greg

Romance Languages   Sunday, June 12, 2005, 16:01 GMT
quasimodo

What are the "romance languages" and why do they call them romance languages? Where did term this come from?
Lazar Saturday, June 11, 2005, 20:06 GMT
The Romance languages are the languages that are descended from Latin: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and several others. They are called "Romance" because they derive from the speech of the Romans.



Brennus

The name 'Romance' comes from Old French "romancer" meaning "to speak in Roman (i.e. Latin) fashion. It's the most popular name for these languages however one sometimes hears them called Romanic Languages, Latin Languages and Neo-Latin languages too.

One writer I read once described Romanian as "Italic" rather than "Romance" probably because it is lexically and morphologically the closest to Classical Latin of all of Latin's daughter languages. Even with its numerous Dacian and Slavic loan words. However, this is still debatable especially when some linguists today are questioning whether Latin was part of the Italic sub-family of Indo-European languages or an independent member of Indo-European unto itself itself like Greek and perhaps the extinct Ligurian language of Southeastern Gaul (France).



Sander

Romantic or Latin languages is a term as well.



greg

En <romance> is from OF <romanz> = 'French language' as opposed to Latin (there are other meanings).
greg   Sunday, June 12, 2005, 16:03 GMT
Sorry for that title/name inversion...