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The Romance languages, also known as the Latin [2] or Neo-Latin [3] languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. [4] They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are:
Neolatino Romance (or simply 'Neolatino') [37] [38] is a naturalistic pan-Romance zonal auxiliary language, proposed as a standard language for Romance as a whole, to ease communication amongst or with speakers of Romance languages, complementing (not substituting) the standards that exist locally (Portuguese, Spanish, etc.).
Romansh belongs to the Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages, which includes languages such as French, Occitan, and Lombard. The main feature placing Romansh within the Gallo-Romance languages is the fronting of Latin / u / to [ y ] or [ i ] , as seen in Latin muru(m) "wall", which is mür ⓘ or mir ⓘ in Romansh.
Scandinavian translations of Continental European romance began with prose translations in the Norwegian court. The Eufemiavisorna represent a further stage of adaptation of Romance, using verse. They are named after Norway's Queen Euphemia of Rügen (1270–1312): in the fullest manuscript attestations, there is a colophon at the end of each ...
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of Latin nominative plural endings, such as /i/) from some masculine nouns. Plural in /s/: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, [25] Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian ...
Today the four most widely spoken standardized Western Romance languages are Spanish (c. 486 million native speakers, around 125 million second-language speakers), Portuguese (c. 220 million native, another 45 million or so second-language speakers, mainly in Lusophone Africa), French (c. 80 million native speakers, another 70 million or so ...
The Romance languages evolved from varieties of Vulgar Latin spoken in the various parts of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. Latin was itself part of the (otherwise extinct) Italic branch of Indo-European. [citation needed] Romance languages are divided phylogenetically into Italo-Western, Eastern Romance (including Romanian) and Sardinian.
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.