A Study on Mutual Intelligibility between Romance Languages

This paper discusses divergences and significant typological correlations found in the family of Romance languages, specifically French, Italian and Spanish. It proposes to reinterpret the complex system of indefinite nominal determination in two central Romance languages, viz. French and Italian, which both feature an indefinite article and a partitive article, as a device of nominal classification in a broad sense, marking the conceptually important distinction between a single, contoured referent and a non-contoured substance. It is argued that this classification system arose when nominal declension in Latin, which differentiated these two referentially highly relevant cognitive concepts via overt gender and number affixes, was partially or completely lost. In contrast to modern central Romance languages, which require obligatory (indefinite) determination in almost every argument position, modern peripheral Romance languages like Romanian or Spanish, possessing a simpler and more flexible system of determination, developed a system of differential object marking in order to unambiguously indicate contoured and highly individualized referents in direct object position.

This article describes the manifestations of the morphosyntactic category of grammatical gender in the Romance languages, including regional varieties and dialects, as well as Romance minority languages spoken under total language contact (which underwent significant reshaping under contact pressure). It will briefly sketch the diachronic development of this category from Latin to the Romance varieties highlighting the diversity that has come into being in Romance as a product of language change and dialect differentiation in this area of grammar. Among this diversity, some phenomena of gender marking and/or assignment have sometimes arisen that are rare among Indo-European languages (and, in some cases, even beyond): these rara & rarissima are paid special attention in the present account of Romance gender.

The research aims to explore the etymology and semantic field of the zoonym “cow” in the linguocultural contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families. The article analyzes the origin of the word “cow” in Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, identifying its core and additional meanings, commonalities and specific features. This analysis makes it possible to determine the national characteristics in the expression of knowledge about people, animals, and the world in mythological and religious beliefs by the native speakers. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the zoonym “cow” not only as a linguistic object, but also as a cultural phenomenon intertwined with history, mythology, religion, and human lifestyle. This zoonym is studied for the first time in a comparative aspect using data from Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, with the aim of identifying, analyzing, and describing national cultural features, similarities, and differences. As a result, the study proves that the etymology and semantics of the word “cow” in the contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families display shared roots, dating back to a distant past, and indicate profound connections between the peoples. Despite some differences among the peoples who speak Slavic and Turkic languages, such as national specificity of worldview, varying living conditions, traditions, history, and religion, the words designating the cow in various linguocultures are part of a unified history, connected to the use of this animal in human life.

In research on information structure and discourse cohesion, contrast has been defined in different ways, depending on the pragmatic/semantic relation established between the propositions involved in the contrast, on the text types and on other discourse conditions. As a whole, despite – or possibly because of – its vagueness, contrast has proved to be a useful heuristic tool for characterizing discourse cohesion phenomena. This paper focuses on results from our research concerning cohesion phenomena in elicited discourse in Romance (Italian, French) and Germanic (German, Dutch) languages and aims to offer a more precise characterization of contrast against several variation parameters. We take into consideration earlier work on three tasks (Finite Story, Polarity-Switch Dialogues, Map Task) and add a new one (Spot the Difference). The comparison between the results allows us to disentangle the following variables: information units involved in the contrast relation; discourse conditions (monologue vs. dialogue); speakers’ access to information (shared vs. non-shared); effect of contrast on information in the common ground (alternative maintained vs. rejected). The aim is to achieve a more fine-grained definition of contrast relations, which allows us to identify and characterize the divergent behavior of Romance and Germanic languages, and to relate intra- and crosslinguistic differences revealed by speakers’ preferences in speech with structural specificities of the two language groups.

The book addresses grammatical gender in Romance, and its development from Latin. It works with the toolbox of current linguistic typology, and asks the fundamental question of how the Latin grammatical gender system gradually changed into those of the Romance languages. To answer this question, the book capitalizes on the pervasive dialect variation of which the better-known standard Romance languages only represent a fragment. Indeed, inspection of dialect variation across time and space forces one to dismiss the handbook account proclaiming that the neuter gender, contrasting with masculine and feminine in Latin, was eradicated from spoken Latin by late Empire times. Both Late Latin evidence and data from several modern dialects show that this never happened, and that the vulgate account proceeds from unwarranted back-projection of the data from modern languages like French and Italian. Rather, the neuter underwent transformations which are the main culprit for the differences in the gender system observed today between, say, Romanian, Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian, to cite just a few types of system which turn out to differ significantly. A precondition for establishing the database for diachronic investigation is a detailed description of many such systems, which reveals data whose interest transcends the diachronic issue under consideration: the book thus addresses systems where ‘husbands’ are feminine and others where ‘wives’ are masculine; discusses dialects where nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and proposes an analysis according to which one Romance language (Asturian) has split inherited grammatical gender into two concurrent systems.

It is often said that languages for specific purposes (also named special languages or technolects) are the product of a division of labor. Although this concept was introduced only as late as 1776 (by Adam Smith, in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations), the idea that professions or occupations of all kind are characterized by a particular vocabulary that is not understood by all native speakers was already manifest in the writings of medieval scholars (for instance, in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia). In the Middle Ages most Romance languages conquered a more or less wide range of domains. The question arose whether they were also appropriate to serve as a medium of scholarship. The disciplines taught at the universities (arts, theology, law, medicine) had a strong Latin tradition; their knowledge was popularized by means of translations, which enriched the vocabulary and the syntactic flexibility of the emerging languages. Thus, the translators—sometimes organized in “schools”—contributed to the elaboration of the target languages and to their emancipation from Latin. Aside from the septem artes liberales, however, a second group of (seven) disciplines without Latin roots (called artes mechanicae) established and introduced mainly native vocabulary typical of the respective occupational fields. During the first centuries of modern times, more and more scholars felt that their mother tongue should take the place of Latin as a means of propagating scholarship and new findings. In the 17th and 18th centuries, French held the lead among the modern languages in nearly all fields of knowledge; it maintained its dominant position among the Romance languages until the second half of the 20th century. On a global level, German was a strong rival in the humanities and several scientific disciplines in the 19th century; for many decades, however, English has been the universal medium of communication in the scientific community. This process has given rise to many discussions about language planning measures to be taken in order to curtail the Anglo-American supremacy. Before the 18th century, special languages did not have a strong impact on the physiognomy of developed languages. In the sphere of academic disciplines, translations of canonical Latin texts entailed a general re-Latinization and, as a consequence, a process of convergence of the Romance languages. The technical languages of trade and artisanry were highly fragmented so that their special vocabulary was used and understood only in limited geographical areas. In the Age of Enlightenment, the growing prestige of experts, on the one hand, and philosophical considerations about the optimization of language(s), on the other hand, led to increasing harmonization efforts on national and supranational levels. Organizations were founded with the purpose of creating and standardizing terminologies for various kinds of subjects (technical products, medicine, etc.). Special languages, far from being homogeneous varieties, are differentiated vertically. Linguists use to distinguish between three levels of communication: specialists inter se (e.g., physician—physician), specialist—skilled worker (physician—nurse), and specialist—layman (physician—patient). Studying how technical terms seep into common language and what changes they undergo during this process is a great challenge for linguists.

Reviews 339 strikingly different from those of the first half of the fifteenth century or even the late nineteenth century. But perhaps this is why, as Rice argues, this reprint of Woodward's classic text is so important: it enables us to evaluate 'whether it [Renaissance humanism] has become a historical curiosity or whether, and to what extent, its traditional principles and ambitions can be given new meanings appropriate to our o w n society' (p. xvii). Natalie Tomas Department ofHistory Monash University Wright, Roger, ed., Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; paper; pp. ix, 262; R R P US$16.95. This book preserves the name and comprises the papers of an international workshop held at Rutgers University in 1989. It was published as a hardback in 1991. In a brief preface the editor describes it as a reprint only (though with three minor corrections), produced because the original edition sold out, and in order to make the material available at a more accessible price. H e claims that, six years after the workshop itself, the papers are still 'at the cutting edge of the field', and that their authors 'represent a high proportion of the present experts in the topic'. These claims are bold but sustainable. Space does not permit a roll call, but the eighteen contributors are a distinguished company whose work will delight and probably surprise most scholars w h o care to take it up, while possibly unsettling many medievalists w h o have at any time patiently plodded their way through primary sources, content to accept uncritically such 340 Reviews traditional categories as 'medieval Latin', 'classical Latin', 'vulgar Latin', 'proto-Romance' or what have you. The emphasis is on metalinguistics—the ways in which language is perceived by those within a speech community, and by those outside it. All the contributors are linguists of the highest sophistication w h o are comfortable with the idea (which does not necessarily come easily to most w h o are constrained by necessity, if not desire, to dabble in original sources) that all writing is merely notation, and that language is really about sound and utterance. Let m e illustrate the challenge of this work with an anecdote. A former teacher of mine served in the British army during the war, attached to a West Country regiment stationed in Norfolk. As an Australian, he had no great difficulty understanding the speech of both his o w n troops and of the local East Anglians, but they found each other at times incomprehensible. This in itself is interesting, but of greater interest is the fact that the local East Anglian fishermen apparently found the Friesian Dutch relatively easy to communicate with. The point of the anecdote, of course, is that the formal distinction between 'English' and 'Dutch' was largely illusory: these are categories that are imposed by convention: by geography, by politics, by the power of the media, and by our natural desire for order. The reality, however, was very different. If w e could take away all such imposed perceptions, each speech community might make surprising choices about those other communities with which i t felt the closest linguistic kinship. Many of the contributors concern themselves in this w a y with the redrawing of the boundaries between Latin and 'Romance'. Tore Janson (pp. 19-28) challenges us to ask ourselves why w e happily accept that 'English' is the native tongue of King Alfred, Chaucer and ourselves, and that 'Greek' has been spoken continuously from Homer's day to the present, while 'Latin' Reviews 341 somehow got marginalized, and Dante chose to write his Divine Comedy in 'Italian'. The fact is that Dante probably saw the distinction very differently: Janson would probably maintain that Dante saw himself as using one form of Latin for the Divine Comedy, and another (he called it gramatica) for his De vulgari eloquentia, while accepting both forms as participants in the same great linguistic tradition. It is w e w h o have seized on the distinctions he made, prised them apart and set them in concrete. In m y o w...

In this article, I explore code-switching in Llibre dels Fets (a 13th century chronicle that narrates the life and deeds of king James I of Aragon) from a glottopolitical perspective in order to uncover the linguistic ideologies reflected in the text through this phenomenon. Code-switching in contemporary Romance languages, as well as in Latin and Arabic, is found throughout the text, mostly within reported speech. Through the analysis of these fragments and the analysis of the labels used to refer to each of these varieties, it is shown that: (i) different varieties are used to express either allegiance (Catalan and Occitan) or opposition (Western Ibero-Romance) to the figure of the King, and that that Aragonese was erased as a language of the Crown of Aragon; (ii) code-switching in Latin is used to confer authority to the discourse; (iii) code-switching in the Romance languages is a mechanism to express group membership; and finally (iv) that mutual intelligibility between Catalan and the attested contemporary Romance varieties is assumed at the time of composition of the text.

Radiation oncology in Latin speaking countries: A link between Europe and Latin America

The position of the word final –s, after a weakening in archaic Latin, seems to be fixed in the spoken language in the classical period. Then, it partially disappeared in the Romance languages: in modern languages, it is conserved only north and west of the Massa–Senigallia line, while we cannot find it neither in the eastern regions nor in South Italy. Based on this fact, linguists generally claim that the weakening of the final –s started only after the intensive dialectal diversification of Latin, simultaneously with the evolution of the Romance languages. However, the data of the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age (LLDB) do not verify this generally accepted opinion. We can find almost as many examples of the lack of word final –s as that of –m also from the earlier centuries of the Imperial age. The aim of this paper is to explore the reasons behind the inconsistencies between the scholarly consensus and the epigraphical data.

A foot is an organizing unit of prosodic structure built on moras and syllables. Prominence falls on the heads of feet, and feet can be right- or left-headed (an iamb or a trochee, respectively). Feet can be constructed from the right or the left edge and lexical stress falls on the head of the leftmost or rightmost foot. The metrical system of a language can thus be defined by (a) the nature of the foot (trochee/iamb), (b) the direction of parsing, and (c) the foot that carries main stress. Each prosodic word minimally comprises a stressed foot. Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three branches, East Germanic (Gothic), West Germanic, and North Germanic. East Germanic has no modern descendants, unlike the latter two branches, which include, for example, English, German, and Dutch (West Germanic), and Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North Germanic), respectively. The status of the foot has remained remarkably consistent across the history of Germanic, remaining trochaic and quantity sensitive (although details differ across the relevant languages). This is despite significant changes to the quantity systems of Germanic languages, which have almost exclusively lost the distinction in either vowel or consonant quantity (whereas Proto-Germanic had both). The extensive borrowing from Romance languages across Germanic has also had a substantial impact. Germanic words rarely contain more than one foot, whereas Romance loans are largely longer than native Germanic vocabulary and therefore frequently comprise two or more feet. Due to the fact that native vocabulary was broadly stressed on the initial foot, whereas Romance loans often retained right-edge stress, a choice had to be made as to which foot to stress and the modern languages demonstrate that the right edge was selected in every case. Thus, while feet remain quantity sensitive and trochaic, the modern languages construct them from right to left and place main stress on the rightmost foot. This is in contrast to the early stages of the languages, when the opposite was the case.

In the article the mathematical formulas and computer algorithms: 1) mathematical formula of G. V. Rauschenbach; 2) electronic calculator of V. I. Levenstein; 3) formula of T. Sorensen were applied to the Nostratic data material of Nostratic etymon *wete "water", which is derivable through the etymons from five language families: Altaic, Afroasiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Uralic. It helped to establish the following degrees of Nostratic languages relationships: the close degree of relationship, which corresponds to the divergent-convergent development of Nostratic languages, is established between Altaic and Dravidian language families; remote degree of relationship, which corresponds to the convergent-divergent development, is established between the Dravidian and Uralic language families, while distant degree of relationship, which also corresponds to the convergent-divergent development, is established between Afroasiatic and Indo-European language families.

Reviewed by: Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony by John Hewson, Vit Bubenik Benji Wald Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony. By John Hewson and Vit Bubenik. (Current issues in linguistic theory 145.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. Pp. xii, 403. This is an important study, both for the conceptual framework it proposes for the analysis of tense and aspect and for the wealth of data it discusses. As stated by the authors in a preface, the volume is the outgrowth of a PhD seminar. This accounts for the comprehensiveness of the survey undertaken of the various Indo-European languages and also for the somewhat speculative quality of some of the analyses. By this I mean that it is an excellently integrated and coordinated effort involving many scholars rather than the product of extensive refinement and readjustment of analyses by a few scholars over a long period of research. The clarity of the general exposition far outweighs the residual unclarities in some specific analyses. Ch. 1 establishes the tense-aspect descriptive framework, called ‘chronogenesis’, positing basic cognitive notions of time relations and event perspectives and how they map onto various morphological systems. Some innovative terminology is used, based on the tense/aspect theory of the early twentieth century French linguist Gustave Guillaume (applied to Classical Greek and Latin), but some of the unclarities and incoherencies of that theory are eliminated. While the framework is tailored for IE languages, its explicit cognitive underpinnings and the method of mapping, as proposed by the authors, imply that the framework is not limited to any particular language family. Therefore, the interest of the work goes beyond IE to TA systems in general. Nevertheless, since the theory is systematically applied exclusively to IE in the book, it is within the analysis of the variety of systems in IE that its more general applicability can be appreciated here. In this vein, the framework is successful in allowing revealing comparisons across IE languages and avoiding confusions of traditional terminology applied to those languages, e.g. preterit, aorist, imperfect, etc.—used differently for different languages. With regard to utility for cross-linguistic typological comparisons, the ensuing Chs. 2–12 are organized into larger sections; (A) ‘Languages with the original three-aspect system’ (Ch. 2, Ancient Greek; Ch. 3, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit); (B) ‘Languages with the original present-aorist system and innovative perfect’ (Ch. 4, Classical Armenian; Ch. 5, Old Church Slavic; Ch. 6, Albanian; Ch. 7, Tocharian); (C) ‘Languages with a three-tense system’ (Ch. 8, Baltic; Ch. 9, Celtic; Ch. 10, Latin); (D) ‘Languages which merged the original aorist and perfect into preterit’ (Ch. 11, Germanic: Gothic, Old English; Ch. 12, Anatolian: Hittite). Note that the traditional terms featured in the section headings are used interchangeably with innovative terminology in the text, e.g. ‘aorist’ = ‘perfective past’, probably as a convenient habit in addressing IEists. The above section headings also presuppose a reconstruction of the Proto-IE tense-aspect system, e.g. with three aspects. The book does not explicitly reconstruct the entire system but suggests basic parts of it on the basis of the trajectories of the attested historical systems. Sometimes I got the impression that the authors are figuring out the PIE system as they write, e.g. hesitation in whether certain aspects of the Hittite system are innovative or conservative (243ff). This is understandable given the huge amount of data involved in PIE TA reconstruction, and it is even helpful to understanding to see the process of reconstruction carried out rather than having a presentation of the results of that process with less attention paid to the problems encountered along the way. Incomplete programmatic observations include such matters as incipient ergativity in Tokharian, and the differences between aorist vs. perfect usage in the original (New Testament) Greek sources and Old Armenian translations (cf. the title of Section B given above). Section E, ‘Later developments’, contains Ch. 13, ‘From Ancient to Modern Greek’; Ch. 14, ‘Development of the modern Indic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 15, ‘Development of the Modern Slavic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 16, ‘Development of the Modern Iranian tense-aspect system’; Ch. 17, ‘From...

The article studies the typological system of languages belonging to Indo-European language family and the influence of native language interference on creative written productions of English language learners. It has been defined that the components of linguistic complexity in writing follow different developmental trajectories related to different levels of language proficiency, interference being observed not only throughout closely related languages. Based on this assumption linguistic complexity has been studied in the aspect of the native language transfer and the languages have been classified according to the typological similarity of language patterns but not according to language family relation. It has been proved that typologically similar languages belonging to the same language group or family cause the same mistakes in the process of ESL studying, specifically while producing complex speech structures. The last stage of the research involves the analysis of the native language influence on English creative written productions depending on the proficiency level of the producer. Finally, languages have been classified into clusters which have the same characteristics (morphological and syntactical) in their influence on ESL studying and a new model to study language interference in contrast has been proposed.

The author examines the conducts and relations between the different language families in Nepalese Himalaya region. The Nepal Himalayas have been the scene of extensive linguistic contact over a considerable period. Languages of different genetic phyla, in particular Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman, have been involved, but so have languages within the Tibeto-Burman phylum representing different stocks with differing typological characteristics. Indeed, the long periods of contact between speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages of different stocks have resulted in considerable lexical and grammatical borrowing, which has tended to obscure genetic relationships. As a result, there is still a good deal of uncertainty as to how even major groupings of languages should be positioned within the family tree.