This series of videos will explore the basic grammar of the romance languages by comparing and contrasting
Late Latin and its descendants.
This first video is a short introduction providing some general thoughts
before we just jump right in.
The Roman Empire spread Latin
as it conquered its way throughout ancient Europe.
Local popular forms of Latin, collectively called Vulgar
Latin, developed over the centuries.
Changing as languages do into a variety of languages
and dialects across the continent.
Some of these languages even spread across the globe,
and continue to develop far from their original homes.
Nowadays there are five Major romance languages:
French, Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, and Romanian. Those are probably names you
recognize. But there are other Regional languages
like Sicilian and Catalan and extinct languages like
Dalmatian that give us a more complete picture of this
language family.
So what is a comparative grammar of the romance
languages? Very briefly a grammar
is how a language works.
So a romance grammar will tell you, or give you an idea
of how the romance languages work.
This grammar will be comparative, because instead of
just looking at individual languages like just French, or
only Spanish, we'll explore examples from multiple
languages in each topic.
Throughout this series. I'm going to display examples
on your screen.
Vulgar Latin examples, will start with an asterisk.
That little star is going to tell you that Vulgar Latin
words are reconstructed. They come from a mostly
undocumented form of Latin. If you want to learn how
extinct, undocumented languages are reconstructed,
I share a lot more in a separate series covering the
basics of historical linguistics. I'll put a link to that
below.
Here's one example;
Classical Latin writers used "𝘭𝘰𝘲𝘷𝘰𝘳" for I speak,
but some late Latin speakers started saying "𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘭𝘰,"
and others started saying "𝘧𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘰" for I speak instead
Examples in languages other than latin in the modern
romance languages start with an asterisk when they
offer negative evidence.
Negative examples are reasonable structures that tend
not to show up in a language. For example, English
speakers say, "My language,"
But don't really say, "The my language." Well, in Italian the
opposite is actually true.
But don't take my word for these. Really, you can get a
taste of the frequency of any of these examples by
starting to search for similar structures online.
Positive examples should come up a lot more frequently
than negative ones, if the negative even returns any
results at all.
Okay, let's divide romance words up.
We'll split them up based on whether or not each word
has different forms.
In English, the word "hat" as a plural form: "hats."
These kinds of words are variable. Other words like "to"
in "to a party" are
invariable. In the romance languages, content words like
nouns and verbs can vary, while function words like
prepositions and conjunctions tend not to vary.
So how do variable words vary?
Not in any old way, variable words vary in a very
specific way. They have a base, that carries the
meaning, like this Spanish base "𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘯-."
We call this base a stem.
Endings attach to the end of this stem, and often carry
some grammatical information.
That Spanish stem "𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘯-" can be used in the verb
"funciona," "it works,"
"funcionó," "it worked," and so on.
We'll treat these variations as different forms of the
same word, not as completely different words.
Let's build on these ideas in upcoming lessons as we
start to look into how nouns, verbs,
pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, particles, and
sentences work in the romance languages.
I'm really excited to start sharing some examples with
you, you're gonna meet some very cool languages,
and get a good sense for how this family works.
𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦. That's goodbye for now, and I look
forward to next time.
