Greek and Spanish comparison

K. T.   Tue Sep 04, 2007 10:10 pm GMT
How many languages have five vowel sounds only?
Spaniard   Tue Sep 04, 2007 10:19 pm GMT
"Latin only had five vowel qualities..., so the 5-vowel system doesn't necessarily come from Basque"
True. Anyway I said probably... My point is that romance languages didn't take the vowel sounds from from Latin. Italian might be an exception. Not sure.
Guest   Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:25 am GMT
"How many languages have five vowel sounds only? "

>> Only Latin and its dearest son Spanish. ^^!
Guest   Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:33 am GMT
>> Besides this strong hint Castilian like basque often changes the initial "f" - which does not exist in Basque - to a mute "h", just to mention one.<<

This rendering of -F- isn't an Iberian or an Pyrenean phenomenon, but was also an Estruscan phenomenon....
OïL   Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:59 am GMT
"How many languages have five vowel sounds only? "

Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, various Italian dialects, Basque, Spanish, Swahili, Japanese.
Czech too, I think.


"Castilian was born next to what it's today the Basque Country."
A strong Basque substrate seems indeed the most sensible explanation.
K. T.   Wed Sep 05, 2007 1:04 am GMT
Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, various Italian dialects, Basque, Spanish, Swahili, Japanese.
Czech too, I think.

Thank-you, OïL.


I didn't know about Bulgarian or Czech.
Guest   Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:34 am GMT
<Have you noticed that Spain, Italy, Greece and Japan are more or less on the same latitude? >

So is the US (my latitude is about the same as Rome's). I suppose this means that the Native American languages should sound a lot like Spanish or Italian, etc.?
Mallorquí.   Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:25 am GMT
Le bulgare a six phonèmes vocaliques: a, e, i, o, u, plus una vocale neutrale (schwa, le "a" de l'anglais "beggar"). Cette voyelle peut se trouver soit en situation atone, soit, en situation tonique.

"Pet" veut dire "cinq". "Pët", chemin, fois".
OiL   Wed Sep 05, 2007 11:12 am GMT
Oups, tu as raison Mallorqui.
C'est le macédonien, pas le bulgare, qui a le système à 5 voyelles (bien que bulgare et macédonien soient virtuellement des dialectes d'une même langue).


"How many languages have five vowel sounds only? "
— I forgot: Esperanto!
Ouest   Wed Sep 05, 2007 11:57 am GMT
K. T.<<<I'm glad that someone introduced this topic. We used to have Greek news on the TV and I'd listen to it and think, "Whaaaaa?" It was like listening to Spanish, but I couldn't understand most of it. I knew the word "Thelo", but I never thought about it being like "Quiero"; is "Qu" related to "The"? I'm not a linguist, just a polyglot, so I'd be interested in what those with a linguistic background think about this. In Spanish "Te" is used without the "h" for words that originally had the theta. >>>

Greek comes directly from Proto-Indo-European, while Spanish comes from a Mixture of Latin, Ibero-Celtic and Germanic, which all come like Greek from Proto-Indo-European but belong to distinct branches of it. Any correspondence between Spanish and Greek must come from Proto-Indo-European. But I doubt that after the creolization that went along with the blending many elements other than the etymology of the vocabulary remains from Proto-Indo-European in Spanish.
Spaniard   Wed Sep 05, 2007 1:52 pm GMT
"Greek comes directly from Proto-Indo-European, while Spanish comes from a Mixture of Latin, Ibero-Celtic and Germanic, which all come like Greek from Proto-Indo-European but belong to distinct branches of it."

Here is a list of Castilian words that came directly from Basque. We could easily assume that the these are the obvious ones and the list could be much bigger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Basque/Iberian_origin

BTW, I am not a Basque.
Adolfo   Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:52 pm GMT
"Greek comes directly from Proto-Indo-European, while Spanish comes from a Mixture of Latin, Ibero-Celtic and Germanic"

Spanish is not a mixture or a creole based on the languages you have mentioned, it is a direct sescent of Latin with some words borrowed from other languages , not only those ones. Although 70% of its vocabulary and 90% of usual vocabulary comes from Latin. So Spanish has the same relationship with Proto Indoeuropean that Greek: PI->Old Greek->Modern Greek and PI-> Latin->Spanish.
Guest   Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:09 pm GMT
<<"Greek comes directly from Proto-Indo-European, while Spanish comes from a Mixture of Latin, Ibero-Celtic and Germanic"

Spanish is not a mixture or a creole based on the languages you have mentioned, it is a direct sescent of Latin with some words borrowed from other languages , not only those ones. Although 70% of its vocabulary and 90% of usual vocabulary comes from Latin. So Spanish has the same relationship with Proto Indoeuropean that Greek: PI->Old Greek->Modern Greek and PI-> Latin->Spanish. >>

How do you explain then that Spanish is so far away from classical Latin? Educated Greeks can understand Koine, while educated Spaniards don't understand a single latin sentence.
Skippy   Thu Sep 06, 2007 2:46 am GMT
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the Spanish writing system has been updated more recently than Greek... Maybe?
OïL   Thu Sep 06, 2007 10:49 am GMT
<<How do you explain then that Spanish is so far away from classical Latin? Educated Greeks can understand Koine, while educated Spaniards don't understand a single latin sentence.>>

Parce que l'espagnol ne vient pas du latin (italien, roumain, français etc. non plus).

Les prétendues langues romanes descendent d'un langage jamais écrit, improprement nommé 'latin vulgaire', qui était en fait une sorte de proto-italien vaguement apparenté au latin.
C'était à l'origine un jargon militaire, qui a dû se former juste après les Guerres Puniques, lorsque Rome a achevé son contrôle sur l'Italie du Nord et l'Hispanie du Nord-Ouest et a commencé à renforcer sa présence le long de la côte méditerranéenne de Gaule. A cette occasion l'armée romaine a été en contact continu avec des populations celtes, sur un très large front, de la Vénétie à la Galice actuelles, y a recruté la plupart de ses soldats.
Ainsi est apparue une nouvelle langue à structure analytique, au lexique sigificativement distinct du latin (ce dernier étant dès alors cantonné au rôle de code académique).

C'est la seule explication que je peux trouver au fait que les langues romanes partagent un certain nombre de traits communs... dont aucun n'a jamais existé en latin.

Si on voyageait dans le temps pour débarquer à Rome au temps de Jules César, on se ferait mieux comprendre avec l'italien actuel qu'avec le latin, j'en suis sûr.


"Educated Greeks can understand Koine"

Parce que le grec est resté le grec. Contrairement au latin il n'a pas été substitué par une nouvelle langue née d'une expansion impériale.
Pour cette raison, le grec reste parlé... en Grèce uniquement. Sur un espace qui n'est pas plus grand qu'au temps d'Homère. Plus petit, même.