"Preservation of the plosive sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ before front vowels /e/ and /i/; for example, centum ..."
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)
In Italian the written letters ce and ci are pronounced with a soft c.
There are plenty of words with a hard c (a k) followed by an e or an i. Italian alphabet doesn't have a k character so those sounds are written as che and chi. That is, in Italian ch is the k sound. Most (all?) of the other languages of the area use ch for a soft c.
To have the hard C in Italian an H needs to be added, CHE or CHI (while in Spanish that leads to something more like tch).
Keep in mind that Celtic and Latin are both Indo-European languages that split off about 4kya, so 1.5kya-2kya they were a lot closer that Romance languages and Celtic are today, and so what's more likely to have happened is that the Celtic spoken by the Gauls blended with the Latin spoken by the Romans. Germanic and Slavic languages are also Indo-European, so this dynamic worked in much of Europe over the past 2ky.
The point is that the other languages, where they were Indo-European, did not get "ousted", rather they blended with Latin.
Basque, Finnish, Hungarian -- these are not Indo-European, and those haven't Romanized, which I think helps my thesis :)
I also have the impression that the Romans viewed the Celts as more closely related to them both linguistically and culturally than almost any other group. Which is possibly one of the reasons why Gaul adopted Latin so rapidly.
In Danish the word 'døgn' indicates a day and a night (24 hours). I don't know if these words have a shared origin, but it sounds plausible (not a scientist).
If you are curious about where words come from, the English-language Wiktionary often has etymologies in its entries for words, and for the Nordic languages they are usually pretty up-to-date in terms of the scholarly state of the art.
Origin of Latin “dies” is also from PIE but a different word: dyews: (sky, heaven).
Interesting Latin dies (day) and deus (deity) are very much related since both come from dyews.
Yes, definitely, because the extremely heavy Latin impact on the Albanian lexicon is not found in the other Balkan Sprachbund languages Serbian–Macedonian–Bulgarian–Greek.
Moreover, the Balkan Sprachbund is generally defined through shared morphological and syntactic features, not lexicon. And those features spread through the region up to centuries after the Latin > Albanian lexical influence – the Slavic languages in the Sprachbund only arrived in the mid-first-millennium AD.
I’m Romanian myself, and the first time when I heard someone speak Albanian was as a teenager, when zapping through the satellite TV channels and landing on a Albanian news segment.
I was very intrigued because it felt that the lady presenting the news spoke a language that I should have understood, and yet I didn’t, not one word.
Later on I found out that there’s a name for that, i.e. for languages that have very similar intonation, but I forgot which one was exactly. Granted, that similarity between how Romanian and Albanian sound is most likely caused by our common Thracian/Dacian substrate.
That doesn't seem "vast" to me?
I don't think anyone ever called Spanish almost Semitic.
Taza, guitarra, almohada, albañil, algebra, elíxir, tamarindo, fulano, alfombra, acimut, cenit, café, azúcar, naranja, azar, ajedrez, arsenal, aceite, alcohol, arroba, azulejo, alberca, cero, etc.
And also several toponyms, the most famous probably being Andalucía.
People who speak very unrelated languages find much easier to learn Italian, Spanish or French after they learn English. Not so with e.g. Arabic
> English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate origin. That being said, 1066 was some time after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west, and it wasn’t Latin that the invaders were speaking. Also, frankly, I’ve written enough about English.
E.g. English imported another ~10k or more Latin words during the English Renaissance. Including the word "lexicon".
Then another wave of Latin influence via scientific discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries creating a need for new terms while Latin and Greek conferred greater cachet (from French to Scottish English around 1630) / prestige (French, from Latin) / status (Latin) over creating new "native" words. Of course helped by them being common languages for scientists to have a certain familiarity with, and sometimes fluency in.
It's particularly fascinating when you find relatively closely related words imported in different waves or from different sources (like cachet, prestige, status), whether because of nuances or perhaps differences in perceived status, or sometimes because the meaning has diverged from the original borrowing.
[Not a linguist by any means, but speak multiple Germanic and Romance languages so the differences and similarities always fascinate me and English still seems like a horrific mishmash, so I spend a disproportionate amount of time learning enough about etymology to make stupid mistakes]
That's one of my problems with this article. Even if the author does briefly admit its facetiousness, a lot of readers will come away thinking that language families are about family resemblances, when they're really a matter of genealogy, pure and simple.
That, and it comes across sort of like a Latinist's attempt to prove all roads lead to Rome, giving short shrift to Albanian (which occupies its own branch of the Indo-European family, with its own characteristics) and to English, which among other things is drastically analytic in comparison with the rest of the I-E languages. (I can't comment on the case of Welsh.)
Edit: I'm referring to his Great Courses series. I've just looked them up and the list prices are silly. I don't know if that's still an option, but I got the audio versions on Audible for very little money.
Today, English is global language with an astonishing amount of variation and learning to communicate in English is as important as learning to understand it in all its glorious forms. It places the burden back on the receiver to learn the local mode rather than an Imperial style self-assuming greatness seeking to subdue conquered peoples.
Also, if you ever need chill content while you fall asleep, they have many moderately-interesting classes from professors with calm voices and detailed content...
1. http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order
(That model may be too simple, but it got me through school at least, filling many gaps in my French vocabulary with "whatever the English say they isn't almost the same as in German")
I think it's interesting that among the major modern language groups in Europe -- Romance, Germanic, Slavic -- the kinds of typical alcohol are also highly associated with those languages -- grapes (wine), grain (beer), potato (distilled) -- and their alignment with north-south/east-west differences.
That would be the Dacian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector
The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, and the linguistic ancestors of Romanian speakers included Albanian speakers who switched to Latin and carried over some of their vocabulary, while Albanian speakers are descended from those who never made that switch. There are still few popular-science books representing this state of the art, but particularly curious readers can look, for example, to the publications of Matzinger and Schumacher.
For those who don't get the subtext, people here are having a political debate disguised as a linguistic/historical debate.
OfSanguineFire is saying Romanians originate in the south and migrated to Romania (known as the "Immigrationist theory") and others are saying Romanians originate from Dacians (the Daco-Roman continuity theory).
The first theory is the favorite of Hungarian nationalists because it places them in Romania before Romanians.
There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
As a Romanian that idea is new to me, and I've just gone through half of this book [1] written by two quite decent Romanian historians about the Balkans during the Slav migrations (one of those authors, Florin Curta, is quite well knonwn)
> The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans,
Again, as a Romanian this is highly, highly debatable and controversial. I personally think that there was some migration, but saying, point blank, that Romanian spread from "areas from the Central Balkans", which means South of the Danube, is most definitely not an established historical fact.
[1] https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migr...
