Re: [OT] Close to latin

From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-unicode@algonet.se)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 17:17:38 EST


Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr> writes:
> I do not know anything about Sardinian,

Sard is quite conservative in places. I'm not very good at it either,
but one tidbit is particularly intriguing: Sard retains [k] before
front vowels in difference to all other Romance languages where
Latin /k/ has been palatalized in this position.

> and I am not sure about what you are talking about when you write
> Roumanian (is it Romanian, i.e. the national language of Romania?).

My school dictionary gives it as "Ro(u)manian", I tend to stick with
both. A search on AltaVista gives 141.271 hits for "Romanian", 12.919
for "Rumanian" and 2.623 for "Roumania". When I'm really naughty I
spell the country "Romînia" in Roumanian.

> Also I am not a linguist, so I easily can be wrong. However I would like
> to add that:
> - Romanian, for obvious geographical reasons, has been highly influenced
> by non-Italic languages;

Indeed, there are a bunch of Slavic loans. My first night in Roumania,
in the small town of Segesvár, a young approaches me and says something,
and I show hear my watch so can see what time it is. Not until after
it occurred to me "I wasn't supposed to understand that!". The magic
word was "ceas" - which I understood from my tiny knowledge of Polish
and Russian.

--
Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se



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