Romance languages

“ ROMANCE LANGUAGES, the name generally adopted for the modern languages descended from the old Roman or Latin tongue, acted upon by inner decay or growth, by dialectic variety, and by outward influence, more or less marked, of all the foreign nations with which it came into contact. ”

“ The three hundred years from 1200 to 1500 were the years of the Metrical Romances. Metrical means written in verse. Romance meant at first the languages made from the Latin tongue, such as French or Spanish. After a time the word Romance was used to mean a story told in any Romance language. But now we use it to mean any story of strange and wonderful adventures, especially when the most thrilling adventures happen to the hero and heroine.
The Norman minstrels, then, took English tales and made them into romances. ”

“ It is, of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin ready to his hands. ”

“ Every language, then, has its genius; forms of words, idioms, and turns of expression peculiar to itself; by which, independently of other differences, one nation may be distinguished from [x] another. This condition may be produced by various causes; such as soil, climate, conquest, immigration, &c. Out of the old Roman, or Latin, there arose several modern languages of Europe; all known by the generic name—Romance; viz. Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, and Portuguese. These may be called daughters of ancient Latin ”

“ But insistence is laid upon the fact that the transformation of a dialect into a language is a process that usually has required centuries. The transformation of the original Latin language into the modern Latin languages, so called, which include Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, Romance, Roumanian, etc., illustrates the slowness of the process. ”

“ The stimulating, quickening, liberalizing tendency of these chivalric enterprises was one of the most potent forces concerned in the mental movement we are tracing.
Rise of Modern Languages and Literatures.—Between the tenth and the fourteenth century the native tongues of Europe began to form literatures of their own. We have already spoken of the formation and gradual growth of these languages (see p. 386) . As soon as their forms became somewhat settled, then literature was possible, and all these speeches bud and blossom into song and romance. ”

“ But what I say now, as I said at the beginning, is that Latin and Greek are dead languages. For us, for the future, for the competitions of the modern industrial and social era, the classics are no good. For a few ornamental persons a knowledge of them may be a pleasing accomplishment. ”

“ The great value to philologists of the Romance group of languages consists in the fact that they originated in historical times, and the various stages of their growth and development lie before our eyes in a long series of documents. ”

“ Those who adopted it, gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the name of romantic. The term is certainly not inappropriate; the word is derived from romance—the name originally given to the languages which were formed from the mixture of the Latin and the old Teutonic dialects, in the same manner as modern civilisation is the fruit of the heterogeneous union of the peculiarities of the northern nations and the fragments of antiquity; whereas the civilisation of the ancients was much more of a piece. ”

“ There were some who despaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin—cette élégance et copie qui est en la langue Greque et Romaine—that science could be adequately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the dead languages. ”

“ Again, when Christianity came with the authority of Rome and in the Latin language, now imbued with an additional sanctity, there ensued in all nations a struggle between the vernacular and the foreign tongue for obtaining the rank of a literary language—a struggle from which the languages of the Continental nations, as well as of Britain, emerged only slowly and late. ”

“ And the novelists, though in narrative they preserve a scrupulous respect for the literary language, take what licence the dialect and character of their personages permit them. It is from novels, indeed, that future generations will best be able to construct the speech of to-day. With the greatest skill the writers of romance mimic the style and accent of their contemporaries. They put into the mouths of those who, in life, knew no other lingo, the highly-flavoured Slang of the street or the market. ”

“ It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction analogous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, I feel rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day English or American romance. ”

“ Let us give up the preposterous doctrine that Latin must be learned in order to learn French, and let us teach French in order to teach Latin. In so doing we do not sacrifice literature to mere business, for the modern languages have literatures as well as the ancient. There exists a French literature which comprises books of poetry, devotion, philosophy, science, history, politics—a literature not less but more extensive and various than Greek and Roman literatures themselves. ”

“ What we are accustomed to call languages, the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and Spain, must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of speech. The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, and in spite of the tyranny exercised by the classical or literary idioms, the day is still very far off which is to see the dialects, even of such classical languages as Italian and French, entirely eradicated. ”

“ It is in the vocabulary that it is most difficult to define the relations of the common and the literary language. So much of the Latin vocabulary as appears over the whole Romance area comes of course from the everyday language which was used from the mouth of the Ebro to that of the Danube, but it is by no means all. It is more interesting to inquire whether anything can be reconstructed from Romance, and, if so, how much? ”

“ A Romance language is one whose basis is Latin,--not the classic language of literature, but a vulgar or popular Latin spoken in the military camps and provinces. Thus Italian, Spanish, and French were originally different dialects of the vulgar Latin, slightly modified by the mingling of the Roman soldiers with the natives of the conquered provinces. ”

“ As I was myself acquainted with ten languages, I wished to test the ability of this eminent linguist; and therefore proposed that we should leave Italian for the moment, and amuse ourselves by speaking different other languages. Having spoken in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, I said at last:—
‘My friend, I have almost run out my stock of modern languages, except some which you probably do not know.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘the dead languages, Latin and Greek, are matters which every one learns, and which every educated man is familiar with. We shall not mind them. ”

“ The idiom had ceased to be merely corrupt Latin, it was Romance, a definite language on a Latin foundation, but full of words and forms belonging to the numberless races that had inhabited or influenced the south of Gaul.
And now with the final destruction of the old order and language began the process of constructing the new; the first movement of the Romance-literature, the literature which for two centuries was to dominate Europe and to form and found the ideals of life that we call modern. ”

“ Nor can any modern European, who forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words, with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come forward like living bodies, full of expression and character ”

“ SLANG WORDS AND AMERICANISMS. No language is, or ever has been, in the strict sense of the word, pure. All languages are continually borrowing and lending—adopting words from foreign sources, and contributing from their own store to that of others. It is now well known that the ancient Greeks borrowed largely from the Oriental tongues, and lent words and forms to Latin. Latin, again, borrowed from Greek, and contributed to form the modern Italian, Spanish, and French. The modern German language is just now strongly affected by a French influence ”

“ No one of all the modern languages has acquired a greater force and strength than the English, through the derangement and relinquishment of its ancient laws of sound. The unteachable (nevertheless learnable) profusion of its middle-tones has conferred upon it an intrinsic power of expression, such as no other human tongue ever possessed. Its entire, thoroughly intellectual and wonderfully successful foundation and perfected development issued from a marvelous union of the two noblest tongues of Europe, the Germanic and the Romanic. ”

“ This popularity, which arose from the fact that French and Latin had for so long been the language of the ruling section of the community, is still the distinction which marks off our prose from that of other nations. In Italy, for example, the language of literature is practically incomprehensible to the dwellers on the soil. But what English prose has gained in breadth and comprehension by representing the tongue of the people, it has lost in subtlety. ”

“ How many and what foreign languages should be learned may be matter for wide difference of opinion. But so far-reaching is the prevalence of the Latin, as one of the principal sources of our own language, and of other modern tongues, that a knowledge of it is most important. ”

“ It matters not what the poetry may be, whether Oriental, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Hellenic, or German, each and all differ totally in their spirit, emotional impulse, general outlook and expression. ”

“ The English, in spite of their great culture, and their learning, their wonderful power of speaking foreign languages—for every one of the noblemen speaks perfectly not only Greek and Latin, but five155 or six other languages, and is well versed in astrology, music, and chess-playing—the English, I repeat, in spite of all this, have something barbarous at heart, which is awakened after they have partaken much of that nauseous potion called sack. ”

“ Poets were often called in to alter the old or to supply the new, which has occasioned incongruities which probably were not to be found in the original state.
13 Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the university—Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the Greek.
14 The term, the Romantic School, is derived from the langue Romans or Romane, under which comprehensive title all the modern languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of the Latin or Roman language. ”

“ Contrariwise the word romantic, as popularly employed, expresses a shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for sentimental, fanciful, wild, extravagant, chimerical, all evident derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of romance is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of romans. ”

“ From this same union, in which the soul (if I may dare so express myself) was Gothic, while the outward forms and a majority of the words themselves, were the reliques of the Roman, arose the Romance, or romantic language, in which the Troubadours or Love-singers of Provence sang and wrote, and the different dialects of which have been modified into the modern Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ”

“ Finally, came the Norman Conquest, and with it a flood of French words. The English we speak to-day is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish, and French.
As you learn your foreign languages you will be interested to find how many Latin words and forms you are using every day; and as for German and French, there are so many words in these languages resembling our own that you are constantly meeting old friends in the course of your new studies.
For instance:
Some of these words have a common Latin root. ”

“ Every dialect which is made the subject of literary culture is liable to the fate of the Latin; aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as in politics; the needs and interests of the many are more important than those of the few, and must in the end prevail. ”

“ We can do even more. Suppose we had no remnants of Latin; suppose the very existence of Rome and of Latin were unknown to us; we might still prove, on the evidence of the six Romance dialects, that there must have been a time when these dialects formed the language of a small settlement; nay, by collecting the words which all these dialects share in common, we might, to a certain extent, reconstruct the original language, and draw a sketch of the state of civilization, as reflected by these common words. The same can be done if we compare Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Slavonic. ”

“ The Dictionaries of the modern languages were necessitated first by the fact that French had at length ceased to be the living tongue of any class of Englishmen, and secondly by the other fact that the rise of the modern languages and increasing intercourse with the Continent made Latin no longer sufficient as a common medium of international communication. ”