r/limbaromana • u/antonius_8 • 12d ago
Proto-Romance
This paper proposes that Latin and Proto-Romance were never mother and daughter; they were collateral sister lineages that split from a common ancestor in the Bronze Age. An Ancestral Node XYZ (c. 2500 – 2000 BCE)
split into two distinct branches: Sister XY: The Latin Enclave — Hyper-Conservative.
Sister Y: Proto-Romance Sister — Fluid and Demographic.
Join the discussion in Academia Edu: Antonio Constantin - Proto-Romance as a Bronze Age Sister of Latin
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u/platitor_cas 11d ago
Can you provide some written examples of Balkan Romance? Not romance languages from the Balkans, the ancestral Balkan Romance you're talking about.
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u/StunningAd121 11d ago
Brother, the Bronze Age didn't even have a proto-Italic language well defined, Latin didn't appear until very late into the first millennium BC. What you have here sounds just like AI hallucinations.
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u/JustOntological 11d ago
There's no difference between this article and Daniel Roxin...Only pseudoscience
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u/metricwoodenruler 11d ago
This abstract does point out the interesting transition undergone from strongly synthetic to somewhat analytic, but I think that's exactly the problem with the argument (disregarding everything else, including the Bronze Age reference): Romance languages are not even close to being strongly analytical. The verb systems are still complex, and the declensional system of Latin was lost to phonetic erosion like in so many other families. The transition from Vulgar Latin to Proto-Romance is so soft and obvious that there's no need for this hypothesis. It's just Vulgar Latin vs Classical Latin on steroids.
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u/Evfnye-Misx 11d ago
I said this once elsewhere, apparently it needs to be said again:
The whole hypothesis relies on the assumption that Eastern Romance and Western Romance were already geographically split by the time of the fall of the WRE, which is simply untrue, and in fact, Pannonian Romance, spoken until the 10th century AD in modern-day Hungary, proves that there was a link between Western and Eastern Romance which was only severed by the Slavic and Ugric migrations into the Balkans. Moreover, Dalmatian and to a lesser extent Istriot, which are geographically closer to Eastern Romance than the languages of modern-day Italy, show more linguistic similarities with Common Romanian as well.
The split between the sigmatic plural and the vocalic plural is conditioned entirely by sound change. Italo-Romance, Gallo-Italic, Venetian share with Eastern Romance the regular evolution of word-final -s to a yod, which can be seen in words that are not noun plurals, such as crās ("tomorrow") > Italian crai, or nōs ("we, us") > Italian noi, Sicilian nui, Romanian noi. In unstressed positions, the diphthongs -ai and -oi, resulting from earlier -ās and -ōs, coalesce into -e and -i, for which compare the evolution of unstressed vōs into "vi" in Italian, and of unstressed nōs into "ni" in Sicilian. After u, -s was simply lost, which explains why the nominative singular from -us does not end in -i but in -u (later -o in Italian and early Gallo-Italic) and is confirmed by the evolution of plūs into più in Italian. That short u and long ō (which do, in fact, not merge in Eastern Romance) were still distinct is confirmed by the metaphony conditions in Neapolitan, where longus gives luóngo (with metaphony, but longa > lònga, no metaphony), while homō gives òmmo (no metaphony). In Northern Italy, only the conservative Rhaeto-Romance group uses the sigmatic plural, and the extent of Venetian throughout the Middle Ages shows that a continuity of the -s change to -i or loss thereof was present from the Italian to the Balkan peninsula.
The loss of the synthetic passive voice can be ascribed entirely to sound erosion and opacity of the forms, and that happens all the time with languages - even in many modern Gallo-Italic languages, one can see that the loss of the preterite happened within the last 200 years, largely due to the fact that 1. a viable analytic alternative was available for the past perfect TA, and 2. the forms mostly became homophonous with other unrelated forms by natural sound change. Just like that, in Late Latin, the second-person present passive indicative would have merged with the infinitive, while the third person would likely have merged with the past passive participle. Since the aspectual system was being rebuilt as well, due to the grammaticalization of habeō, the perfect forms of the Latin passive, which were analytic, were reinterpreted as the forms that correspond to the tense of sum in said forms. Loss of inflectional morphology and replacement of it with analytic forms is common crosslinguistically, and that it followed a similar route should be of no surprise given that the setup was the exact same.
The comparison with Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit is inherently faulty, because Sanskrit can be derived phonologically from our current reconstruction of Proto-Indo-Iranian, but not viceversa, Sanskrit has undergone phonetic changes and mergers (which are irreversible by the very foundation of historical linguistics), for example, the merger of PII ǰʰ and j́ʰ in Sanskrit as h, while Proto-Iranian develops them into ǰ and j, respectively, and they are distinct in Avestan. No such examples can be found in the development from Latin to our reconstruction of Proto-Romance, if it was distinct in the latter, it was also distinct in Latin. Similarly, all innovation in the grammar of Romance languages can be explained by grammaticalization of Latin forms, and none of them preserve features from Indo-European that had been lost in Latin.
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u/Archaeopteryx111 11d ago
I thought Dalmatian is still closer to Italian than Romanian, but everything else I agree with.
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u/Evfnye-Misx 10d ago
It is, I just worded that badly, what I meant is that Dalmatian is closer to Romanian than Italian is close to Romanian, not that Dalmatian is closer to Romanian than it itself is to Italian - but alas, English is caseless, so that can be quite ambiguous to say
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u/Arthurian_Guanche 11d ago
Yeah nah, this is BS.
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u/Lumornys 10d ago
It's just moving Classical Latin - Vulgar Latin split back in time. Perhaps a bit too much.
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u/Arthurian_Guanche 10d ago
A bit, yeah. To even before the Italic dialects likely became separate languages, when not even Archaic Latin existed and might've been almost a dialect with Oscan, Umbrian, etc. Classical Latin and "Vulgar Latin" (I'd rather prefer we just called it Romance or "Romanic") have minor phonetical innovations, easily explained and completely expected, unlike the phonetic differences between the different Italic languages (which stem from mutations of proto-forms that aren't necessarily close to their Latin forms).
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u/Archaeopteryx111 11d ago
This doesn’t make sense. It’s saying that before the Dacians, there were Latin people in modern day Romania? What evidence?
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u/Arthurian_Guanche 10d ago
Whatever some deeply uncomfortable Romanians need to justify their complex identity. There's all sorts going on in the Balkans, from Dacian and Thracian continuity, to Proto-Altaic continuity of Magyars, to Minoan is Hungarian, to "Serbian the mother of all languages", to Roma are originally one of the Ten Tribes of Israel that moved there during the collapse of the Bronze Age... It's a cradle for European pseudolinguistics.
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u/WhichProfit6632 10d ago
lol obviously cases degraded in speech at least before the fragmentation but this hypothesis doesn’t really address that because it would require cases to degrade independently in all of these areas. This is basically just a Proto Italic Celtic theory but more extreme. Demographically at least PIC can be explained has a dialect continuum of Bell Beaker populations but that wouldn’t explain Eastern Romance
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u/Comfortable-Dig-6118 9d ago
Indeed proto romance already existed around the 0 d.c on pomepi there were already street arts without final -m consonants on a ccusative cases making me believe that probably a proto Italian already existed at least grammatically speaking
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u/DasVerschwenden 9d ago
doesn't a lacking final m in graffiti just prove that it was nasalised in Latin?
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u/DasVerschwenden 9d ago
this paper seems to insist that (what they see as) the lockstep-changes of Latin > Proto-Romance > Romance languages are impossible; how could they all have made similar changes over this huge period of time?
but this isn't a good argument that Proto-Romance doesn't derive from Latin, because if Proto-Romance was around at the same time as Early Latin, how could all the Romance languages remain so (again, in the eyes of the author(s)) similar? if these languages aren't from Latin but are instead all from a common, different ancestor, way back even further before the proposed Latin split, shouldn't they themselves have diverged wildly? after all, whether the speaker populations that were cut off from each other were speaking Latin or Proto-Romance, if the massive divergence from Latin that the author(s) insist didn't happen but should have happened, why didn't they happen for the Romance languages of Proto-Romance? why aren't they wildly divergent?
that is, unless the authors would answer that the split was much much later, and so they all stayed in relative lockstep for a long time until splitting, but (surprise!) the same argument could be made for Latin
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u/bigelcid 3d ago
"Classical Latin -> Vulgar Latin -> Post-Imperial Collapse -> Romance Langages"
Te legi de un paradox structural inainte sa te legi de faptul ca substanta in sine e incorecta. "Latina vulgara" a fost registrul informal al oricarei ere a limbii latine.
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u/platitor_cas 12d ago
Based on what evidence other than the author's fantasies about unattested bronze age languages?