Re: OT: Semi-OT: Romance Comparisons

Jonathan Beagley wrote:

 I would
> definately like to do French, Spanish, and Rumanian, as I know French,
> Spanish is widely spoken (especially in this area), and Rumanian is
> fairly different and yet fairly accessible as well. I am thinking about
> adding another language or two to the list, such as Catalan or Occitan,
> but I'm not sure.
Those two are interesting but basically aren't all that different from
French and Spanish-- "Western Romance".  Oddly enough, Italian seems to
subgroup better with "Eastern Romance" as exemplified by Romanian.  Cybalist
(a Yahoo group) has had a LOT of discussion, some of it slightly wacked out,
on developments in Romanian, with glances at mutual influences with Albanian
via "Proto-Balkan-Romance" interesting but speculative.
>
> I have also decided to put a comparison chart of the numbers in the
> different languages and also the perfect tense. Is it true that, as I
> have read somewhere, that all the Romance languages threw out the Latin
> past and perfect tenses and made new ones?
Well, the imperfect indicative is continued in recognizable form; the Latin
perfect becomes the preterite (moribund in spoken French); it survives in
Romanian, but I'm not sure whether as a perfect or a preterite; the Latin
pluperfect indicative (e.g. amaveram, dixeram) survives only in Spanish (and
Port.?, I'm not sure) as the -ra subjunctive (amara, dijera).  The Latin
pluperfect subjunctive (e.g. amavissem, dixissem) survives as the past
subjunctive in Span, Fr., Ital -- I don't know about Romanian


I know that the French past
> and perfect tenses aren't anything like the Latin ones, but is this true
> with all the other Romance languages?
Same in Spanish, Italian and I assume Romanian-- reflexes of _habe:re_ plus
the past ppl.  At least Ital. and Fr. (not Span.) use reflexes of _esse_
plus past ppl. for some intransitives.  There was a useful post here just
recently from Ray Brown on the development of the habere + ppl.
construction.

>
> Also, are there any books you would recommend which would have
> information on this topic? I suspect that the local college library will
> have some linguistics books (they even had /Historical Linguistics/ by
> Theodora Bynon, but it was in Spanish).
W. D. Elcock, The Romance Languages.  Faber (ca. 1960)
Rebecca Posner, The Romance Languages.  ???? much more recent.

Good Luck with the project, it sounds like fun. (Something only a linguist
would say, I guess :-))  )