Talk:Romance languages

message: Looking at the article flow a big chunk in the middle is taken by the "Sound changes" part. The topic is too complex to be compressed in a satisfactory manner. I suggest moving most of its content to "Phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance". It would add to the main article's depth, and, at the same time, improve readability of the Romance languages article. Aristeus01 (talk) 13:07, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree, and I'm not sure anyone would disagree. Most of that content should be in a separate article. A word of caution though, not all the changes in the "sound changes" part affected all of Romance, so they wouldn't strictly be sound changes to Proto-Romance. I'm not totally sure what should be done about those. Palatalization which affected all of Romance to some degree, but some varieties more extensively, is already briefly mentioned in Phonological changes... so I think transferring most of this article's Palatalization section there would be fine. I guess we should also see what some of the main contributors to the Proto-Romance articles (namely ) have to say and I'm also curious if other language families have their own sound changes articles. Erinius (talk) 16:15, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: You could certainly add a section labelled 'subsequent regional sound changes', or similar, to the article about Classical Latin > Proto-Romance changes. Nicodene (talk) 16:59, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I ask only that whatever content transferred there be cited to the same standard as the rest of the existing article. Nicodene (talk) 17:00, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: A fair request. We should start by adding refences to our current text in question and when we are happy with the result we can look again at all the suggestions and decide on the best way to move forward. Aristeus01 (talk) 18:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound changes 

message: Proposing to remove the map due to not meeting quality standards of an academic material.
General issues:
*it arbitrarily and subjectively sets the time frames based on the length of rule of Dacia and Britannia, then on a 100 years basis, then on a generic "over 500" with no clear explanation of the relevance of such categorisation.
*it sets the end of Roman rule on the end date for the Western Roman Empire, misrepresenting the rule in Moesia that lasted until the 6th century under Eastern Roman Empire ( so "over 500 years")
*it ignores the difference between rule in most of Italian peninsula and the other areas presented as "over 500".
*it misrepresents the gradual conquest of Iberian peninsula that took over 200 years, possibly misleading the reader to think it happened in two waves.
*as above it makes no distinction between southern France and the territories added by Julius Caesar.
*it completely misrepresents North African provinces and timeline, including the geographical extent of Roman border along Libyan coast, and the length of rule in Mauretania Caesariensis ( should be "over 500")
Language specific issues:
*it mixes representation of national languages with regionally recognised languages, oddly showing only some of the latter.
*it draws the Jireček Line in an amateurish manner, following neither Jireček's indications nor one of the latter academic proposals.
*controversially assigns "Romanian" speaking label to Aromanian language (which is very poorly illustrated, by the way).
*confusingly shows a single clade of languages ("Galloitalic") touching on the subject of clades then refuses to elaborate.
Overall, the map adds little to no value to Romance languages' history and grouping, and poorly illustrates the chronology of the Roman Empire and its limits. Aristeus01 (talk) 10:00, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  I understand your concerns; however, I feel that the map should be improved, rather than deleted. The original author in Commons is Andras Bereznay (probably no longer active), and it's been modified by commons:User:Liviojavi. Why don't you try to contact them? --Jotamar (talk) 11:18, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: A re-do is definitely in order if the map is to be kept. In addition to sorting out the time questions, there's this concern: "It mixes representation of national languages with regionally recognised languages, oddly showing only some of the latter.", troublesome in multiple ways. If regionally recognised means the usual here, the designation is far more political than linguistic, thus misleading at best, and guaranteed to be less informative than might be helpful to non-expert readers. This is then compounded by the labeling of e.g. French through almost all of France and Italian for most of Italy, with nods to very few local languages or typologies (Galloitalic), not just misleading, but misinforming the non-expert. None of this is easy to deal with in a small map, but attempts at coherent language labeling can be made. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 14:28, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I've contacted both editors a few days ago bit so far no reply. It's possible that the map, with improvements, could be useful for the topic but I do not have high hopes the authors will make any changes. Aristeus01 (talk) 09:17, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Length of the Roman rule and the Romance Languages Map 

message: @Cush
I feel like we need to modernize the 'Romance Languages in the World Map'. Was there any specific reason you changed it back to the old one?
It is in need of modernization for sure, if we could get one made! IntelloFR (talk) 00:45, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Languages Map 

message: The redirect Romance peoples has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  #prodraxis connect 16:49, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Romance peoples]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: I'm trying to figure out what the best way to represent the split between the Classical Latin-derived literary varieties of Latin (i.e. Late Latin, Medieval Latin, Renaissance Latin, Neo-Latin, the Hermeneutic style, etc) and the Vulgar Latin-derived Romance languages in the language family portion of the infobox. Does anyone here have any suggestions? The name used in the Glottolog database is Latinic, if that's worth anything. Arctic Circle System (talk) 09:43, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure we really need to represent that split in this article's infobox in the first place - and as it is, the infobox says the Romance languages are descended from Vulgar rather than Classical Latin. Some of the "ancestor" parameters (the ones which display as "Early Forms") ought to be either removed or put into the "Family" parameters though. Erinius (talk) 00:11, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: @Erinius Which ones do you think should be moved to families? Old and Vulgar Latin? Regardless, as it currently stands, the family sections of the infoboxes for the various Romance languages currently suggest that they split directly from proto-Latino-Faliscan or something, which isn't the case. I think maybe adding Latin itself to the language family sections would work? It'd show that the Romance languages split via a a branch of Latin well enough, I think. Arctic Circle System (talk) 01:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Linguistic classification should not be interpreted as a form of derivation or evolution, it is simply classification. The "Early forms" section demonstrates the potential path of evolution. So whilst the Romance languages are all derived from vulgar Latin, they are not classified as a type of vulgar Latin. Jameel the Saluki (talk) 03:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  The classification in regards to language families is based on phylogenetic relationships (generally descent from a common ancestor). Saying that Dutch is ultimately derived from proto-Germanic is not the same as saying that it's a type of proto-Germanic. Arctic Circle System (talk) 22:05, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Could I construe your objection being the use of the term Latino-Faliscan as a classification that includes the Romance languages? Jameel the Saluki (talk) 03:01, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not quite. What I'm saying is that the way the infoboxes are written currently implies that the evolution of the Romance languages into, well, the Romance languages went as follows: Indo-European → Italic → Latino-Faliscan → Romance, as if proto-Romance split directly from Latino-Faliscan. But that's not the case. It's more accurate to say something like this: Indo-European → Italic → Latino-Faliscan → Latin → Romance. Arctic Circle System (talk) 06:18, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

text: For this article only "Vulgar Latin" really needs to be in "Early Forms" (we certainly don't need to go all the way back to PIE), and I agree that putting "Latin" in the family section below "Latino-Faliscan" would be a good idea. The same goes for articles on individual Romance languages like Spanish language, "Latin" should go between "Latino-Faliscan" and "Romance" in the Families section. Erinius (talk) 22:35, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Perhaps you're right on that, going back to PIE in those might be a bit much. Old Latin is probably the farthest that's reasonable. But that's beside the point of this discussion. Arctic Circle System (talk) 06:21, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Representation of Classical Latin–Vulgar Latin split in infobox? 

message: 'The usual solution to these issues is to create various nested subgroups. ...
Probably a more accurate description, however ...'
As soon as you have sentences like this, you are already admitting that you are violating the WP:NPOV policy and possibly also the WP:NOR policy. First, you are openly giving undue weight to a certain view which is not 'the usual one'. The usual view (among experts) is precisely the one that Wikipedia is supposed to represent first and foremost; minority opinions, if sufficiently widespread, may be included, but not presented as more accurate than the usual ones. Second, even these minority opinions must come from reliable sources; if the alternative 'more accurate description' happens to be your own and not attributed to any reliable source, you are also engaging in original research. And indeed, the only citation I see at a cursory glance is to some dialect map from a hundred years ago, implying that the text in the article is not the published position of any modern linguist, but the conclusions that a random Wikipedian has drawn from primary source data. This sort of thing has no place on Wikipedia and really ought to be eliminated on sight. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 08:09, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Please, do so, along with all the other problematic things you've pointed out here. God knows this bloated mass of OR could use a trim. Nicodene (talk) 17:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research / non-neutral point of view 

message: "In all of the above examples, the words appearing in the fourth century Vulgate are the same words as would have been used in Classical Latin of c. 50 BC. It is likely that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech by the time of the Glosses; but if so, they may well have been still widely understood, as there is no recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language.
By the 8th century, the situation was very different."
Something seems wrong here. The passage appears to contrast the 8th century (when the text wasn't understood) with the Glosses (when it was), but the Glosses come from the 8th century. And the Glosses would have been unnecessary if the words really had been still 'widely understood' at the time when the Glosses were written. In that sense, the Glosses themselves are 'recorded evidence that the common people of the time had difficulty understanding the language'. Perhaps what the editor meant was that some of these words had already disappeared from casual speech (but were nevertheless widely understood) by the time of the Vulgate (and not the Glosses)? 62.73.69.121 (talk) 08:53, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  At the time of the Vulgate or the Glosses? 

message: 'Vulgar Latin is believed to already have had most of the shared features that distinguish all Romance languages from Classical Latin. These include the almost complete loss of the Latin grammatical case system and its replacement by prepositions, the loss of the comparative inflections, replacement of some verb paradigms by innovations (e.g. the synthetic future gave way to an originally analytic strategy now typically formed by infinitive + evolved present indicative forms of 'have'), the use of articles, and the initial stages of the palatalization of the plosives /k/, /ɡ/, and /t/.'
This may have been true of (very) late 'Vulgar Latin', but the way it is formulated, it sounds as if it had been true already of lower class speech of classical times (the late Republican and the early Imperial periods), which is decidedly not what 'is believed'. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 09:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Vulgar Latin already had...' 

message: 'During the late 8th century, Charlemagne, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe. Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the Council of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into the rustica romana lingua, an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin.'
I can't check the source, but this seems wrong - someone should check it. The passage implies that until Charlemagne's unfortunate intervention, comprehensibility had been fine and the 'written vernacular' had been the natural, updated, 'corrupt' Vulgar Latin. This is definitely false; there are many preserved texts in Latin from the two or three centuries preceding Charlemagne's reforms (Bede, Jordanes, Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours) and while their language isn't exactly Classical Latin, it does not differ from it so significantly as to change whether they are intelligible or not. If you don't understand Classical Latin, you won't understand them either. They are most certainly not in some kind of Early Romance and a sermon written in their so-called 'Late Latin' would be about as unintelligible to a Romance speaker as one in Classical Latin. Written and official Latin had stopped being 'updated' long before Charlemagne; that was the reason why the 813 edict and the translation of sermons was necessary, not the Carolingian promotion of Classical Latin. Also, Charlemagne couldn't even read, so I suspect the pickiness with respect to varieties of Latin didn't emanate from him personally. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 09:53, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Charlemagne's role 

message: 'The critical period between the 5th–10th centuries AD is poorly documented because little or no writing from the chaotic "Dark Ages" of the 5th–8th centuries has survived, and writing after that time was in consciously classicized Medieval Latin.'
Again, this isn't true. We have a lot of 'Late Latin' texts from that time - Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Gildas, Bede, to take but a few known authors, and there are many anonymous texts as well. And they are all still basically in normal Latin, with only minuscule details distinguishing them from the classical variety - they don't display anything like a natural and gradual transition into Romance. The problem here isn't that there is no surviving writing, the problem is that the written language just didn't reflect the changes taking place in the vernacular. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 10:11, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  No Latin from the 5th–8th centuries 

message: Contrary to what is claimed in the article, Ethnologue publishes no data on Catalan-French similarity. You can go to both of their Ethnologue pages if you don't believe me, but I have gone back through the last 15 editions and found no evidence of the 85% figure ever being published. I believe that it is a mistake originating from someone misreading the identical 85% similarities of Catalan-Spanish and Catalan-Portuguese.
I have just edited the article for Lexical similarity to reflect this fact, but I am hesitant to make any changes here due to the (much neater) distance-matrix layout of the table. However, I strongly recommend that you either update the table with the correct information (and thus restructure appropriately), or remove the Catalan row entirely. 
Multiple websites now tout the 85% figure as being published in Ethnologue, but it is not, so I think it's highly likely that their source is this page. Please update the data appropriately. 131.111.185.176 (talk) 19:38, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vocabulary Comparison: Catalan-French Lexical Similarity. 

message: I noticed that the language trees for Portuguese and Italian, were different than French and Spanish. We list the former pair as belonging to the Latin branch of languages, but we didn't list the latter pair under that branch.
I've gone ahead and made edits to French and Spanish so that their language trees match Portuguese and Italian. There shouldn't be a difference between these languages, right?
Or was the error in the Portuguese and Italian articles, and they were the ones needing an edit?
Either way it's my understanding that the trees for these 4 languages should be identical from the Indo-European through to the Italo-Western branch Jozsefs (talk) 06:22, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistency