Is Latin an Italic or a Romance language by cross-linguistic categ?

[Paul Hopper]

Yuri,

Thanks for sharing your research with us. Could you tell us how your work
relates to that of Fred Agard, who in the 1950s (or early'60s) did a
similar project comparing surface phonetic features in Romance?

Paul




On Wed, March 17, 2010 17:14, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
> Dear Funknet colleagues, cross-linguistic categorization is quite an
> interesting topic to discuss. Let us not forget phonetics.
> Cross-linguistic categorization in phonetics may give some new clues for
> language taxonomy or language classification. Some time ago it was a
> common place in linguistics that Latin is a Romance language. However,
> according to the modern classification Latin is an Italic language.
> Nevertheless, we know that Latin is the parent language for all the
> Romance languages. Let us analyse its place from the phono-typological
> point of view. The ordered series of the phono-typological distances to
> the centre of the Romance languages: 17.30 Moldavian
> 18.42 Latin
> 20.24 - Rumanian
> 20.54 Italian
> 21.73 -Spanish
> 30.27 - Portuguese
> 51.17 - French
> The least typical Romance language is French. What ideas have you got to
> share with me about the most and the least typical Romance language from
> the phono-typological point of view? Looking forward to hearing from you
> to yutamb at mail.ru  in what journal do you advise me to publish the
> results of my investigation? Yours sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev,
> Novosibirsk, Russia
> Linguists may ask about Latin. We all know that Latin is the parent
> language for all those Romance languages listed above. Actually, Latin
> has the following phono-typological distances: Latin - Moldavian = 5.58
> Latin - Italian = 6.96
> Latin - Rumanian = 8.66
> Latin - Spanish = 15.09
> Latin - Portuguese = 28.42
> Latin - French = 45.81
> Why is Moldavian the closest to Latin? Was Latin sound picture preserved
> in Moldavian better? Now Latin is not considered to be a Romance language
> but Italic. Should we reconsider this new classification and return Latin
> back to the cluster of Romance languages? We can say many words that
> Latin is the Italic language but the numerical analysis clearly show that
> Latin is a Romance language. At least by its speech sound picture.
> Looking forward to hearing from you to yutamb at mail.ru  in what journal do
> you advise me to publish the results of my investigation? Yours sincerely
> Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia
>
>
>


-- 
Paul J. Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213