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It seems that a frequent urban myth is that Romanian is the closest living language to Latin. This myth is especially promoted by Romanians.
However, these claims cannot be further from the truth, since the only criteria where Romanian would qualify is in terms of grammar. In other aspects such as phonology, vocabulary, discourse, and intonation, Italian trounces Romanian in being the closest to Latin, since Romanian is heavily influenced by Slavic languages.
According to linguist Mario Pei, he used all of these criteria to determine the closest living language to Latin, and came up with this scorecard (lower percentages indicate less deviation from Latin):
Sardinian - 8%
Italian - 12%
Spanish - 20%
Romanian - 23.5%
Occitan - 25%
Portuguese - 31%
French - 44%
Out of the major Romance languages, Italian is the closest to Latin and has about half the deviation from Latin that Romanian does. The closest to Latin overall is Sardinian.
So, why is the myth of Romanian being the closest living language to Latin so heavily promoted?
I haven't heard the "myth" in a long time, but I know that Romanian has retained Latin style declensions while no other Romance language has. That makes Romanian grammatically very close to Latin and it also means that when one speaks Romanian they are following speech patterns and inflections that are most similar to Latin; at least as far as I understand it. There are also a handful of original Latin derived words that are preserved in Romanian that are not evident in other Romance languages. However, when it comes to vocabulary, the most similar is, as you said, Italian and/or Sardinian.
So, which is "most similar" would seem to come down to what we are measuring it against. There are certainly "Latin uniquenesses" present in Romanian, but while that perhaps makes it "special" it doesn't necessarily make it "most similar" as you have pointed out.
Just curious, why is this something you're passionate about?
Just curious, why is this something you're passionate about?
I love debunking myths is all. Mario Pei's scores are a composite evaluation using all criteria. I don't know how much weight he gave to each criteria, however, his scorecard seems to not show any bias.
Never heard this before, much less heavily promoted.
I've always heard it too. I think one time I heard it from a Romanian. I know nothing about their language but I loved studying Latin in high school (eons ago).
The reason the myth worked and got circulated was because most people did not know that Romanian was a Latin-root language, so the myth was simply used as an exaggerated form of "Did you know Romanian evolved from Latin?" It seems that the only people who knew that Romanian was Latin-based were the Romanians, so they get blamed for the myth.
The reason the myth worked and got circulated was because most people did not know that Romanian was a Latin-root language, so the myth was simply used as an exaggerated form of "Did you know Romanian evolved from Latin?" It seems that the only people who knew that Romanian was Latin-based were the Romanians, so they get blamed for the myth.
This explanation makes the most sense to me. Romanian is sometimes called the forgotten Romance language.
Something similar happened in Appalachia near the end of the 19th century. It became popular to say that Appalachian English was the closest living dialect to Shakespearean English. It isn't really accurate either, but Appalachian English has some old forms.
Shakespearean English is closely associated with "received pronunciation" in many people's mind. That is categorically false as RP developed long after Shakespeare. It is just one of those easy mistakes as people think of both Shakespeare and RP as "high class".
The pronunciation of English when Shakespeare was alive is called "Original Pronunciation" which has to be inferred from spelling. Actually Shakespeare's rhymes are a good indicator, because many of them don't rhyme in modern English (British or American). So we can assume they rhymed 400 years ago.
I love debunking myths is all. Mario Pei's scores are a composite evaluation using all criteria. I don't know how much weight he gave to each criteria, however, his scorecard seems to not show any bias.
Fair enough. I had heard it stated before, but never considered it something pervasive that many people believed to be true.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jtur88
The reason the myth worked and got circulated was because most people did not know that Romanian was a Latin-root language, so the myth was simply used as an exaggerated form of "Did you know Romanian evolved from Latin?" It seems that the only people who knew that Romanian was Latin-based were the Romanians, so they get blamed for the myth.
Makes sense. It may have something to do with the whole "Roman" in Romanian thing as well.
Furthermore, it is not justified to assert that something that is widely held is absolutely not true, merely because one authority (in this case, Mario Pei) expressed a different opinion based on a metric that cannot be empirically shown to be any more accurate or authoritative than any others.
It may well be true that in very general terms, Romanian is closer to Latin than any other language, if the subjective criteria are not those selected by Dr. Pei in his analysis. Linguistics is not an exact science, and the definition of "close" is never fully agreed upon by lingusts.
Furthermore, Pei compares the modern languages only with Classical Latin, which was not the spoken Latin that would have influenced the modern languages of farflung parts of the Roman Empire. It is quite possible that modern Romanians would have no trouble understanding the Vulgar Latin that was spoken by common people of the Roman Empire. We do not know because little is known of Vulgar Latin.
The Romanians were isolated from the rest of Late Latin speakers, so their language was not subject to the influences of evolving Italian, French or Spanish. So it is very possible that Romanian went through less evolutionary change than the other Romance languages.
The OP expresses the opinion of one linguist among many, and that opinion does not set the matter to rest. Pei's chart first appeared more than 60 years ago, and is widely quoted, but it pretends to have an exactness that is not borne out by the nature of linguistics, which cannot be measured down to a fraction of a percent, and he would be the first to tell you that.
Furthermore, it is not justified to assert that something that is widely held is absolutely not true, merely because one authority (in this case, Mario Pei) expressed a different opinion based on a metric that cannot be empirically shown to be any more accurate or authoritative than any others.
It may well be true that in very general terms, Romanian is closer to Latin than any other language, if the subjective criteria are not those selected by Dr. Pei in his analysis. Linguistics is not an exact science, and the definition of "close" is never fully agreed upon by lingusts.
The OP expresses the opinion of one linguist among many, and that opinion does not set the matter to rest.
Very true. Linguistics is something I am not versed in at all. I had, however, heard the "Romanian is closest to Latin" thing. Doing a little web searching it turned up that it is a rather ranging debate and very dependent on exactly how you want to measure it. A linguistics forum had a rather lengthy debate on the topic and seemed to come to the conclusion that I stated in my first response...
Italian/Sardinian is closest in terms of vocabulary and some phrases are nearly identical.
Romanian is closest in terms of grammar and is the only one that uses Latin declensions which means that spoken Romanian is closest to how Latin would have sounded when being spoken. Romanian also has a handful of Latin words that are simply not used in any form in other languages.
Ultimately though, I think a large part of the debate is that people simply don't really know what Latin is supposed to sound like and how it was really spoken. What we have are basically educated guesses. The only modern extensive use of Latin (beyond medical, scientific and legal terms) is in the Catholic Church. Even there it is not considered to be actually Latin, but a derivative of "High Latin" known as "Ecclesiastical Latin". "Church Latin" is what people are taught in school if they take Latin. The romance languages descended from "Vulgar Latin" and that is what the people of Rome would have spoken. Chances are if we took someone fluent in modern "Church Latin" and transported them back to ancient Rome, they most likely wouldn't be able to converse with anyone or at the very least they would sound incredibly strange to people.
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