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:

 

New York, Maps, Languages

I visited New York a month ago or so.

New York City is home to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.
New York City is home to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.

What’s amazing is that your hear so many languages and people from different parts of the world there.

Not only are there tourists coming from all over the world, but a lot of people have found their home there. New York City is home, for instance, to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.

I took the photo at the right in Chinatown, where you could hardly see any text in English.

While Chinatown is in the South-East of Manhattan Island, the largest concentration of Hispanics is in the north, as seen on the map.

Hispanic people in Manhattan Links:

Portuguese Verb Conjugation

After the spring in Spain in 1995, I attended classes in Portuguese. I felt that Portuguese shouldn’t be too hard to learn, because it’s closely related to Spanish. I was wrong. Portuguese is much harder than Spanish – and in this I mean the pronunciation. As people say that written and spoken French are different languages, this could also apply to Portuguese. 

I learnt the Portuguese as spoken In Portugal and I would say it’s harder to learn than French.

The verbs in Portuguese, however, are pretty close to the Spanish ones. The infinitives are pretty much identical with the corresponding verbs in Spanish. There are some differences, though:

  • Second person plural is not used (in Portugal)
  • Compound tenses are not used
  • “Synthetic pluperfect”, i.e., pluperfect is formed without auxiliary (like in Spanish and English)
  • Conjugated infinitive

Somehow I felt that Portuguese preserves more verbal forms than any other Romance language – Romance languages are those that derived from Latin. The conjugated or inflected infinitive is something specific for Portuguese only.

I attended elementary Portuguese classes in one year only. But after that, guess what? I bought myself the first Portuguese verb conjugation book to master the Portuguese verbs.

Links: