Talk:Romance languages/Archive 1

message: I think a heading "Distinguishing features" should be added since there is already such a section but you hardly notice its introductory paragrah since it appears to belong to the previous section.
Also in this section it would be interesting to see how the various languages use verbs for "to be". I know Spanish has "ser" and "estar" and I'm 99% sure that Portuguese uses them in an almost identical way. I also believe that the other languages have cognate words which may or may not be used in similar ways any more. Could anybody illustrate this situation? — Hippietrail 09:47, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok Hippie, I've put in a bunch of distinguishing features.  As for "ser" and "estar", I mentioned it briefly as a distinguishing feature, and you'll find them discussed to death under Romance copula.  Enjoy.  Steverapaport 08:32, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Distinguishing features 

message: :Northern African (extinct by the 15th century)'
Couldn't find any reference to a Romance language in Africa to have survived antiquity. Was there really such a language to survive as late as the 15th century? If not, we should delete it from the list. Bogdan | Talk 22:01, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm fairly sure there was such a language - I seem to recall al-Bakri (11th century) mentioning Latin speakers in North Africa - but certainly not as later as the 15th century. - Mustafaa 19:25, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Northern African Romance 

message: Does anyone know for sure if the above mentioned document is a written in 2 century bc in greece in a romantic unknown language, or is purely greek?
:The evidence for clearly distinguished Romance languages is usually dated to the 8th-9th centuries AD. The Oath of Strasbourg is one of the earliest known Romance texts. Man vyi 20:19, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Romance Papyrus

message: I've removed the phrase saying that some degree of declension is kept in the personal pronouns: for that matter, in Romanian (and perhaps in some, older, forms of Romance), declensions are kept in much more than just personal pronouns.
However, I don't think this deserves a mention in the introduction: we've got a whole article to play with.
Also, if you don't like the way I've tempered the paragraph ("many of the differences", "among others"), feel free to reword, but some form of "tempering" should be left. Certainly, not all the differences are analytical (and not all Romance languages have all those differences, see Romanian), nor are the cited reasons the only ones for differentiation from Latin (namely, everyday and everylanguage phonetic changes are certainly part of the picture).
Other than this, is the phrase "many of the differences from the Romance languages in relation to Latin" grammatically correct?
LjL 15:35, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, and as I said, I think it should be kept - except for adding clues to inform that it is a generalization, as I hope I've done effectively. LjL 15:50, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Introductory paragraph

message: Not sure what to make of this, but it was obviously out of place so I moved it to here.   --Patik 03:23, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
In chinese,six means good luck,so 16 could bring us at least one good red luck of chance by meeting with our ideal woman.So,good luck,my friends,hope 16 could brings you some kind of romance which you have been dreamed of it.
:I'd leave it where I think it belongs -- out of the Romance languages article :-) LjL 12:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It is cute, though. Put a smile on my face. :)--Theathenae 12:24, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed sentence under "16" section 

message: Where does this number of 30 million for Romanian come from? Our own article Romanian language gives 26 million, which sounds more likely to me. Ethnologue gives about 23.5 million , but I believe that they count dual-native speakers only once, and Romanian has a lot of those (for example a million or so Romanian-Hungarian dual native speakers in Transylvania). Still, Romania has a population of just over 22 million, Moldova has less than 3.5 million. Yes, there are some Romanian speakers in Ukraine, and (if you want to stretch the definition of "Romanian language") maybe 400,000 speakers of other Eastern Romance languages in the Balkans, but conversely there are easily a million Slavs in Moldova, many of whom don't speak Romanian at anything like a native level. 
I suppose that under Wikipedia's policies all of this is neither here nor there if someone has a good citation for this (Ethnologue is normally considered a pretty good citation, but I find its number implausibly low), but I don't see any citation in the article. I figure I'll give at least a couple of days for someone to answer before I edit, since I'm new to this article and I know how contentious numbers like this can be. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Romanian-speakers