Talk:Romance languages

Content to remove

While a lot of the "Classification" section should be transferred to the corresponding main article, and most of "Sound Changes" should also go in a separate article, there's a lot of content on this page that I think should be removed entirely because it's either totally unsourced (and possibly misleading) or totally irrelevant to this article's scope. I don't want to start deleting things en masse, and I can see reasonable arguments being made in favor of keeping some of these things, so I'll just make a list here of everything I think should be purged from the article:

• the "Samples" section - Totally unsourced, might not be entirely relevant for this article, possible that one or two of the smaller languages have really unnatural or inaccurate translations (who would know since it isn't sourced), and the "Vulgar Latin" example seems really reconstructed-y
• Within "Classification":
  • Within "Proposed Divisions"
    • The giant table showing verb conjugations in different languages, supposedly ordered from conservative to innovative - unsourced which leaves the door open to possible errors, not very relevant for a classification of the Romance langs, selection of languages may be questionable, the relative ordering of languages in relation to each other as more/less innovatory may also be questionable and seems OR-y. Selection of verb conjugations is arbitrary, and the table falsely presents each language's verb forms as largely mapping onto the others' one-to-one
    • The "conservative" vs "innovatory" bullet point - neither of its sources actually establish conservative vs innovatory as a widely-used way of classifying different Romance languages (sorry, Dante!)
    • Three consecutive paragraphs beginning with "The usual solution to these issues...", "Probably a more accurate description..." and "This would explain why some of the "northwest" features..." - unreferenced and misleading
    • " Outcome of stressed Classical Latin vowels in dialects of southern Italy, Sardinia and Corsica" - It's likely that all the info in that table is accurate and that it's compiled from one or more good sources - but the question marks on the reflexes for Latin /au/ and the parentheses and the lack of citations make me inclined to delete it
    • Gallo-Romance languages - not particularly relevant for a very high-level classification of Romance dialects, and uncited
  • Conlangs - Not sure how they're relevant to this page
• "Writing systems" - "Romance orthographies" actually is a coherent topic (which surprised me - Encyclopedia Britannica article does include a section on orthographies, and the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages has a chapter on writing systems as well) - but this section doesn't need to be as long as it currently is - it certainly doesn't need to include every consonant digraph and trigraph
• Vocabulary comparison - the big table feels OR-y, while the lexical similarity table could be moved to the "classification" page

My current mood is that we should delete first and, if citations show that certain content actually should be included, restore later. I'd appreciate any feedback. Erinius (talk) 23:42, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

This seems reasonable; I've a few questions, as I feel the Latin pages are suffering from similar problems of focus / bloat.

• does WP have a guide or a good model by example of how a language topic should be constructed?
  • or are there other examples; for instance, what topics does Britannica cover in its Romance languages article?
• is it possible to spin sub-pages off for any of this where the content is decent, eg "writing systems"?

In general, these pages seem to fill with changes to linguistic patterns, and other quite technical information, which may interest someone with a deeper interest in linguistics, while the page contents tend to lack thematic discussions or other information which would engage someone whose interest was more general, I would say. Jim Killock (talk) 06:47, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Super pressed for time just now, but I'm chiming in -- I hope it's clear in a collegial spirit -- to urge restraint in executing bold deletions and other sweeping changes. Issues in no specific order...

Samples. Such a list seems very useful in that most readers probably have no idea of the variegated richness of Romance, find themselves stuck at national languages with maybe Catalan and a couple of others tossed in. The sample list also makes it clear that the little list under Languages is the iceberg's tip only, not exhaustive and not intended to be (notwithstanding the unfortunate Dalby input). Agreed that the list is bloated in terms of variants in subgroups. Emilian, Ladin, Lombard, for example; one will do, readers can turn to specific articles for detail. The main issue in Samples is attribution. That does need resolution, which a concerted effort should be able to reach. ("Vulgar Latin" is pretty much by definition a reconstruction; there's no real need to have it in the list, though.)

Writing systems. This is pretty well done, though running text can be made a good bit more concise. Seems to me the question is whether to edit carefully or just present a summary paragraph of high points in this article, and move the detail to an article "Romance language writing systems".

Vocabulary comparison. Not just sound shifts, but also lexical selection, and, like Samples, surely informative for the neophyte. A bit of a mess as it is, though. Especially for that readership who can't correct as they read (no, Italian 'man' is not phonetically [ˈwɔmo], but [ˈwɔːmo]), it needs a lot of cleaning up for inconsistencies and inaccuracies in IPA -- though presented as phonetic, many entries look phonemic, or partially one, partially the other. And then there's French, all phonemic, yet said to represent pronunciation. OR doesn't seem to me an issue, as they're all basic dictionary entries easily available to one and all. Definitely check suspect entries for accuracy, though: e.g. is Sicilian 'water' really [ˈakːua], with [u]?

Classification. If the main article were a good bit fleshed out, I'd say sure, just a paragraph or two here, with a see... the main article. But the main article is still far from containing even the (à mon avis, useful) Extent of variation table and much else that's informative that is present in this Romance article.

Basta. Must run. Once again, I'm just urging let's take it easy. Babies and bathwater sort of thing. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:34, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Maybe the first issue is actually the content order. The sections run in an odd order. The most helpful parts are probably "modern status" and "history" which are in the second half of the running order; "name" and "Languages" are also introductory, while "samples" is to my mind background information. I would also give these sections more helpful titles, eg:

1. The Romance Language family [combine 'name' and 'languages']
2. Romance languages today
3. History

On 'classification of Romance languages', move this to a separate article and add a simmar to part 1 above

Then look at the rest of the page and work out if it needs slimming down / separating out Jim Killock (talk) 18:51, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies! I won't go ahead with any big deletions. Erinius (talk) 22:54, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

I completely agree. It is very odd to find the History chapter for example mid-way trough the article. Aristeus01 (talk) 12:39, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

The majority of the content in Classification section has now been moved to the main article. There are still a lot of improvements needed but all the content that should be kept in Romance languages was saved/moved to the appropriate section and the further remaining changes to be made (such as citing the elements of the big table) can be done on the respective page. This page's history has suffered enough for it. Aristeus01 (talk) 16:32, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Representation of Classical Latin–Vulgar Latin split in infobox?

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)

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)

@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)

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)

@Jameel the Saluki: 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)

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)

@Jameel the Saluki: 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)

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)

@Erinius: 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)

Original research / non-neutral point of view

'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)

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)

At the time of the Vulgate or the Glosses?

"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)

'Vulgar Latin already had...'

'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)

Charlemagne's role

'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)

No Latin from the 5th–8th centuries

'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)

Vocabulary Comparison: Catalan-French Lexical Similarity.

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)

Inconsistency

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)

Map Updates

The map: File:Map-Romance Language World.png needs to be updated.

It is incredibly incorrect across the board.

To name a few things:

1. The top of Brazil is missing
2. Equatorial Guinea is not majority native Spanish speaking.
3. French is not the official language many west african states now.
4. French is not spoken in Syria.
5. The top islands of Canada are missing.

IntelloFR (talk) 15:42, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

@Tonyandrew19 - could you confirm why you removed the previous map and put the old one back?

I don't mind using a different map, but the one currently on the page is incorrect. IntelloFR (talk) 15:47, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

it’s been used several times by other admins I spoke to and others alike that told me the same things that u raised but I think it’s a better map with Tonyandrew19 (talk) 16:00, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

ok. I don't feel good about putting a map out there that has wrong information, would you be able to update it? IntelloFR (talk) 16:39, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

let's stop just validating colonial spread of language

by colonial, we mean macabre settler colonialism as happened in the americas, in this particular case. not necessarily roman, or equivalent, colonialism, which didn't center on human rights violations towards natives.. 12.146.12.2 (talk) 17:09, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Please be specific re which strings of text validate colonial spread of Romance languages, and what validation consists of -- i.e. suggestions for non-validating text. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:30, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Having reviewed the various occurrences of “colonies” and “colonial” in this article, I can't say that I have found any that frame it in either a positive or a negative light. Nicodene (talk) 20:35, 17 August 2024 (UTC)