romance language. All conservative languages show innovations alongside conservative traits; this is not specific of Sardinian, but even true of Modern Icelandic. It's the conservative traits we're interested in this context, however. And the (so far) uncontested observation that Sardinian shows strikingly conservative traits, so conservative that they point back to Old Latin, even if they're only a few lexemes, are those that the conclusion that Sardinian already began to diverge from mainland Romance as early as the first or perhaps even second century BC is based on. It doesn't matter one whit how many millions of innovations Sardinian otherwise has. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:40, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The origin of nom.pl -as as an archaism (rather than an innovation) is, at best, possible. There isn't substantial evidence for it, and the almost universal <ae> of the Classical Period argues against it.
The occasional Pompeian graffito dropping a final -t does not indicate that the phoneme was completely erased. In fact it is was still present in Proto Italo-Western Romance, considering the following points: it survived in Old French, it survived in Old Spanish, and traces of it survive to this day even in Italian and Neapolitan (which, notably, is spoken in the immediate vicinity of Pompeii) in the form of radoppiamento sintattico. At most, sporadic -t loss would have been an allophonic phenomenon in Pompeian speech.
The use of the Greek zeta in Latin words is hard to interpret phonetically. It may have been an attempt to render something like [ɟ] in writing. That isn't actually incompatible with the evidence from Sardinian, where all inherited examples of an original intervocalic /dj/ lenited, leaving e.g. oi < CL hodie.
Osco-Umbrian triggers are far from "likely", in the opinion of e.g. Adams, who wrote what is probably the most celebrated work to date on the evidence for regional differences in Imperial Latin. I have already provided some quotes from him.
The archaisms in Sardinian do not imply that it must have split off from the rest of Latin~Romance as early as 0 AD or earlier. As the quote from the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages states, its supposed "archaic" features were common throughout the Latin-speaking area in the first few centuries AD. That includes both lexical items and features such as the lack of palatalization of /k,g/ before front vowels. And, needless to say, the fact that Sardinian participated in many Romance innovations of all types, such as the palatalization of /tj/ and /kj/, the use of e.g. caballus for equus, or complete loss of Latin's synthetic future tense (and replacement with habere ad + inf.) argues against an early split. If needed, I can provide far more examples from any of these three categories (phonological, lexical, or grammatical changes in common with all other Romance languages). --Excelsius (talk) 04:18, 11 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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