Phonological Variation and Change in Romanian

Author(s):  
Ioana Chitoran

Romanian stands out from its sister Romance languages through the conditions of its historical evolution. It has developed in isolation from the other Romance languages, and in cultural and linguistic contact with various non-Romance populations. The history of writing in Romanian, and the earliest preserved texts, dating from the 16th century, also reflect this rather unique heritage. The main dialectal division is marked geographically by the Danube river. The variety developed north of the Danube forms the Daco-Romanian group, while the variety developed south of the Danube includes Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian. The most characteristic changes affecting consonants in the development of Romanian include several patterns of palatalization (with or without affrication, depending on the segments’ place and manner of articulation), the emergence of labial-coronal clusters as part of a more general preference for labials, and rhotacism, a major feature of nonstandard varieties. Major vocalic changes include patterns of diphthongization, vowel raising before nasals and in the context of trills, which led to the development of two phonemic central vowels, /ɨ/ and /ʌ/. Many of these patterns show variation among different varieties. In all varieties of Romanian, vowel alternations are involved in morpho-phonological alternations. The stress pattern of modern Romanian follows the stress pattern of Balkan Romance. The standard and nonstandard varieties differ with respect to their intonation patterns, particularly in the case of yes/no questions.

Author(s):  
Loredana Stănică ◽  

Published in 1993, the novel Bois rouge by Jean-Marie Touratier brings to life the history of the short-lived French colony of Brazil, the Antarctic France, whose existence, reduced to only five years (1555-1560), was described in the travelogues written in the 16th century by André Thevet (Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique - The New Found World, or Antarctike) and Jean de Léry (Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil – History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil). Beneath the appearance of a simple story told by an ironic voice, sometimes even satirical towards the military leader of the French colony, the Knight of Malta Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon and his chaplain, André Thevet, future cosmographer of the kings of France, the novel delves into issues of great complexity, such as (the issue of) identity and the relationship to the Other (the American “savage”).


Languages ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen

In this paper we will describe the historical development of the Spanish doublet ante-antes (‘before’) and explore the question whether a process of exaptation is involved (cf. Lass 1990). We will argue that the final –s of antes, that originally marked the adverbial status of the word, in the course of time had become a kind of morphological ‘junk’ (cf. Lass 1990) and, subsequently, could be exploited in order to encode the semantic opposition between temporal meaning on the one hand, and adversative meaning on the other hand. However, based on quantitative data we will show that the incipient semantic redistribution over the course of the 16th century rather suddenly collapsed, leading to a differentiation between the prepositional ante and adverbial antes.


Author(s):  
Daniel Recasens

Major dialect-dependent differences in articulatory fronting and strengthening for the front lingual affricate and fricative outcomes of Latin sequences composed of /t, d, k, g/ and a following front vocalic segment in the Romance languages may be accounted for assuming that those outcomes were issued from (alveolo)palatal or palatalized stop realizations exhibiting variable closure fronting degrees. The place and manner of articulation characteristics of the front lingual affricate and fricative outcomes in question depend on several aspects about the Latin stop sequences: stop closure location and voicing status, whether the vocalic segment was a vowel or a glide, and word position. While differences in fronting and strengthening associated with etymological stop voicing occur in both Eastern and Western Romance, those related to the other factors hold mostly in Western Romance and especially in Raetoromance. Several diachronic pathways are difficult to interpret; thus, in early times, [c] derived from Latin /ki,e/ and /kj/ may have been more anterior in Western Romance than in Eastern Romance, or else the initial outcome [tʃ] of the affrication process stayed palatoalveolar in the latter domain and fronted to [ts] in the former. Gestural blending accounts not only for the realizations [c, ɟ] of /t, d, k, g/ before a front vocalic segment but also for the alveolopalatal and palatoalveolar end products of the Latin sequences /kt/ ([c]), /nj/ ([ɲ]), /lj, kl/ ([ʎ]) and /sj, ks/ ([ʃ]).


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
José Luis Girón Alconchel

Summary This article is intended as a contribution to the history of Spanish grammar of the 16th and 17th centures. It has two parts. In the first the author places grammar studies within the framework of Spanish linguistics of the Renaissance; in the second, he delineates their evolution with reference to Latin grammar and the teaching Spanish as a foreign language. It is well known that nationalism and the intention to establish the literary foundations of the language are the most important agents of grammatical studies during the Renaissance; yet, attention must also be paid to the rupture of medieval Latin-Romance bilingualism, to the new intellectual paradigm in which rhetorics substitutes for syllogism, and to the influence of Erasmus. The grammar of the troubadours and Latin grammar – medieval and humanist – evoke an interest in developing grammars of Romance languages; it made the appearance of Nebrija possible. In his grammar of Spanish we may stress its capacity to be a grammar for foreigners and the value of this document for the history of Spanish. Spanish grammar writing of the 16th century is dominated by Nebrija; is strong presence is evident with the critical reception Villalon and Valdes give to his work. In the 17th century the work of Sanctius initiates a rationalism which favours pedagogical methodology and linguistic nationalism. Jimenez Paton, Correas and Caramuel are the most important authors of that period. With an exemplary linguistic realism Correas applies Sanctius’ theory of the elipsis to Spanish, and he recognizes the singularity of Spanish grammar in contrast to that of Latin. The grammars written for foreigners in the 17th century are at the height of inductive methodology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 67-98
Author(s):  
Alexey Popovich

The article explores changes in the use of the categories of victim and sacrifice in political literary artefacts in the second half of the 16th century: namely, the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky and Kurbsky’s History of the Grand Prince of Moscow. The study shows that the writers of this time used the literary topoi of victim in a fundamentally different way to earlier authors in medieval Russia. The article defines the main means of poetics and rhetoric in the works of Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky. The methods for updating the topos of victim for both authors are similar. Each of them desacralizes a high Christian idea and uses it and a topos for subjective and, as a rule, ideological purposes. Such changes are possible due to the mixing of earthly (profane) and heavenly (sacred) logic when dealing with the categories of victim and sacrifice, which is typical for this time. If, for Kurbsky, the people killed by the tsar are new martyrs, then for Ivan the Terrible, they are justly punished traitors. The tsar believes that subjects should be ready to sacrifice their lives for him. Kurbsky does not deny the necessity of willingness to sacrifice, but he consistently proves that the tsar’s personality does not correspond to Christian ideas about the ideal monarch, so he convinces the reader of the possibility of confronting the tsar. At the same time, both authors characterize themselves as a person affected by the actions of the other and use the literary topoi of victim.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-191
Author(s):  
Felix Nicolau

The historical evolution of languages has been more than once influenced by the sheer influence of scholars who re-channeled some linguistic phenomena or simply consecrated aspects of colloquial usage. This happened in the history of Romanian language when the Latinist scholars cleansed the lexicon and parts of morphology of various non-Latin borrowings and derivations whereas they revived or inserted Latin formations. Taking account of this, it would be hard to justify the rejection of many feminized denominations of professions used already by people in everyday conversations. With the advance of technology and with the support of the third wave of feminism women are able nowadays to embrace whatever professional field they may want. On the other hand, there are numerous international conventions that acknowledge the role played by women in the setting up of the postindustrial society. That is why my article is a plea in favor of a linguistic updating, namely the acceptance into the literary language of feminized denominations of professions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 42-45
Author(s):  
Petr Mašek

The core of the Višňová castle library was formed already in the 17th century, probably in Paderborn. Afew volumes come from the property of the archbishop of Cologne, Ferdinand August von Spiegel (1774–1835), but most of the items were collected by his brother Franz Wilhelm (1752–1815), a minister of the Electorate of Cologne, chief construction officer and the president of the Academic Council in Cologne. A significant group is formed by philosophical works: Franz Wilhelm’s collection comprised works by J. G. Herder, I. Kant, M. Mendelsohn as well as H. de Saint-Simon and J. von Sonnenfels. Another group consisted of historical works, e.g. by E. Gibbon; likewise his interest in the history of Christianity is noticeable. The library contains a total of more than 6,200 volumes, including 40 manuscripts, 3 incunabula and 15 printed books from 16th century; more than a half of the collection is formed by early printed books until the end of the 18th century. The other volumes come from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Volumes from the 17th century include especially Latin printed books on law, and one can perceive interest in collecting books on philosophy. There are many publications devoted to Westphalia; in addition, the library contains a number of binder’s volumes of legal dissertations from the end of the 17th century and the entire 18th century published in diverse German university towns. Further disciplines widely represented in the library are economics and especially agriculture, with the publications coming from the 18th and 19th centuries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 135 (4) ◽  
pp. 1007-1041
Author(s):  
Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga ◽  
Francisco Javier Herrero Ruiz de Loizaga

Abstract The process of grammaticalization of Italian tuttavia and Spanish todavia, from Latin tota via, is an interesting case study because both adverbs converge and diverge at different points along the history of Italian and Spanish. Both adverbs inherited the temporal values of late Latin tota via (‘always’) and developed adversative values when reanalysed as connectives in some contexts where contemporary events could be reinterpreted as opposing one to another, However, It. tuttavia went further down this path of grammaticalization and lost its temporal values, while Sp. todavía, due probably to the emergence of new adversative connectives in the 17th century such as sin embargo and no obstante, abandoned the adversative uses in the 18th century and consolidated the phasal temporal value developed since the 16th century. In present Italian, tuttavia is a discourse connective with an antioriented argumentative function and no continuative or phasal temporal value, while in present Spanish, todavía is a phasal temporal intrapredicative adverb. This study tries to highlight how the comparative approach adopted here enriches our knowledge on the history of Romance Languages and allows for a better understanding of non-linear grammaticalization processes.


Author(s):  
Henk van Nierop

By the middle of the 16th century the Netherlands consisted of some twenty principalities and lordships, loosely connected under the rule of Emperor Charles V. The heir of the dukes of Burgundy, Charles ruled these lands as his own patrimony. They roughly covered the area of the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as a strip of northern France. During the rule of Philip II, king of Spain (r. 1555–1598), Charles’s son and successor, a revolt broke out. From c. 1580 onward Philip succeeded in bringing the southern provinces of the Netherlands (roughly modern-day Belgium) back to obedience, while the northern provinces (roughly the area covered by today’s Netherlands) retained their independence. The northern provinces came to be known as the “United Netherlands” or the “Dutch Republic,” the southern ones as the “Spanish Netherlands.” What had begun as a rebellion turned into regular warfare between the Dutch Republic, on the one side, and Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, on the other. The so-called Twelve Year Truce interrupted the fighting between 1609 and 1621. It was not until 1648 that the belligerents finally concluded peace. After 1585 (the capture of Antwerp by the Spanish army), the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands gradually drifted apart as they became two separate states, and, even more slowly, they developed their own national cultures and identities. The consequence for historiography is that the history of the Netherlands until the end of the 16th century is best studied as a whole, while the histories of the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands during the 17th century are usually studied separately.


Author(s):  
Ignazio Putzu

Ever since the fundamental studies carried out by the great German Romanist Max Leopold Wagner (b. 1880–d. 1962), the acknowledged founder of scientific research on Sardinian, the lexicon has been, and still is, one of the most investigated and best-known areas of the Sardinian language. Several substrate components stand out in the Sardinian lexicon around a fundamental layer which has a clear Latin lexical background. The so-called Paleo-Sardinian layer is particularly intriguing. This is a conventional label for the linguistic varieties spoken in the prehistoric and protohistoric ages in Sardinia. Indeed, the relatively large amount of words (toponyms in particular) which can be traced back to this substrate clearly distinguishes the Sardinian lexicon within the panorama of the Romance languages. As for the other Pre-Latin substrata, the Phoenician-Punic presence mainly (although not exclusively) affected southern and western Sardinia, where we find the highest concentration of Phoenician-Punic loanwords. On the other hand, recent studies have shown that the Latinization of Sardinia was more complex than once thought. In particular, the alleged archaic nature of some features of Sardinian has been questioned. Moreover, research carried out in recent decades has underlined the importance of the Greek Byzantine superstrate, which has actually left far more evident lexical traces than previously thought. Finally, from the late Middle Ages onward, the contributions from the early Italian, Catalan, and Spanish superstrates, as well as from modern and contemporary Italian, have substantially reshaped the modern-day profile of the Sardinian lexicon. In these cases too, more recent research has shown a deeper impact of these components on the Sardinian lexicon, especially as regards the influence of Italian.


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