Classical Languages in Southern / Romance Europe
Thread poster: Thomas Johansson
Thomas Johansson
Thomas Johansson  Identity Verified
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Mar 16

This is an attempt to list all old/dead languages in Southern/Romance Europe that have an important body of written literature of historical interest:


--EUROPE IN GENERAL--
Medieval Latin (600-1350 AD)
Renaissance Latin (1350-1500 AD)
Neo-Latin (1500-1900 AD)

--FRANCE--
Old Occitan (Old Provençal) (800-1400 AD)
Old Norman (842-1359 AD)
Old French (842-1350 AD)
Middle French (1350-1600 AD)
Old Catalan (800-1600 AD)<
... See more
This is an attempt to list all old/dead languages in Southern/Romance Europe that have an important body of written literature of historical interest:


--EUROPE IN GENERAL--
Medieval Latin (600-1350 AD)
Renaissance Latin (1350-1500 AD)
Neo-Latin (1500-1900 AD)

--FRANCE--
Old Occitan (Old Provençal) (800-1400 AD)
Old Norman (842-1359 AD)
Old French (842-1350 AD)
Middle French (1350-1600 AD)
Old Catalan (800-1600 AD)

--IBERIA--
Old Galician–Portuguese (870-1200 AD)
Old Spanish (900-1400 AD)
Old Portuguese (1296-1516 AD)
Early Modern Spanish (1400-1700 AD)

--ITALY--
Old Latin (700-75 BC)
Classical Latin (75 BC-300 AD)
Late Latin (300-600 AD)
Old Tuscan (1200-1400 AD)
Old Tuscan - Fiorentine dialect (1200-1400 AD)
Renaissance Italian (1300-1600 AD)


[Edited at 2024-03-16 15:34 GMT]
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Hugo Fernandes
Hugo Fernandes
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Iberian languages Mar 16

Thanks for your post, it is quite interesting!
I would rather call 'Old Castilian' instead of 'Old Spanish', because in that age there was no country known as Spain, there were several kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula and Castilian is the language that is called nowadays as Spanish.

your Galician-Portuguese item is very interesting! These two languages are very similar and have the same origin.


expressisverbis
Michele Fauble
 
Thomas Johansson
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Updated Iberian languages Mar 21

Hugo Fernandes wrote:

I would rather call 'Old Castilian' instead of 'Old Spanish'


Thank you for the feedback, Hugo! I have updated my list for the Iberian languages, like so:

Old Catalan (800-1600 AD)
Andalusian Arabic (800-1500 AD)
Mozarabic (Andalusi Romance) (800-1300 AD)
Old Galician–Portuguese (870-1200 AD)
Old Castilian (900-1400 AD)
Navarro-Aragonese (1000-1500 AD)
Old Catalan (Hebrew-written) (1100-1492 AD)
Judaeo-Portuguese (1200-1800 AD)
Galician-Portuguese (Old Portuguese, Old Galician) (1296-1516 AD)
Early Modern Castilian (Spanish) (1400-1700 AD)
Old Castilian (Arabic-written) (1400-1560 AD)
Old Aragonese (Arabic-written) (1400-1560 AD)
Early Basque (1500-1900 AD)
Early Modern Aragonese (1500-1707 AD)
Early Modern Portuguese (1516-1900 AD)
Middle Galician (1516-1800 AD)
Early Modern Catalan (1600-1900 AD)
Late Modern Castilian (Spanish) (1700-1900 AD)
Late Modern Aragonese (1707-1900 AD)
Rennaissance Galician (1800-1939 AD)


 
expressisverbis
expressisverbis
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Similarities Mar 21

Hugo Fernandes wrote:

your Galician-Portuguese item is very interesting! These two languages are very similar and have the same origin.


I would dare to say that there are many more similarities between European Portuguese and Galician than there are between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, but as a northerner, we are more conservative in our language. It's no coincidence that we use many Galician expressions and terms.


 
Eugenio Garcia-Salmones
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Basque does not Mar 21

Thomas Johansson wrote:

Hugo Fernandes wrote:

I would rather call 'Old Castilian' instead of 'Old Spanish'


Early Basque (1500-1900 AD)



Basque has nothing to do with Romance languages.


expressisverbis
Thomas Johansson
 
Thomas Johansson
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right Mar 21

Eugenio Garcia-Salmones wrote:

Thomas Johansson wrote:

Hugo Fernandes wrote:

I would rather call 'Old Castilian' instead of 'Old Spanish'


Early Basque (1500-1900 AD)



Basque has nothing to do with Romance languages.


The goal here is just to list all "classical languages" mainly associated with the Iberian Peninsula (with "classical language" being defined very broadly as any language that has left some literary heritage).

I used the word "Romance" a little bit carelessly in the title of this thread.

Besides Basque, the list also includes Andalusian Arabic as another non-Romance language, and could probably also include various Jewish dialects, but that would require a little bit more research to determine.

I am also curious about whether the Latin once spoken in Spain, during the Roman Empire time, was a specific dialect of Latin that possibly could be differentiated from that of Rome or other parts of the Empire - in which case I would add that dialect as well to the list.


 
expressisverbis
expressisverbis
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Ladino Mar 25

Ladino is a language that was developed by the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal).
Ladino started as a dialect of Spanish, which was influenced by Portuguese, Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages spoken around the peninsula.

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/what-is-ladino

I'm not sure it's worth adding to your list.


 
Thomas Johansson
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Anatolia Mar 25

expressisverbis wrote:

Ladino is a language that was developed by the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal).
Ladino started as a dialect of Spanish, which was influenced by Portuguese, Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages spoken around the peninsula.

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/what-is-ladino

I'm not sure it's worth adding to your list.


Thank you for the suggestion, and many thanks for the link (which is a gold mine for my purposes!).

Ladino has been difficult to get a grip on. Right now, I have it listed as "Judeo-Spanish" under my list for Anatolia.
https://www.proz.com/forum/linguistics/366608-classical_languages_in_the_middle_east_and_west_asia.html

Due to limits in my "database" -- an Excel file -- I can only have one entry for each language/dialect and only assign each entry to one historical region, which in this case ended up being Anatolia.

It seems Ladino mainly began to crystalize as a separate language after the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492, and it seems a major community of the speakers gathered in the Ottoman Empire, where Ladino - or one of its main varieties - first began to take form as a separate language from Spanish.

Important literature has been produced in the language, so it definitely belongs to my list.


expressisverbis
 
Oriol VIP (X)
Oriol VIP (X)
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I don't understand your distinctions -language is not compartimental, it is evolutive Mar 26

I don't understand the distinctions you make from "old" to "early" with their corpuses and such, and how you categorize that next to dead languages as if it was the same thing. No it's not. By far.

Languages are not compartimental entities, they don't "jump" from 600 to 1400, they evolve (their meanings, usages and syntax), so you are making a distinction that is not too clear to me from a linguistic/evolutive/scientific point of view.

In other words, language X is lang
... See more
I don't understand the distinctions you make from "old" to "early" with their corpuses and such, and how you categorize that next to dead languages as if it was the same thing. No it's not. By far.

Languages are not compartimental entities, they don't "jump" from 600 to 1400, they evolve (their meanings, usages and syntax), so you are making a distinction that is not too clear to me from a linguistic/evolutive/scientific point of view.

In other words, language X is language X, whether it's in 800 BC or 2020. Its evolution each year, once it is defined or categorized as "language X" (due to historical, political, whatever factors) are this, their evolution and corpus. This separation you are making is not clear to me, and I am afraid it has a political agenda behind that has little to do with linguistics.

In linguistics, some structures remain unaltered through the centuries, while others change -their meaning is deformed, obscured, metaphorized, changed, etc., due to many reasons which only hard study can show-, so the distinction you are proposing is not really correct from a scientific point of view -and don't fool yourself, modern language studies aka philology are all about the scientific study of language. For example, one contemporary reader, not versed in language studies, might read a text that is a thousand years old and he/she will understand fragments or parts of it, maybe even whole sentences, while some words will escape understanding because the word is not in use anymore, or it has shifted meaning (nowadays it means another thing, maybe related, maybe far-stretched from the original meaning). Anyone can check an ethymological dictionary to that end to see how the meanings and usages of words have fluctuated through the centuries.

So again, what is the purpose of this list, and why it makes the completely unaccurate assumption (and mind you, preposterous and biased) that old and dead languages are the same? I really don't understand why is that.

As for the Castilian - Spanish distinction, it is actually very simple. "Castilian" is the name that is used by the Spanish to refer to the Castilian language (¡en castellano!), since the reality of the Spanish country has always been multilingual, while the fictional aggregate "Spanish" is what the foreigners, ignorant of the Spanish reality, say. That's the small elephant exposed, there, for you! So if you want to know if your linguist is really Spanish (Spain) native, just ask them whether they prefer to speak about Spanish or castellano!



[Edited at 2024-03-26 15:00 GMT]
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Thomas Johansson
Thomas Johansson  Identity Verified
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well Mar 26

Oriol VIP wrote:

I don't understand the distinctions ...


Hello Oriol, I am trying to develop a practical list of "historical languages" (any languages spoken in the past and has some important literary heritage) that can be useful for organizing digital resources, such as scanned manuscripts, under practical language categories (for instance in situations such as this: "Should I put this PDF with an ancient hand-written manuscript under category X or category Y?")

As for the names and periodizations, I am mostly trying to follow the categories, years and terminology typically used by linguists (whenever it has been possible to find such information).
In general, I try to use the names most familiar to an English-speaking audience, while sometimes adding alternative names in parentheses.

I am sharing the list here in several parts in the forums for two reasons: one, since the list may perhaps be helpful to other people on the net working with similar issues, and two, with the hope of receiving feedback (corrections, omissions, etc.) that can help me improve the list.
In other threads, I have posted the corresponding sections for other parts of the world.

[Edited at 2024-03-26 22:56 GMT]


 
Oriol VIP (X)
Oriol VIP (X)
Spain
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"en castellano" Mar 27

A sentence that, by the way, and I want to clarify this, is something you will NEVER hear me say.

I just wanted to make this clear.


 


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Classical Languages in Southern / Romance Europe






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