Romance Languages

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

a general name for those modern languages that are the immediate descendants of the language of ancient Rome. In those parts of the empire in which the Roman dominion and civil institutions had been most completely established the native languages were speedily and completely supplanted by that of the conquerorsthe Latin. This was the case in Italy itself, in the Spanish peninsula, in Gaul or France, including parts of Switzerland, and in Dacia. When the Roman empire was broken up by the irruptions of the Northern nations (in the 5th and 6th centuries) the intruding tribes stood to the Romanized inhabitants in the relation of a ruling caste to a subject population. The dominant Germans continued, where established, for several centuries to use their native tongue among themselves; but from the first they seem to have acknowledged the supremacy of the Latin for civil and ecclesiastical purposes, and at last the language of the rulers was merged in that of their subjects; not, however, without leaving decided traces of the struggle traces chiefly visible in the intrusion of numerous German words, and in the mutilation of the grammatical forms or inflections of the ancient Latin, and the substitution therefor of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. It is also to be borne in mind that the language which underwent this change was not the classical Latin of literature, but a popular Roman language (lingua Romana rustica) which had been used by the side of the classical, and differed from it-not to the extent of being radically and grammatically another tongue - but chiefly by slovenly pronunciation, forms, and the use of "low" and unusual words and idioms. As distinguished from the old lingua Latina, the language of the Church, the school, and the law, this newly formed language of ordinary intercourse, in its various dialects, was known from about the 8th century as the lingua Romana; and from this name, through the adverb Romanicé, came the term romance, applied both to the language and to the popular poetry written in it, more especially to the dialect and poems of the troubadours. The Romance languages recognized by Diez are six-Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Provençal, French, and Rumanian. Ascoli and newer investigators treat the Romansch of the Grisons as a seventh sister-tongue; and each of these have more or less numerous dialects. The original Latin spoken in the several provinces of the Roman empire must have had very different degrees of purity, and the corruption in one region must have differed from those in another according to the nature of the superseded tongues. To these differences in the fundamental Latin must be added those of the superadded German element, consisting chiefly in the variety of dialects spoken by the invading nations and the different proportions of the conquering population to the conquered. French, as was to be expected, is richer in German words than any other member of the family, having 450 not found in the others. Italian is next to French in this respect, but on the whole is nearest to the mother Latin. Spanish and Portuguese have considerable Arabic elements; and Rumanian was much modified by Slavic. The Romance tongues further differ from the common parent in other details. The six great Romance tongues and their literatures are treated in the articles on Italy, Spain, Portugal, Provençal, France, and Rumania, to which may be added the Romansch.