Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction

by Ti Alkire , Carol Rosen

• ISBN13: 9780521717847
• ISBN10: 0521717841
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen trace the changes that led from colloquial Latin to five major Romance languages, those which ultimately became national or transnational languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Trends in spoken Latin altered or dismantled older categories in phonology and morphology, while the regional varieties of speech, evolving under diverse influences, formed new grammatical patterns, each creating its own internal regularities. Documentary sources for spoken Latin show the beginnings of this process, which comes to full fruition in the medieval emergence of written Romance languages. This book newly distills the facts into an appealing program of study, including exercises, and makes the difficult issues clear, taking well motivated and sometimes innovative stands. It provides not only an essential guide for those new to the topic, but also a reliable compendium for the specialist.

Author Biography

Ti Alkire is a senior lecturer in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Besides historical Romance linguistics, his research interests include stylistics, translation theory, and current variation in French and Italian. Carol Rosen is a professor of Linguistics and Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her work in language typology, grammatical relations, and formal theory design lends a special character to her research in Romance linguistics, ranging over historical and contemporary topics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The evolution of stressed vowels	p. 5
Syllables and word stress in Latin	p. 5
Stressed vowels: the (almost) pan-Romance seven-vowel system	p. 8
Special developments in stressed vowels	p. 19
The three Latin diphthongs	p. 23
Exercises	p. 24
Early changes in syllable structure and consonants	p. 26
Prosthetic vowels	p. 26
Syncope and new consonant clusters	p. 28
Merger of /b/ and /w/	p. 31
Early consonant losses	p. 33
In search of Popular Latin speech	p. 36
Exercises	p. 40
Consonant weakening and strengthening	p. 44
Degemination	p. 44
Lenition	p. 45
Other consonant weakenings	p. 48
Fortition	p. 52
Exercises	p. 53
New palatal consonants	p. 56
About palatal articulation	p. 56
Yods old and new	p. 57
Yods and the growth of new consonants	p. 58
Charles and Charlotte	p. 72
Exercises	p. 74
More about vowels: raising, yod effects, and nasalization	p. 77
Vowel raising in Italian	p. 77
Yod effects in Spanish	p. 80
Yod effects in French	p. 86
Nasal vowels in French	p. 91
Exercises	p. 92
Verb morphology: the present indicative	p. 95
Infinitives	p. 95
Present indicative in Popular versus standard Latin	p. 99
Present indicative in Italian	p. 100
Present indicative in Spanish	p. 102
Present indicative in French	p. 103
Stem allomorphy in the present indicative	p. 104
Paradigm leveling	p. 112
Paradigm disleveling	p. 116
A stem extender: -sc-	p. 118
Some truly irregular verbs: be, have, go	p. 119
Exercises	p. 123
Verb morphology: systemic reorganization	p. 127
Map of the Latin verb system	p. 127
How Romance reorganizes the Latin system	p. 130
Present indicative and present subjunctive	p. 133
Imperfect indicative	p. 140
Perfect indicative: Romance synthetic past	p. 144
Imperfect subjunctive	p. 158
Future subjunctive	p. 162
Future and conditional	p. 163
A bombshell: the birth of periphrastic perfects	p. 169
The passive voice	p. 174
Past participles old and new	p. 176
Exercises	p. 180
Noun and adjective morphology	p. 185
The starting-point Latin noun and adjective morphology	p. 185
From five to three declension classes	p. 186
From six to two cases	p. 187
Romance noun and adjective morphology	p. 188
The neuter diaspora: from three to two genders	p. 192
Toward gender marking	p. 195
Imparisyllabic nouns and adjectives	p. 196
Romance personal pronouns	p. 198
Birth of the definite article	p. 203
Exercises	p. 206
History and structure of Portuguese: in overview	p. 209
Stressed vowels: the seven-vowel system	p. 209
More on stressed vowels- secondary diphthongs	p. 212
More on stressed vowels: nasalization	p. 215
Raising effects	p. 217
Early changes in consonants	p. 217
Consonant weakening and strengthening	p. 219
New palatal consonants	p. 222
Noun and adjective morphology	p. 228
Verb morphology: infinitives	p. 234
Verb morphology: present indicative	p. 234
Paradigm leveling and disleveling	p. 240
A stem extender: -sc-	p. 240
Some truly irregular verbs: be, have, go	p. 241
Verbs: old categories with inherited morphology	p. 242
Verbs: new periphrastic	p. 246
Verbs: other new categories	p. 248
Exercises	p. 250
History and structure of Romanian: an overview	p. 252
Romanian vowels: diachrony and synchrony	p. 252
Syllable structure: conservatism and innovation	p. 260
Palatal influences on consonants	p. 261
Other consonant changes	p. 263
Present indicative and subjunctive	p. 267
Verb morphology: systemic reorganization	p. 274
Noun and adjective morphology	p. 279
Exercises	p. 284
Formation of the Romance lexicon	p. 287
Lexical competition and replacement	p. 287
Exploiting the derivational resources of Latin	p. 289
Cycles of added and lost meaning	p. 300
Reanalysis: how the mind remakes words	p. 304
Loan words	p. 306
Exercises	p. 314
Emergence of the Romance vernaculars	p. 317
Language in the Carolingian world	p. 317
The earliest Romance texts	p. 323
Conclusion from dialects to standards	p. 330
Exercises	p. 335
Notes	p. 339
Glossary of linguistic terms	p. 353
Suggestions for further reading	p. 360
Works cited	p. 364
Index	p. 372
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