Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE LATIN
- PART TWO THE ROMANCE VOCABULARY
- 7 The Lexicon in General; Shifts in the Meaning of Words
- 8 Changes in the Form of Words
- 9 When Words Collide
- 10 Immigrants
- PART THREE PROTO-ROMANCE, OR WHAT THE LANGUAGES SHARE
- PART FOUR EARLIEST TEXTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, OR WHERE THE LANGUAGES DIVERGE
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of English Words
7 - The Lexicon in General; Shifts in the Meaning of Words
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE LATIN
- PART TWO THE ROMANCE VOCABULARY
- 7 The Lexicon in General; Shifts in the Meaning of Words
- 8 Changes in the Form of Words
- 9 When Words Collide
- 10 Immigrants
- PART THREE PROTO-ROMANCE, OR WHAT THE LANGUAGES SHARE
- PART FOUR EARLIEST TEXTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, OR WHERE THE LANGUAGES DIVERGE
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of English Words
Summary
OVER-ALL SHAPE OF THE LEXICON
For the moment, the curtain is rung down on the developing grammar and sounds of Vulgar Latin; when it rises again, the spotlight will be on Proto-Romance. In the meantime, while the action takes place off stage – which is to say, the period when many changes go virtually undocumented – we have the opportunity to examine the vocabulary of the Romance languages, its sources and subsequent alterations.
The great bulk of the vocabulary in our three Romance languages is inherited from Latin or based on Latin. Many of the common, workaday words come from Latin: et “and” > French et, Italian e, Spanish y; de “of; from” > French, Spanish de, Italian di; quando “when” > Italian quando, Spanish cuando, French quand. Other languages also contributed words, to be sure. In the earlier centuries, they entered Latin first, which received and then passed them on: carrum “wagon” from Celtic, or episcopum “bishop” from Greek. Later they seem to have been taken into the Romance languages directly and independently: Germanic *werra “war” > Italian, Spanish guerra, French guerre, and Arabic súkkar “sugar” > French sucre, Italian zucchero, Spanish azucar. Nonetheless, it remains true that Latin bequeathed the vast majority of the words to the Romance languages.
To dramatize this fact, when studying the Romance lexicon with my classes, I have sometimes assigned them a tricky exercise.
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- Latin AliveThe Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages, pp. 127 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010