Latin contributed vocabulary but it is not the mother tongue of the Romance languages

by Carmen J. Huertas

There is a law of linguistics that says that languages ​​diverge and that excludes any possibility of convergent evolution. If Romance languages ​​derived from Latin as breasts have said, they would separate from each other but maintain a clear linguistic relationship with the mother.

However, that is not what we found. Romance languages ​​resemble each other reaching identical convergent solutions, which instead show a break with Latin.

How do you explain that a mother tongue does not legify its daughters or the morphology, the syntax, the phonetic laws, or the structure and order of the constituents of the sentence and also that the declinations, the deponent verbs are lost, the connectors....?

This convergence of romances can only be understood if the relationship is prior to the so-called romanization. They would therefore be languages ​​derived from a common mother tongue from which Latin also drank, through Etruscan and the Sabbath languages ​​that were already in the territory before the arrival of the Romans.

When at the beginning of the 7th century B.C. The influence of Rome went beyond the region of Lazio, the Italian peninsula was occupied by two large flourishing cultures: the Etruscan in the north and the Greek in the south.

Different peoples were divided into groups: those who spoke Latin-Faliscan languages, north of the city of Rome and in the central region of Lazio; Osco-Umbras or Sabélicas, spoken in most of the Italian peninsula, and the Tyrannical language better known as Etruscan, spoken in Tuscany.

Greek was also spoken. If we place the extent of these languages ​​on a map, we will see that Latin expansion was minimal.

Where did this language come from so unrelated to those of its neighbors? Latinos were getas, a tribe of Dacians from the Danube area. When Rome subdued all populations in their conquest campaigns, their contingents spoke Sabbath-speaking languages ​​of the Osco-Umbrian trunk. In addition, in the case of the Punic Wars, the Roman armies employed citizens of Hispania, who cannot be considered active agents of Romanization.

Therefore, that Latin was the official language of the empire does not mean that all Romans spoke Latin, much less that they imposed their language on us.

In fact, except for the patricians, the Romans had to study to speak Latin correctly. When we analyze languages ​​synchronously, we observe territorial continuity with transit zones and linguistic isoglosses that act as borders.

By studying diachronically the linguistic change, we can appreciate that the internal changes of a language are slow or very slow; they do not occur in centuries, but in millennia. We have clear examples with Spanish and American English that, after 500 years, remain English and Spanish. In no case have tongues been deformed nor have they been syntactically unstructured; they maintain their grammar rules even though they may suffer a significant lexical transfer. For centuries, Latin was considered the language of culture.

It was only written in Latin. Its prestige was so great that new words were created from Latin or Greek, leaving aside the method of composition, so productive, with which our languages ​​allow us to create as many terms as we need. However, if we carry out a deeper analysis, we realize that many of the ethics used to demonstrate the Latin origin of the words of the Romance languages ​​can explain better from our knowledge of Iberian than from Latin.

To begin with, the compositional elements that in the romances are dismantled, acquire meaning if they are compared with the Iberian cognates. But even its supposed etymological evolution falls apart if we take into account the characteristics of Iberian phonetics.

To give an example, the palatalization that is explained as a correlation of changes that have occurred over three hundred years due to the influence of iod (which assumes a Celtic influence) can be explained simply from the Iberian. Because precisely the / i /, the anterior palatal vowel, is the most present vowel in Iberian.

This would demonstrate that more than 50% of the linguistic change that until now has been attributed to an external influence, could have its origin in Iberian speech. Another interesting case is that of the formation of fricatives. Since the sound fricative / Z / did not exist in Latin, its appearance is justified by saying that it was formed from the deaf / S / in contact with the glide yod. Well, it is clear that the Iberian texts clearly represent two different sibilant fricatives, considered S and Z respectively. There are also two different rhythms in Iberian, one single / R / and one double / RR /. Undoubtedly the most difficult to explain is the appearance of African sounds and the same happens with the rest of the phonetic inventory. Where do these joints, present in all Romance languages, but nonexistent in Latin? If the theme of phonetics shows an abyss between Latin and its supposed daughters, the morphology and syntax are not the same as those of the supposed mother tongue.

The grammatical cases and the links that establish the syntactic correlations disappear; the preferential use of peripheral constructions is established over analytical ones; the passive voice decreases; there are no deponent verbs; non-personal verbal forms are reduced; there are no absolute ablative sentences or infinitive sentences; the paradigm of non-lexical categories is expanded: prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions; and last but not least, there is a radical change in the order of the constituents of the sentence and in the structure of interrogative and negative sentences ...

In historical grammar, an attempt is made to justify the enormous distance that separates Latin from Romance languages, speaking of vulgarization, of a setback that led to parataxis, that is, it returned to the primitive stage of using nonverbal language, gestures, to understand each other. beyond a language that only used simple sentences or elementary composition by coordination. There is not a single society on the entire planet earth that does not have a perfectly structured language, because as generative grammar demonstrates, language is an intrinsic part of the human race, it only serves for communication, it is the basis of abstract thinking! We are born genetically prepared to speak! The reality is that linguists cannot explain this structural change between Latin and Romance. And what is even more difficult, in this supposed state of confusion, speakers from regions as far away as Galicia and Romania, who were never in touch with the fall of the Empire, came to identical solutions.

Chance? Our current languages ​​share many words; This affinity would not respond so much to Latinization but to a common lexicon that would go back thousands of years. The differences would be the result of the slow natural evolution from an older mother tongue and shared by the different Mediterranean peoples.

Given this situation, we should pay more attention to the more than two thousand epigraphic texts that Iberian culture has left us.

We should ask ourselves how it is possible that, in the 21st century, his writing will continue without deciphering.

Why it is still explained in the schools that were the Roman conquerors who contributed culture and civilization. Why it is not known the high level of indigenous culture that has commercialized since ancient times with other Mediterranean peoples: Minoan, Mycenaean, Hellenic, Phoenician.

And in linguistics, why a complicated theoretical framework of phonetic evolution that ignores the characteristics of the Iberian is still used.

The multiple questions posed by this work should help us rethink current philological studies. The Iberian language is our great hope to advance in the understanding of our own roots.
Reference:
https://www.academia.edu/5855719/No_venimos_del_lat%C3%ADn_resumen