I'm not a linguist, but I always love finding (possible) examples of hard C in Latin in other languages. For instance "Caesar" is borrowed into German as "Kaiser", and the borrowing of Latin "piscis" into Albanian as "peshk" appears to me as another example of that vestigial hard C.
> This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason behind the Romance family and its wide spread.<p>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.<p>The point is that the other languages, where they were Indo-European, did not get "ousted", rather they blended with Latin.<p>Basque, Finnish, Hungarian -- these are not Indo-European, and those haven't Romanized, which I think helps my thesis :)
Interesting. This is about Welsh: "Likewise, diwrnod ‘day’ goes back to Latin diurnāta, apparently an alternative word for ‘day’ that also led to French journée and Italian giornata."<p>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).
These sound like examples of Sprachbünder, not some category of "almost-" X languages. Does the lexicon of Albanian really owe as much to Latin as it does to its position within the Balkan Sprachbund? Not to mention, does a table of related words really tell indicate a profound similarity between these languages? If Albanian and Latin are so much alike, then where, for example, are Latin's optative or admirative moods?
<i>>The lexical contribution of Latin to Albanian is simply vast; one previous estimate for the total today is around 600 words, another around 800 (Gramelová 2013: 101).</i><p>That doesn't seem "vast" to me?
Well I would put English in this category too, even if it has a much more recent and convoluted history.<p>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
I'd highly recommended John McWhorter's lectures to anyone interested in languages. I've listened to three or four of his popular-linguistics courses. There's a bit of overlap in material but I found all of them to be very informative and highly entertaining. He's such an engaging lecturer.<p>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.
Linguistic history is interesting. I read Spoken Here [1] which talked about subject-verb-order [2], and how there was only a one or two languages in the entire world that were OSV.<p>1. <a href="http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/</a>
2. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order</a>
It's interesting that while Latin spread across Western Europe (whether through conquest, commerce or religion), the eastern Mediterranean stubbornly held onto Greek long after the Western empire had fallen.
If Old English lacks Brythonic influences because, as the article speculates, Angles and Saxons settled in thoroughly latinized regions, are there many traces of that pre-Norman latin in Old English? That's something I've often wondered when considering that simple mental model od English as "a Germanic language with lots of 11th century French sprinkled in".<p>(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")
There's a funny concept I've come to appreciate called "cultural inventory" which includes all of the things associated with a culture, which includes its language.<p>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.
> Romanian vocabulary likewise includes words of an unclear pre-Roman substrate language<p>That would be the Dacian language: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector</a>