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
