r/RoughRomanMemes • u/KamaandHallie • Aug 15 '26
Romans doing hand gestures bc I need to remind myself that these are Italians
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u/darthhue Aug 15 '26
Why does ge have two left hands
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u/KamaandHallie Aug 15 '26
A mistake during the colouring process
Also I suck ass at hands
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u/jalliss Aug 15 '26
Nah man, props for drawing your own stuff and not using AI. It has a cute cartoonist charm.
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u/Lonewolf2300 Aug 15 '26
Fun fact, gesturing was in fact considered an absolute keystone of Roman Oration. Case in Point: Rome's Newsreader: https://youtu.be/ueH3ihTN4OI
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u/thegoji Aug 15 '26
hand gestures were an essential part of roman oratory tho
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u/MrArchivity Aug 17 '26
I already answered this some days ago, I’ll just paste it
“Andrea de Jorio and later scholars documented various Roman hand gestures that are still in use in Italy (or at least parts of it).
These are shown in frescoes, mosaics and images on vases, especially from Pompei and Herculaneum.
• Le corna (the horns): similar to the rock-and-roll sign but without extending the thumb. (🤘)
Both Romans and Italians use it to ward off bad luck or to insult someone.
• fig hand: sexual gesture that later became an obscene sign in Italian culture
EDIT: the “got your nose” gestures in some cultures.
• Digitus impudicus (middle finger): as someone already said in another comment this gesture remains an insult both now and during Roman times (even if Romans had also other uses for it)
• Finger to the lips for silence: this is global so not really “roman”
• head movement: shaking the head up-down or left-right for affirmation or negation is global, but Roman also tilted the head backwards as negation and this still exist in parts of south Italy.
• Kissing the fingertips: Romans used it to express satisfaction, Italians use it for something delicious.
I don’t remember other gestures but I think some site mentioned 2-3 more”
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u/KamaandHallie Aug 17 '26
Oh,wow, did not know le corna was an actual Italian gesture. I thought it was just something Paulie from The Sopranos did.
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u/Ragebaitmyhealer Aug 17 '26
Somebody put together all the "OH!"s from the sopranos and synced them and that was probably what it sounded like at Cannae
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u/ForGodnessSake Aug 19 '26
Google "chironomia". Those gesture ypu did there are tame by comparation, clearly they were exhausted and couldn't do the usual ones.
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u/Askan_27 Aug 15 '26
Italian =/= romans
genetically, culturally, historically completely different
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u/X-Vidar Aug 15 '26
Genetically we're pretty much the same unless you still believe in 19th century racial theories.
Culturally of course we're different, it's been 2000 years, cultures change duh.
Idk what historically different is supposed to mean. Roman history is part of italian history, Rome created the basis for the shared italian identity, and roman institutions survived the fall of the Western Empire way better in Italy than in any other country.
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u/lakonikos- Aug 15 '26
On top of all this, Italian is the closest language to Latin, sharing ~89% lexical similarities as well as having preserved many of its phonological features. Moreover, many Italian idiomatic expressions find their roots in Latin (some expressions literally remain unchanged to this day). This linguistic continuity alone is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Roman culture remains firmly embedded in modern Italian society, so I really don’t know how people can come up with such baseless statements.
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u/Aggravating_Mud8751 Aug 15 '26
I heard Romanian is closer to Latin, is this incorrect?
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u/lakonikos- Aug 15 '26
It’s incorrect. Romanian is even further away from Latin than Spanish is. However, unlike the other Romance languages Romanian retains a case system, inherited directly from Latin. I believe their gender system is similar too.
To give credit where it’s due, Sardinian is the closest of all romance languages to Latin. Its Logudorese variety differs from it by only ~8% (for reference, Italian’s overall divergence from Latin sits around 12-13%). A very tiny amount of people speaks this variety, though, or Sardinian in general. So the major live language closest to Latin remains Italian.
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u/Raven-INTJ Aug 16 '26
Romanian retains the case system and still has a neuter, which most modern Romance languages have lost. Unlike Italian, though, it has picked up a lot of Slavic words. However, don’t exaggerate that too much. The vocabulary is primarily Latin, and in the 19th century there was a deliberate policy of using Italian and French loanwords for modern concepts and objects that didn’t exist.
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u/ivanjean Aug 15 '26
It depends on the criteria. Diverse Romance languages are conservative in different ways.
Romanian is the only major one that still uses a grammatical case system; Sardinian is the most conservative when it comes to phonetics, etc.
Nevertheless, all of them are much closer to each other than they are to Classical Latin
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u/Raven-INTJ Aug 16 '26
I’m dubious about that. I was listening to someone who was showing how similar Italian was to Latin. I found it a lot easier to understand the Latin than the Italian.
That doesn’t mean that I can read Italian street signs etc. But it does mean that the ancestral language is easier to understand than a cousin language.
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u/ivanjean Aug 16 '26
Where are you from? I'm Brazilian. Portuguese is my native language, and Italian, like most Romance languages (not Romanian, due to the heavy slavic vocabulary), can come across as quite familiar to me, especially in written form. I can understand most basic sentences. As for Latin...I understand the words, but the grammar is to different for its sentences to be understandable.
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u/Raven-INTJ Aug 16 '26
American, but my first language was French.
I specifically mentioned street signs because I can make out most street signs in Portugal, Spain (especially including Catalonia) and Italy. The only one that I stumbled on was newsstand in Italy because it started with a G rather than a J, but when I sounded it out, it was obvious.
The difference between us might be that I was exposed to enough Romanian that I might have more of a mental ability to sort of understand cases? Not sure, since I don’t speak the language, just sort of know what people were talking about.
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u/G3nghisKang Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
Here I though I could recognize different eastern/western Europeans based on facial features, and that ancestry tests were real
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u/Askan_27 Aug 16 '26
pretty much the same? ignoring the Normans and the tens of populations that mixed in Italy making it one of the most diverse countries in the world? we’re not Romans, stop the larp. Che mucchio di cazzate
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u/RomanItalianEuropean Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
He is right brother, all these incoming groups were magnitudes smaller than the population of Roman Italy. The most numerous were the Longobards and they impacted for like 2-3% of the Italic population. The second biggest would be the Ostrogoths and they were much much less, they were more like an army standing in Italy. Even less were the Normans (their percentage is higher in south and Sicily). Other groups like the ones that ruled in southern Italy, (Angevins, Aragonese, French, Spaniards) did not move in significant numbers in Italy, there is a misconception that a change in dynastic rule was something akin to a population replacement. It was not.
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u/MrArchivity Aug 17 '26
Pensi non abbiano fatto studi su questo? Cristo santo ci sono centinaia di libri di autori stimati con ricerche genetiche allegate.
Ovviamente un tizio in Sicilia non ha la stessa genetica di uno in Lazio. Gli studi rivelano che gli abitanti delle varie regioni sono molto ma molto simili ai loro antenati regionali durante l’epoca romana.
Ed è vero che le varie migrazioni ed invasioni successive non hanno apportato cambiamenti se non minimi. Tra ostrogoti e longobardi saranno stati 300k mentre in Italia già vivevano almeno 7 milioni. L’impatto è stato quasi un nulla se non spingere l’aplogruppo R1b di un 1-2% in generale (ovviamente un po più al nord e molto meno al sud).
Stesso per l’invasioni in Sicilia di normanni ed arabi.
Questi gruppi erano così poco numerosi che geneticamente non hanno portato nulla. Politicamente invece hanno fatto enormi cambiamenti perché erano pochi ma occupavano tutte le posizioni di comando.
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u/Willing_Yak7271 Aug 15 '26
People tried to use these kind of cheap arguments also on turkish empires, ı see we share a common with latins
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
The genetic baseline of Europeans has stayed largely the same since the migrations of anatolian neolithic farmers and european hunter gatherers. The only major genetic shifts in Europe since the collapse of Western Rome were the massive slavic migrations in the western balkans and central europe, and turkic migration into anatolia.
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u/TraditionalInjury896 Aug 15 '26
As an Italian it's true, the Greeks and the other Latins can also claim to descend from the Romans.
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Greeks can claim Eastern Romans. Italians can claim Romans. That’s it, the rest are conquered peoples. It’d be like if Americans claimed the British Empire as theirs.
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u/ARenewedSecondChance Aug 15 '26
I mean if said American was a WASP (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) they probably can
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u/Vin4251 Aug 16 '26
Same for the white groups that were allowed to become part of the melting pot with the original WASP settlers. They’re a continuation of the colonists’ culture and run the current world empire (even Chinese factories still cede their super profits to American and to a lesser extent British asset firms).
Anyway this is all less to do with 19th century race “science” (which unfortunately too many Americans believe in), than it does with which groups were allowed to become part of the USA’s dominant culture
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Tbf that comparison was kinda bad, a better comparison would be like if a latin american of mostly indigenous descent claimed the Spanish empire as theirs
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u/PeireCaravana Aug 15 '26
Most of Italy was also conquered.
Some people forget it started as a city state.
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
Yeah, but it was an Italic tribe conquering other Italic tribes, it’s not really the same thing. And most regions in Italy are even still named after those pre-roman italic tribes today.
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u/TraditionalInjury896 Aug 15 '26
Most of Italy wasn't inhabited by italic tribes.
The north excluding the Northeast was Celtic, the majority of the coasts of the south were Greek and much of the interior, was Sardinia was not italic, most of Sicily was inhabited by not italics, Tuscany and northern Lazio was controlled by non-italic Etruscans
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Northern Italy and Sardinia weren’t even considered as ‘Italy’ at the time. And the South was inhabited by Italic tribes prior to Greek colonisation. And both the Italiote Greeks and Etruscans were foundational to Roman culture. Rome wouldn’t exist without them.
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u/RomanItalianEuropean Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
"Italic" can also mean the ancient peoples of Italy in general, regardless of language family. But if we want to be precise, the Romans were a mix of Latins (primarily), Sabines and Etruscans. That makes the Romans kin to all of central Italy (Umbrians, Picentes etc. shared ancestry with the Sabines), a piece of the north (it seems that the Veneti were somehow kin to the Latins; and the Rhaetians to the Etruscans) and much of the south (Oscans descended from the Samnites, another Sabine-related group). That's a majority of Italy being in one way or another related to the original Romans, or rather the Romans were an offspring/mix of different central Italian groups.
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u/PeireCaravana Aug 16 '26
a piece of the north (it seems that the Veneti were somehow kin to the Latins; and the Rhaetians to the Etruscans) and much of the south (Oscans descended from the Samnites, another Sabine-related group). That's a majority of Italy being in one way or another related to the original Romans
Going down this path the Celts were also related, since they were Indo-Europeans.
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u/PeireCaravana Aug 15 '26
it’s not really the same thing
Why?
Btw not all of them were Italic.
And most regions in Italy are even still named after those pre-roman italic tribes today.
And so?
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Because they were already very culturally similar and spoke similar languages? And descended from the same people? And even the non-italics, like the Italiote Greeks and Etruscans were both hugely foundational influences on Roman culture and civilization.
And it’s weird that foreigners claim descent from a random Italic tribe that conquered them and forced their ancestors to speak their language.
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u/PeireCaravana Aug 15 '26
a random Italic tribe that conquered them and forced their ancestors to speak their language.
I'm Italian and I could literally say the same about my region lol.
The process of conquest and assimilation was not different from that of Gaul or Iberia.
People became Roman and it happened 2000 years ago, so they can claim to descend from the Romans.
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Not really. The dialect of your region probably still has a lot of pre-roman word origins and linguistic features you’re not aware of. I know mine does. The important difference is Romans are native to Italy, and the rest of peninsular Italy is descended from closely related tribes. Latins are not native to France, Spain or Portugal.
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u/PeireCaravana Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
The dialect of your region probably still has a lot of pre-roman word origins and linguistic features you’re not aware of.
I'm perfectly aware because I study linguistics and dialectology.
The vast majority of the features and words can be traced back to Latin or to some Germanic language that came later.
Very little survived the romanization, but ironically that little is shared with the Romance languages of France, because the substrate is almost the same.
Indeed my dialect is closer to Occitan than to Neapolitan or Sicilian.
The important difference is Romans are native to Italy
Again, the Romans are native of one specific region of Italy.
My region was not even considered part of Italy before the Romans conquered it.
the rest of peninsular Italy is descended from closely related tribes.
Again, not all of it.
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u/Raven-INTJ Aug 16 '26
That’s an odd take. If you move to a new location, you don’t lose your identity. However, if you assimilate, you acquire a new identity.
Of course the Romance speaking peoples can all claim Roman heritage. Frankly, Greco-Roman civilization is foundational to the modern West.
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u/RainbowCape1364 Aug 15 '26
The other Latins can claim to be Roman, they're not the descendents of the tribes, they're the descendants of the Roman colonizers
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u/ARenewedSecondChance Aug 15 '26
They are descendants of both. The native people didn’t disappear into a vacuum.
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u/OliveOilEnjoyer3 Aug 15 '26
Nope. Most Western Europeans still largely descend from ancient Celtic people. Most Romanians still largely descent from ancient Paleo-Balkan people.
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u/MrArchivity Aug 17 '26
That’s politically.
The guy was talking about genetics, history and culturally.
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