Major myth debunked: The Romance languages DO NOT come from Latin (comment on a video by Carme Jimenez Huertas)

Hah! I feel so vindicated. Vindicated is not exactly the right word, but something that is partially quite vindicated, mixed with happy, and utterly delighted with my discovery of this amazing interview on youtube.

Unfortunately, if you can’t understand Spanish, you’ll miss out on it.

I’m not a linguist, so I don’t know how “traditional” linguists would respond to all the points Carme Jiménez Huertas*, philologist specialized in linguistics, makes.

The fact is she has answered a most fundamental question I had which had popped up in my mind as soon as I started learning a bit of Latin.

Something unexplainable starkly stood out to me. Something did not make sense at all: the syntax of the Romance languages in many fundamental ways does not match Latin AT ALL, BUT it is very similar across all Romance languages. Obviously, this blows a hole the size of a crater in the theory that says that Romance languages are DERIVED from Latin. They cannot be, simply cannot be.

And here it is beautifully explained why, along with so many other interesting linguistics points.

Basically, there was a Western European language that is the mother of all Romance languages which was spoken all across the region. With the Roman conquest, Latin permeated and intervened in this older maternal Romance language, but it obviously was NOT Latin that was the matrix! This older Romance language is the mother of all Romance languages, not Latin! This older Romance language was spoken all across Western Europe before Latin arrived on the scene, already forming all kinds of regional variations over time. Latin came and shaped all these already existing variations of this older Romance language, but it did not generate them from its “scratch” Latin base (including from Vulgar Latin!). The “vulgarization” theory is ridiculous. That’s exactly what I thought as well.

I have to ask people studying linguistics now if academics are still going around saying that Latin is the mother of Romance languages or if this very old and entrenched myth has begun to be discarded on the face of pure logic and more recent research.

Loved it! Note the points she makes from about min. 34 to 50: The key question when comparing the fundamental syntax of a language, regarding its main components, plus comparisons with key and root vocabulary, plus the fact that Latin sits in between the Romance languages and German.

And very interestingly, and with which I totally agree, is the question of time. There was not sufficient time for so much fundamental syntactic change, as the (stupid) theory of Latin being the matrix of Romance languages claims. 400 years is NOTHING – as she so keenly and wonderfully points out. This was one of my questions as well! Hah! I feel so vindicated. For a language’s syntax to change on the level of such fundamental syntactic mechanisms, it takes thousands of years, not a few hundred. This is perfectly true!

So cool. Sorry, but I don’t feel like transcribing and translating to English everything she says.

p.s. And the question of what language  all the varied and highly diverse Roman troops spoke is also very interesting. All the foreigners in the Roman armies probably had learned, at a minimum, some basic Latin to function, but otherwise, as she says, they spoke their own language of origin. That’s my guess without more info at the moment. Some questions remain for me also about the written form of this older language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPI_Y4hdIaU
Reproduced from:
https://alessandrareflections.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/major-myth-debunked-the-romance-languages-do-not-come-from-latin/