History of the Romance Languages

Youtube suggested me a video with History of the Romance Languages. I watched it and liked it. Starting from Proto-Italic it shows on the map the spread of the languages along with a time-line. So much information in so comressed format.

And Verbix conjugates the verbs of much of the Romance languages shown in the video:

Moreover Verbix docs has a lot of information of the other languages mentioned.

See the video here

Cognates

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin.

For instance today’s Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, etc.) all share the same “parent” language, the Latin. And therefore these languages have a lot of cognates.

Starting from October 2019, there are verb cognates on the Verbix website. On the cognate pages you can check out how the Indicative present looks like in different Romance languages.

As can be seen, sometimes the differences are relatively big. And what’s more, sometimes the meaning of the word may have changes.

Italic Peoples 500BC

The Italics were all the peoples who spoke an idiom belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages and had settled in the Italian peninsula.

As seen on the map, the Italic tribes and Italic languages were spoken on a very small area in the beginning. One of the languages, though, was Latin. The Roman conquests eventually spread it throughout the peninsula and beyond in the Roman Empire. The evolved dialects of Latin gave birth to the Romance languages; French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. that are nowadays spoken allover the world.

Links:

 

French Verb Conjugator

See French Verb Conjugator on-line.

After finishing the Spanish verb conjugator, I thought that programming a verb conjugator  for French verbs would be easy and straightforward. This was not exactly the case.

French belongs to the Romance languages, a group of languages that developed from the Latin language. So does Spanish. That’s the reason that verbs are quite similar between these languages; they have the same irregular verbs, the same moods, tenses, and persons, and they have the same kind of verb endings.

Compared with the Spanish language, the French verb conjugation shows less forms. The future tense of the subjunctive mood does not exist. And the subjunctive past has only one form, opposed to Spanish that has two forms for it.

There is one thing, however, that is much harder to program in the French verb conjugation; the compound forms are formed either with être ’to be’ or avoir ’to have’ as the auxiliary verb.  (Spanish always uses haber ’to have’). The correct auxiliary depends on the meaning, and this requires a dictionary.

When I was done with entering the verbs that take être as the auxiliary verb — there are less verbs of this category — in compound tenses, I could release the French verb conjugator.

Links: