In the case of the French, it has expanded to new territories and continents. This geographical distance and the lack of connection between these regions have led to considerable differences even between the varieties of the same language. The French spoken in France, Congo, and Canada might stem from Vulgar Latin, however, the physical distance between these countries has resulted in three different varieties of the same language.
For example, Standard Italian based on its Florentine dialect which dates back to the 12th and 13th century Tuscan poetry.
Modern French, on the other hand, based on the Francien dialect and it was during the 14thth century when the standardization of the French language began6.
Clearly, French and Italian are two independently developing languages and as such we cannot expect them to be extremely similar despite their common ancestor. While French is notorious for its silent letters, many vowels, and special letter combination, Italian is much more consistent when it comes to its pronunciation. Since it is a phonetic language, in Italian you write the words the same way you pronounce them while in French even native speakers might not know how to spell a particular word if they have never heard it before.
Click To Tweet. Although both the Italian and the French alphabets based on the Latin script, their adaptations are quite different. For instance, French has 26 letters while Italian has only First Name. Count me in! Overall, French and Italian are very melodic languages, however, they are rather divergent in terms of their pronunciation. Grammar is one of the hardest aspects of learning any language.
Both French and Italian known for being rather difficult languages grammar-wise. In terms of articles, French is much easier since there are articles for singular and plural form which change based on the gender of the noun feminine or masculine. Italian the form of the articles depends on the number, gender, and the initial letter of the word — depending on whether the word starts with a vowel or a consonant, uses different articles.
As you can see there are no great dissimilarities between French and Italian. Of course, there are subtle features that, however, make a big difference.
For example, in French, the direct object pronouns le, la, les are situated before the verb Je veux la voir, meaning I want to see her while in Italian they are attached to the end of the verb Voglio vederla. Overall, both French and Italian have their own particularities.
Thus, it is pointless to keep trying to find out which one has more complicated grammar. Since both French and Italian originate from Vulgar Latin, it is expected that should have a lot in common in terms of vocabulary. Below you have the extract same sentence in French and then in Italian:. Essi sono dotati di ragione e di coscienza e devono agire gli uni verso gli altri in spirito di fratellanza.
These two passages clearly show how similar the vocabulary of these languages is. While it would be an overstatement to say that these texts are exactly the same, we can clearly see how similar most of the words are. Indeed, a French speaker would be able to understand the gist of the Italian excerpt without any previous knowledge of Italian. Still, you should keep in mind that despite these conspicuous, but rather superficial similarities, French and Italian have developed independently.
If you tally together the population of every Romance language, you get 1. There are many, many multilingual people in Europe, so this inflates the numbers a bit. If you only count the top five languages by user, however, the number is still over 1.
While the governmental empire began to collapse in the 5th century, the language was still spread all around the continent. As the communities started to close off from each other and individual kingdoms sprang up, the languages drifted apart and started sounding more distinct. The languages spread even further apart with the various colonial empires, bringing French, Spanish and Portuguese to North and South America. The word for grass in Latin was herba. That same word exists in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, but over the centuries a sound change has created a different rendition of the word in each language.
As a result, we have a variety of forms. For example, Latin had herba , which began with an h —but in all five of these languages the h is gone. Spanish has the word hierba ; the h sound is long gone. H is fragile and has a way of disappearing in languages. The same thing happened to our word. Italian, of the five Romance languages, is closest to Latin.
Learn more about how sounds evolve. Other languages, though, have gone a little further. Not only is the h dropped in pronunciation, but the letter a is dropped at the end. Then, you have in Portuguese erva. The b changed to a v. In Portuguese you have erva. The b transformed to a v. In the Latin alphabet, b is near the beginning, and v is down at the end. Diversity within languages also makes it hard to generalize. Argentine Spanish sounds markedly different from the Spanish in Spain, and both sound different from Mexican Spanish.
Furthermore, not everyone finds Romance languages irresistibly charming. Although French is popularly known as the language of love, its nasal vowel vocalization and guttural r come across as grating to some hearers. Conversely, German, which is sometimes stereotyped as a harsh language, often surprises foreigners by sounding pleasantly mild and controlled.
In fact, the great bard of Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, preferred English to his native Spanish , in part because of where the stress usually falls in the two languages. In other words, whether or not a language is beautiful is a subjective determination—and in the case of the Romance languages, it may have more to do with the way they evoke the elegance of Old Europe. But today, the Romance languages are at home far beyond Europe.
The vast majority of Spanish speakers live in Latin America, not Spain. And Brazil boasts about 20 times as many Portuguese speakers as Portugal! While Europe is facing population decline, Francophone Africa and Latin America are set to keep growing rapidly for the next few decades. Add to this the fact that Spanish and French are two of the three official United Nations languages, and you can see why the Romance languages will be globally relevant for a long time to come.
One writer albeit a proud Frenchman even argued in Forbes that the language of the future will not be English, Spanish, Arabic or even Chinese—but French! How did Latin birth so many distinct yet closely related tongues? The story of the Romance languages is full of twists and turns, and a bit of conjecture due to blanks in the linguistic record. We know scarcely anything about pre-Latin tongues in the areas where the Romance languages are now spoken. However, we do know a central piece of the plot: the history of the Roman Empire.
Rome reached the height of its territorial expansion in AD From its seat of power in modern-day Italy, the Empire stretched all the way to Britain in the far north, covered modern-day Spain in the west, claimed a long strip of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt to the south, and extended as far as Turkey and the Levant to the east.
The Roman navy dominated the Mediterranean. Despite periodic revolts in the provinces and crises of succession in the capital, Roman rule brought unprecedented stability to the region, enabling swift travel and flourishing trade.
It also brought Latin. The Empire itself was less fortunate, gradually breaking apart under the strain of high administrative costs, infighting, and overexpansion. Germanic invaders steadily conquered the western provinces, removing the last Roman emperor in Fortunately for the development of the Romance languages, however, the new rulers adopted Latin and Christianity.
Latin remained in use despite the collapse of the Empire and the fragmentation of Europe. Three hundred years later, a Germanic tribe called the Franks became a major political force on the continent. They were also allied to the Pope in Rome. Under Charlemagne and his successors, the Carolingians, Europe experienced sweeping Church reforms and a linguistic revival. By this period, the inhabitants of the former Roman provinces were speaking a variety of quasi-Latin dialects.
0コメント