Talk:Romance languages/Archive 2

message: I added and changed a few things in that section, but I still have some problems with it:
*Why is English "sixteen" irregular?
*Why is it relevant here that Romanian is a member of the Balkan linguistic union?
Does anyone know a reference on this? — AdiJapan ☎ 13:06, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The number 16

message: Added French for America, with estimated population speaking it. Dali 04:39, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: French in America

message: Every Italian dialect, French dialect or other Romance language dialect is recognized by Ethnologue and has its own page: check Piedmontese language, Lombard language, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian language (Romance),  Neapolitan language, Venetian language, Corsican language, Picard language, Norman language and many many many others. So we can put all of these languages/dialects in the article, and clutter it irremediably, or remove the Sicilian languages, that doesn't deserve more than 
any other one. GhePeU 11:48, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * Occitan is a whole different language (langue d'oc) opposed to current French language (one of the langues d'oïl), Sardinian had a completely different evolution from Latin due to its peculiar substrates, just like Ladin and Friulian belongs to a different linguistic group. GhePeU 14:18, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sicilian dialect

message: :*Your reasoning still makes zero sense - continuing to refer to Sicilian as a dialect is POV in the extreme on your part - you obviously don't know too much about the evolution of Sicilian, you have jumped to a conclusion without even looking into it thorougly, i.e. POV city, here we come!   ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 21:39, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *You put Sicilian in, you put every single Italian language with a dedicated page in Wikipedia. Start with Piedmontese language, Lombard language, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Central Italian, Ligurian language (Romance),  Neapolitan language, Venetian language and Corsican language. Then you can't leave out the alternate French languages, and I'm pretty sure that there are some Castillan dialects, and some Romanian and Portuguese dialect that Ethnlogue considers languages. How about carving some place for them too? GhePeU 22:09, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *GhePeU, I ask you again to share with readers the scientific, linguistic information that points toward considering the above languages dialects.  Your disdain for Sicilian and the other languages of Italy seems to come from a personal bias, in my own opinion.  The lack of providing any credible sources or citations for your comments leads me to believe that your knowledge about the linguistic situation in Italy is coming out of thin air.  You also seem to have a distaste for Ethnologue's linguistic classifications.  But again, I beg you to provide your own resources, if in fact they even exist, in order to counter Ethnologue.  Until that point, you have not even the slightest background information needed to defend your position on the matter. --VingenzoTM 00:40, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: How dare you change an edit of mine on this talk page!  Just how POV you are is becoming clearer and clearer.  One, you insist on using the term "dialect" when I have already said that the Wikimedia Foundation accepts Sicilian as a language.  Two, once you strip away the term "dialect", what do you have left as part of your argument?  Sicilian is the most widely spoken Romance langauge after Catalan.  It therefore has every right to remain.  It's up to others more knowledgable about other romance languages as to whether they get a guernsey.   At least I have the guts to put my real name to these edits, and I am not just some anonymous rabble rouser.   ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:44, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Wikimedia accepts all the Italian dialects as languages, check Piedmontese language, Lombard language, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian language (Romance),  Neapolitan language, Venetian language and Corsican language. So you put them all or you remove Sicilian. And by the way, 10,000,000 speakers is a numebr without justifications, Ethnologue (you always cite it) gives 4,832,520 speakers (this is the population of Sicily, including people that don't speak Sicilian), and if you want to double the number because you count third and fourth generation emigrants you must double the speakers of the other dialects too. And for example, recent polls indicate that 80% of Veneto population (about 3,600,000) speaks regularly in Venetian language, not to count the millions of emigrants from Veneto and Friuli that settled in Brazil and Argentina. GhePeU 00:48, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *GhePeu, maybe you should follow the suit of Pippu and begin to cite your own resources.  The Wikipedia project is an enciclopedic work, and should be treated with the same respect as other published documents.  This means you must cite your information and be able to support what is written using factual data.  Unfortunately, you are providing nothing of the sort in your quest to defame certain languages.  --VingenzoTM 00:40, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Are you being deliberately perverse?  The ethnologue entry merely gives the population  of Sicily - it is not meant as an estimate of the speakers of the language.  Throw in the speakers from southern Calabria, Salentino and the millions of Sicilian immigrants to the USA, Canada, Argentina, Australia and the EC amd Northern Italy in recent decades and there is your answer.  Lastly, is your chief concern that Venetian is not getting a guernsey?  You don't like seeing the more unworthy southern language showing up ahead of something from Northern Italy - is that the chief concern?   And you describe me as being POV?  I'll let whoever have a crack, but I will return, as long as the Wikipedia Foundation accepts Sicilian as a language, then I am entitled to make reference to it in a general article on the Romance languages, especially when it is the 7th most common, and has many features which set it apart from Italian, certainly worth highlighting in an article such this I would have thought.    ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 07:38, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I made an example with Venetian because I know directly its status, but what I wrote is not valid just for Venetian (and note that I'm not the one trying to slip in "its dialect" here). I'm trying to tell that every single language now considered a "dialect of Italy" has the same right to be in a prominence position. You keep repeting that "Wikimedia recognize Sicilian as a language", that "Sicilian has more speakers than what officially recognized", that "it is different from Italian". Well, this is true for every Italian languages/dialect, and while you gave reason for putting Sicilian there, you did not give a single reason for putting ONLY Sicilian there. So again, either you explicitly cite Piedmontese language, Lombard language, Ligurian language (Romance), Venetian language, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Central Italian, Neapolitan language and Corsican language or you don't put any of them. GhePeU 10:29, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I'll accept your most recent edit for the time being.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 12:30, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Sicilian language]]

message: I've found some similarities between Sicilian and Italian:
*They both have assimilations; for example, from Latin ct to tt. it-perfetto, scn-pirfettu
*They both have geminations.
*They both have vowels at the end of the suffixes corresponding to following in English: -ion, -al, -ar, -or, and -ile,(all I can think of) unlike some other Romance languages:
*english - spanish - portuguese - french - italian - sicilian
*discussion - discusión - discussão - discussion - discussione - discussioni
*plural - plural - plural - pluriel - plurale - plurali''
*solar - solar - solar - solaire - solare - sulari
*color - color - cor - couleur - colore - culuri
*facile - fácil - fácil - facile (final e is silent) - facile - facili
*verb infintive endings: - ar, er, ir - ar, er/or, ir - er, ir, re - are, ere, ire - ari, iri
*The plural markers of both languages are similar. They all derive from Latin nominative plurals. Latin declension
So, are Sicilian and Italian genetically closely related? Or are they merely a Sprachbund?
70.20.142.70 01:48, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You  will find your answer in Sicilian language.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 04:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

text: They are clearly related because they are part of the same language group (and closely related at that).  But if you mean that Sicilian did not descend from Italian, that is correct.  They have similar but separate histories.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 03:00, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * The word for Brit. Eng. "colour" in Portuguese is "cor", not "color". In fact, Portuguese frequently drops inter-vocalic "l" (e.g. "céu", "dor", "cor", "moinho", etc... vs Sp "cielo", "color", "dolor", "molino", etc... or French "ciel", "couleur", "douleur", "moulin", etc...), I've edited your the table above to correct that. Mbruno 02:38, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is Sicilian related to Italian? 

message: The link "Dialects of Italy" actually takes one to Dialects of Italian - these are two very different concepts!  I quote from thea article:
:Dialects of Italian are regional  varieties which are closely related to  Standard Italian, while the terms Dialects of Italy is suggested for those idioms, such as Piedmontese, Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian, Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, who show considerable differences in grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Many "dialects of Italy" should thus be considered distinct languages in their own right, and actually are assigned to separate branches on the Romance language family tree by Ethnologue and other academic works. However, for historical, cultural and political reasons, these idioms have not yet been given an official status, nor have they developed a unified written standard.
Following on from the above quote, a better expression would be "languages of Italy".  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 01:15, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Dialects of Italy vs [[Dialects of Italian]]

message: It has been proposed that Languages of Oïl be renamed and moved to Langues d'Oïl. Comments and votes on Talk:Languages of Oïl, please, if you're interested. Man vyi 09:08, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed move 

message: I think that none of the wikipedian can decide by himself which language is a "real language" or just a dialect.
The criteria most communly used is to verify the existence of the ISO 639-2 code: languages normally have it, dialects not.
About the languaes spoken in the Italian territory, the following ones (listed in a strictly alphabetical order) have an ISO 639-2 code:
*Italian (ita)
*Friulian (fur)
*Ladino (lad)
*Neapolitan (nap)
*Sardinian (srd)
*Sicilian (scn)
You can check it:
*List of ISO 639 codes
*ISO 639 list
Thanks for your attention.
--Giusi 02:01, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This test is true only in one direction, though: if there is an ISO code it means that someone managed to convice some international committee that the language was a real language.  But if there is no code, it does not follow that it is a dialect.  Perhaps the speakers of that language didn't have the resources to lobby the committe, perhaps they didn't bother, or they missed the train to the meeting. Or perhaps the committee decided that it was not worth the trouble because there were too few speakers left. Jorge Stolfi 02:41, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: PS. Anyway, this discussion about language/dialect is pointless, the topic has been discussed billions of times, and has been resolved within Wikipedia.  Venetian, Sicilian, etc. are languages, not "dialcts". "Dialects of Italian" do exist, like "dialects of Venetian", but are something else. Jorge Stolfi 03:20, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Jorge, I am totally agree with you. I posted my message because someone thought that Venetian, Sicilian, etc. are not languages and for this reason he canceled parts of the article. --Giusi 01:59, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dialects and Languages of Italy 

message: • Folks, instead of fighting here, why don't we   work on the article? At the very least we need a listing of all the Romance languages, including Italian, Venetian, Sicilian, etc (but not their dialects -- those should go in the respective pages), with the numbers of native speakers.
BTW, note that while the children of immigrants usually speak the language of their parents, the grandchildren as a rule won't even understand it. So you can count only a small fraction of those millions of Italian immigrants who left 100 years ago. All the best, Jorge Stolfi 03:20, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A proposal 

message: I've just finished copyediting the first part of the article, mainly inserting IPA tags and deleting excessive wikilinks. I guess I haven't paid attention to this page for a while, since the last part  has somehow turned into a huge mess, including a section called "leftover text". The responsible person(s) should try to amend that, soon. The lists of languages would be better unified and/or placed elsewhere IMHO. On the issue of dialects and languages, may I suggest that the two terms are more often than not just politically motivated labels, and should not be cause for an argument? --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 21:28, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you 100% on every point.  Thanks for tidying it up.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 00:24, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leftover text etc. 

message: I have moved the classification trees (including the Ethnologue) to a spearate article, classification of Romance languages, and combined the geographical and alphabetical lists into one.
I propose that we avoid getting into classification disputes here, e.g. whether Galician is a Spanish or Portuguese dialect etc.  However, it may be useful to combine some entries into groups, besides the dialect/parent groups that are already there.  For example, we could group together any set of languages that, although not "dialects" of any other language, (a) have coevolved in neighboring areas with substantial contact, and (b) form a language continum that is more or less well-distinguished from other languages outside the group, and (c) include at most one official language.  Thus perhaps most of the languages of France can be re-sorted as two groups (Oc and Oïl), and most languages of Italy into half a dozen groups (Venetian, Ligurese, Sicilian, etc.); whereas Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan would remain separate groups, and Galician may be put in yet another separate group with the other secondary languages of NW Spain.  What do you think? Jorge Stolfi 19:15, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Language lists

message: *Moved to Talk:Portuguese language Jorge Stolfi 19:16, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Is ''ter'' = "to hold" in Portuguese?

message: * Moved to Talk:Portuguese language. Jorge Stolfi 19:20, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Is ''tem'' = "there is" in Portuguese?

message: Hello friends, I have a question reguarding the Romanesco (Italian Meridiano) language group in central Italy. For reasons you see on the Romanesco page, I'm not sure how to treat its classification. 
=====Romanesco refers to:=====
*the language group of central Italy, and 
*the particular dialect of Rome and the immediate surrounding area
=====Different influences:=====
*the language group stems from different varieties of Vulgar Latin with pre-Romance substrata
*the particular dialect of Rome was influenced much by Tuscan in the late 1600s 
*this makes Roman dialect much closer to Italian than the other Romanesco dialects outside the city
*Romanesco dialects outside the city are more authentic, based on Vulgar Latin of the area
=====Modern History, Diffusion, Romanaccio=====
*the Tuscanised Roman dialect was confined to Rome and its immediate surrounding area until the 1800s
*it spread considerably outside the city and province during the 1900s 
*between the 1920s and 1960s many settlers came from other Italian regions
*this ultimately changed the Roman dialect
*it was contaminated by other regional languages and dialects of Italy
*this vulgarisation of the Roman dialect led to the negative term "Romanaccio"
*during the 1950s the newly evolved Roman/Romanaccio dialect spread outside the city 
*Roman/Romanaccio contaminated the traditional Romanseco (non Tuscanised) dialects in central Italy
*Roman/Romanaccio was later ghettoised and anyone who spoke it or Romanesco was stereotyped as ignorant, vulgar, lazy
=====Death of Roman dialect=====
*it is possible that the Roman dialect died between 1970 and 1980
*caused by social changes in the last few neighborhoods where pure Roman was spoken
*neighborhoods in the city center, Trastevere, San Lorenzo, and Testaccio were transformed to places of commerce
*it is the parent of Romanaccio
=====How to classify the language group, dialects?=====
*Romanesco = Italian meridiano language group, southcentral Italy
**Non-Traditional Dialects:
***Classical Roman - Roman vulg. Lat. influenced by Tuscan in the late 1600s (extinct 1980)
****Romanaccio - Class. Roman, influenced by other dialects/regional languages (evolved 1920-1960)
**Traditional Dialects:
***Laziale Centro-Settentrionale 
***Umbro Settentrionale
***Umbro Meridionale-Occidentale e Viterbese
***Umbro Meridionale-Orientale
***Marchigiano Centrale Anconitano
***Marchigiano Centrale Maceratese
***Cicolano-Reatino-Aquilano
Since I'm translating these things in English, I'm unsure how to proceed.  I've broken down some of the components above and I think it would be the most appropriate classification.  However, I'm very cautious in saying that dialetto Romano, Romanaccio, or Romanesco is a language.  By today's standards, Romanaccio is not much of a language of its own.  The pure Roman dialect made popular by Belli in the 1950s has long died away.  I'd feel more comfortable calling Romanesco a dialect, but in the same sense, the same word is used to identify the entire language group.  And as noted above, the Romanesco dialects in Lazio (outside center city Rome), Marche, and Umbria are in fact the original Romanesco dialects evolved from Vulgar Latin of the area.  It was only the dialect of Rome, "Romano", also called "Romanesco" that was influenced by Tuscan and to which it became very similiar.  Therefore, I want to avoid and eliminate the ambiguity in translating the language names from Italian to English.  As you see, even in Italian, the language names have different meanings to different people, in different places, and are treated dissimilarly between linguists and the citizens themselves.
The problem is "language versus dialect" and the ambiguity of the word "Romanesco".  I think I am doing right by this, but I'd like other persons' feedback and suggestions.  With the exception of the idiom spoken in metropolitan Rome, the rest of central Italy speaks one of many Romanesco dialects.  It is a language group in its own right, see  map.  And like Catalan, Galician, Neapolitan, Corsican, and all the other regional languages, it deserves to be recognized.  I'm not advocating it's political recognition, but instead I'm advocating its recognition through this encyclopedia, since it's already linguistically recognized as the "Meridiano" language group in Italy.  I will soon provide examples of the various literatures written in the different varieties of Romanesco.  But please post your thoughts, suggestions, and ideas, so that I can make the English version of this article informative, concise, and least complicated as possible. --Massimino 22:58, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say that the differences between so-called "classical" Romano and Romanaccio are negligible when compared to the overall Tuscan influences on Romano (dating from the 16th century at least).  The rural Laziale dialects are more conservative, e.g. they preserved many features of their Oscan substratum.  Robotchoir 12:26, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Romanesco (Italian Meridiano) Language Group

message: *Romanesco = Italian meridiano language group, southcentral Italy
**Non-Traditional Dialects:
***Classical Roman - Roman vulg. Lat. influenced by Tuscan in the late 1600s (extinct 1980)
****Romanaccio - Class. Roman, influenced by other dialects/regional languages (evolved 1920-1960)
**Traditional Dialects:
***Laziale Centro-Settentrionale 
***Umbro Settentrionale
***Umbro Meridionale-Occidentale e Viterbese
***Umbro Meridionale-Orientale
***Marchigiano Centrale Anconitano
***Marchigiano Centrale Maceratese
***Cicolano-Reatino-Aquilano
Since I'm translating these things in English, I'm unsure how to proceed.  I've broken down some of the components above and I think it would be the most appropriate classification.  However, I'm very cautious in saying that dialetto Romano, Romanaccio, or Romanesco is a language.  By today's standards, Romanaccio is not much of a language of its own.  The pure Roman dialect made popular by Belli in the 1950s has long died away.  I'd feel more comfortable calling Romanesco a dialect, but in the same sense, the same word is used to identify the entire language group.  And as noted above, the Romanesco dialects in Lazio (outside center city Rome), Marche, and Umbria are in fact the original Romanesco dialects evolved from Vulgar Latin of the area.  It was only the dialect of Rome, "Romano", also called "Romanesco" that was influenced by Tuscan and to which it became very similiar.  Therefore, I want to avoid and eliminate the ambiguity in translating the language names from Italian to English.  As you see, even in Italian, the language names have different meanings to different people, in different places, and are treated dissimilarly between linguists and the citizens themselves.
The problem is "language versus dialect" and the ambiguity of the word "Romanesco".  I think I am doing right by this, but I'd like other persons' feedback and suggestions.  With the exception of the idiom spoken in metropolitan Rome, the rest of central Italy speaks one of many Romanesco dialects.  It is a language group in its own right, see  map.  And like Catalan, Galician, Neapolitan, Corsican, and all the other regional languages, it deserves to be recognized.  I'm not advocating it's political recognition, but instead I'm advocating its recognition through this encyclopedia, since it's already linguistically recognized as the "Meridiano" language group in Italy.  I will soon provide examples of the various literatures written in the different varieties of Romanesco.  But please post your thoughts, suggestions, and ideas, so that I can make the English version of this article informative, concise, and least complicated as possible. --Massimino 22:58, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say that the differences between so-called "classical" Romano and Romanaccio are negligible when compared to the overall Tuscan influences on Romano (dating from the 16th century at least).  The rural Laziale dialects are more conservative, e.g. they preserved many features of their Oscan substratum.  Robotchoir 12:26, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: How to classify the language group, dialects?

message: :Initially the "Roman language" would only refer to Langue d'oïl, but it was eventually generalized by scholars to describe all languages derived from Latin.
Gonzalo de Berceo (ca. 1190–1264) spoke about román paladino. --Error 01:19, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The origin of Romance

message: I suggest we include a vocabulary table comparing the different Romance languages, similar to the one found in the Germanic languages article.Mbruno 02:50, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: for the sake of space, show only the singular masculine for all adjectives; English infinitive shown without preposition.   ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Fixed now. Man vyi 07:06, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Are we almost ready to plonk in the main article?  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 07:17, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Which meaning of That is intended? Man vyi 07:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Adjectival.  But if it's too ambiguous, it could be better to leave out.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 07:50, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Vocabulary Table

message: The Atlantic Islands where Portuguese (Azores and Madeira) and Castillian (Canary islands) are spoken are not represented on the map. This should be corrected. The Ogre 11:20, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atlantic Islands 

message: past imperfect DĪCEBAT "he was saying". is this past imperfect(?) or past continuous ?
There was no dictinction between imperfect and continuous in Latin. FilipeS 22:02, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  past imperfect? 

message: Italian retains some absolute verbal forms as participio assoluto e gerundio assoluto in both two tenses --Philx 21:31, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Absolute verbal forms 

message: I am finding the additional notes to the vocab table a bit of a distraction - they are of interest, but they impact on the compactness of the table itself - any ideas on how to fix? footnotes perhaps?  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 23:36, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've just footnoted it up. What do people think? Man vyi 08:37, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks much cleaner - thanks!  I'm thinking it might even be useful spreading over two columns so the page doesn't run as long - I'm happy to try if someone else doesn't get to it first.  ρ¡ρρµ δ→θ∑ - (waarom? jus'b'coz!) 13:12, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Vocab Table revisited 

message: According to the 1979 Encyclopedia Britannica article on romance languages that I read, the northern limit of where Romance languages are spoken was in present-day southern Germany. From the 5th to the late 9th centuries A.D, a Celto-Roman cultural presence along with a language known as "Allemannic" thrived in Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia and Baden-Wurttemberg before the advent of Germanization by 1000 A.D. Some surviving documents and manuscripts of an extinct Romance language are on exhibit in regional museums across southern Germany. I think the information is worth while adding to the wikipedia article, though I should examine the research on the up-to-date encyclopedia britannica web page if I'm able to now. +207.200.116.72 23:56, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please add these extinct Romance languages 

message: The following was needlessly obscure:
:The verbs derived from Latin HABĒRE, TENĒRE, and ESSE are used differently for the concepts of "to have" (something), "to have" (auxiliary verb for complex tenses), and "there is" (existence statements). If we use T for TENĒRE, H for HABĒRE, and E for ESSE, the various languages classify as follows:
:TTH: Portuguese, Galician.
:THH: Spanish, Catalan.
:HHH: Occitan, French.
:HHE: Romanian, Italian
:For example:
:English: I have, I have done, there is
:Portuguese: (eu) tenho, (eu) tenho feito, há (TTH)
:Spanish: (yo) tengo,  (yo) he hecho, hay (THH)
:Catalan: (jo) tinc, (jo) he fet, hi ha (THH)
:French: j'ai, j'ai fait, il y a (HHH)
:Italian: (io) ho, (io) ho fatto,  c'è (HHE)
:Romanian: (eu) am, (eu) am făcut,  este (or e) (HHE)
:Friulian: (jo) o ai, (jo) o ai fat, a 'nd è, al è
:Most of these languages also use the TENĒRE verb for the sense of "to hold", e.g. Italian tieni il libro, French tu tiens le livre, Catalan tens el llibre, Spanish tienes el libro, Romanian ţine cartea, Galician Tes o libro, Friulian Tu tu tegnis il libri ("you hold the book").  However, Portuguese normally uses a different verb for that sense, usually segurar (from the Vulgar Latin ASSECURARE, "to make secure"). On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese informally uses the T verb in the existential sense, e.g. tem água no copo instead of há água no copo ("there is water in the glass"). Also, archaic Galician-Portuguese used H in permanent states eu hei um nome (I have a name, i.e. for all my life) and T in non-permanent ones eu tenho um livro (I have a book, i.e. perhaps tomorrow have not).
I suppose someone rewrote it this way because, if a modern speaker of Portuguese wants to translate "to hold", he will use segurar most of the time, rather than ter.
Nevertheless, ter can mean "to hold" sometimes. An example is "Tenho um livro nas mãos", which I would not hesitate in translating as "I'm holding a book in  my hands".
Also, if we're going to have these scruples about words whose most common meaning has changed somewhat since classical Latin, then Portuguese should not be the only casualty. In Spanish, too, tener does not mean "to hold", most of the time.
However, my interpretation of this section is that it is concerned with the structure of the compound tenses of Romance languages. The literal meaning of the auxiliary verbs is unimportant. The're not being used by themselves in these examples, they're being used as auxiliaries. FilipeS 19:40, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: To have and to hold

message: This was recently added to the article:
:Although falling into the second category, Portuguese also makes use of this same liaison, allowing final s (when preceding a vowel in the next word) to be read as a z.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think you only call it liaison when the consonant is silent some of the time (which is not the case in Portuguese). Can anyone confirm/refute? FilipeS 11:35, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I just removed this (not because it's false but because it didn't bear directly on the point under discussion, classifying the RLs wrt the two broad strategies of plural formation). You are right, this is not strictly speaking a case of liaison, but some other sandhi phenomenon ("consonant mutation", if you like…) CapnPrep 11:44, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Liaison in Portuguese?

message: I think this section could be improved by adding a detailed discussion of:
*What happened to the verb tenses, moods, etc., of Classical Latin in the Romance languages: some remained mostly unaltered, a few were completely lost, several were repurposed, and several were reconstructed as periphrases.
*The new verb forms created by Vulgar Latin / Romance: the conditional, the future subjunctive, the anterior past (passé antérieur, in French), the near future (futur proche)...
*More recent morpological innovations of the Romance languages, such as progressive aspect forms.
*Perfectivity in the Romance languages. FilipeS 20:41, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Linguistics Features section: suggestions for improvement

message: Where does the number '2 000 000' for the speakers of Lombard come from?
I don't mean it is necessarily wrong, but how has it been estimated?
On the basis of the 1990 census I estimated some 70% of the population in the Lombard-speaking valleys of southern Graubünden (Bergell/Bregaglia, Misox/Mesolcina, Puschlav/Poschiavo), Switzewrland, and some 40% of the population of Ticino, Switzerland. Estimates for Italy are far more difficult, as Italian censuses are not very informative on this issue.--Jorgengb 15:27, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of speakers

message: A recent edit deleted the following paragraph from "Features inherited from Classical Latin":
* Most of them have a T-V distinction, although in many cases it has been considerably transformed since the Middle Ages.
I may be mistaken, but I believe late classical / medieval Latin did have a T-V distinction: tu was informal, and vos was both plural and singular formal. FilipeS 20:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm surprised I never heard of it. Is there a reference I could look at? Rwflammang 14:57, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: T-V distinction in Latin

message: 'Nuff said.  Rhode Islander 22:42, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Talk:English_language#The_English_people_and_language_are_Romance]]