How intelligible is Latin with Spanish and other modern Romance languages?

-Nouzòt Popá, ki dan syèl-là[...]

I think it's also important to mention that French ortography diverges a lot from its phonology (especially if compared with the other Romance languages). Current Haitian ortography choses to focus on pronounciation and less on etymology, that's one of the reasons why it looks so foreign for a French speaker. It's also true that it has a lot of different grammatical features from African languages, which makes it quite complicated to understand it in a sentence level.

It's also interesting to see that most Creoles keep some archaisms now lost in the mother tongue, like the "nouzòt" (nous autres).
 
French-based or Spanish-based Creoles aren't actually Romance languages, so they aren't actually very relevant.

I don't know, I'm a native speaker of both Haitian Creole and French and growing up my community always thought of them both as Romance languages. It's only anecdotal, but I don't see why the creoles should be left out.

But in spoken French most people would say « on est » instead of « nous sommes. »

Depends on the dialect, I almost exclusively prefer nous sommes to on est, although you'd be right just talking about metropolitan French.

Regarding Haitian Créole, I find it to be a similar experience: I can figure out individual words but the word order, prepositions, conjugations etc. are different and it's hard to make sense of the whole sentence.

It's important to note (having taught French and briefly Creole) that part of the reason Haitian Creole and the other Antillean Creoles diverge so much from French is that they're full of false cognates. It's very common for French speakers to think they recognize a word in Creole only to misuse it entirely, and vice versa. I once heard a French man (from France) trying to speak Creole say "Komman peze w?" and we all just laughed at him because he thought "peze" was cognate with the identically sounding French "peser" or "to weigh" when it actually means "to fuck" (French baiser). I've also had Creole students trying to learn French answer "No" when asked "Are trees living beings?" because the adjective for "living" in French, vivant, is used to mean a person/human in Creole, so they heard the question as "Are trees people?"
 
I don't know, I'm a native speaker of both Haitian Creole and French and growing up my community always thought of them both as Romance languages. It's only anecdotal, but I don't see why the creoles should be left out.



Depends on the dialect, I almost exclusively prefer nous sommes to on est, although you'd be right just talking about metropolitan French.



It's important to note (having taught French and briefly Creole) that part of the reason Haitian Creole and the other Antillean Creoles diverge so much from French is that they're full of false cognates. It's very common for French speakers to think they recognize a word in Creole only to misuse it entirely, and vice versa. I once heard a French man (from France) trying to speak Creole say "Komman peze w?" and we all just laughed at him because he thought "peze" was cognate with the identically sounding French "peser" or "to weigh" when it actually means "to fuck" (French baiser). I've also had Creole students trying to learn French answer "No" when asked "Are trees living beings?" because the adjective for "living" in French, vivant, is used to mean a person/human in Creole, so they heard the question as "Are trees people?"

Quality post on the Kreyol part. My thoughts and experiences exactly, except I lack the linguistic knowledge to fully explain.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
French-based or Spanish-based Creoles aren't actually Romance languages, so they aren't actually very relevant.

The start of the art is that they are. Of course, you could argue they do not really have a parent language, as the chain of natural inter-generational transfer is broken, but tree-based lineages of languages are artificial simplifications in any case.
 

JJohnson

Banned
Very difficult the intelligibility

Differences that I think of the moment
a) Declension or inflexion that in Spanish is keep extensively in verbs (mostly here and difficult for non Romance language speakers) and less in adjectives and articles. In brief Spanish is moderately inflexive compared to Latin.
b) Subject–verb–object (SVO) as the basic and main a sentence structure in Spanish. Latin with the help of being higly inflexive was more free form.
c) grammatical articles (el, la, lo, los, las, un, una, unos, unas) that has gender and number agreement with the noun. Latin lacks definite articles.
d) Less complex or reduced number of grammar case compared to Latin.
e. Frustratingly got rid of -or- and -issim- for comparative/superlative adjective forms in favor of the equivalent of more/most back in Vulgar Latin. If only Spanish had had a Romantic period where that had been restored.
 
Back to the Spaniards ISOTed to the Roman Empire:

It depends when and where - I would say that communicating with the average peasant would be far easier than with the elite in Rome (and/or other major cities). The peasants probably spoke Vulgar Latin by 100-300 AD, I would think.
 
e. Frustratingly got rid of -or- and -issim- for comparative/superlative adjective forms in favor of the equivalent of more/most back in Vulgar Latin. If only Spanish had had a Romantic period where that had been restored.
I've definitely heard Spanish speakers say muchísimo. Even heard my Mexican coworker say muchisísimo once. So it exists, but probably not as commonly as in Italian.
 
(Classical) Latin is unintellegible to modern Italian speakers (and Sardinian almost btw), but reading Latin one can relatively easily get the meaning of a great number of words, possibly even a majority. Grammar structures have completely changed however as did the actual meaning of many important words, especially things like the basic verbs needed for everyday life.
Anyways an example, the Lord's Prayer, wher you can also notice that Sardinian has itself a very different syntax from classical Latin:

LATIN
Pater Noster qui es in cælis:
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in cælo, et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidianum
da nobis hodie;
et dimítte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus
debitoribus nostris;
et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.
Amen.


SARDINIAN (Logudurese)

Babbu nostru chi ses in sos chelos,
santificadu siat su nomene tou,
benzat su regnu tou,
siat fatta sa voluntade tua,
comente in chelu gai in terra.
Dae nos su pane nostru 'e cada die,
perdona nos sos pecados nostros,
comente nois perdonamus a sos depidores,
e no nos lessas ruere in sa tentascione,
libera nos dae su male. Amen.

ITALIAN

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno,
sia fatta la tua volontà, come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione,
ma liberaci dal male.
Amen.

SPANISH

Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,
santificado sea tu nombre;
venga a nosotros tu reino;
hágase tu voluntad
así en la tierra como en el cielo.
El pan nuestro de cada día dánosle hoy;
perdona nuestras deudas
como también nosotros perdonamos a nuestros deudores;
y no nos dejes caer en la tentación,
mas líbranos del mal.

Out of comparison, my (Romance!!!) conlang Dalmatica (http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Dalmatica) reads this way:

Petër nieltrëm fo cëri yas',
ayëxyas'tër Nuam Coi;
Vën'ec ves'ail'ë Coi;
Xaic vuancë Coi
haik tari oic cëri.
Dvaini haimërë pen'ën nieltrëm vuan'ezyes'ken;
yas'koiznipë zëvyëtëz
haik yas'koiznom zëvyëtvarz nieltri;
nuzazaivinipë taindec'aunën,
vaicë yelaivrini ekexi. Amën.
 
I don't agree. What makes something a language or not a language? At the end of the day Creoles are languages with their own grammar and vocabulary, terms such as language, dialect, creole, etc. are sociocultural categories without any scientific meaning.
Creoles are creoles. They don't belong to the language family of their lexicon-giver, they have their own family.
 
The start of the art is that they are. Of course, you could argue they do not really have a parent language, as the chain of natural inter-generational transfer is broken, but tree-based lineages of languages are artificial simplifications in any case.
The chain of transmission that exists for almost all non-Creole languages is broken in the case of creoles. Most linguists do not believe creoles belong to the families of their lexifiers. There are some, like Mufwene (sp.?), but they are the clear minority.

The classical creole has a lexifier and a substrate. Which is the parent? Is Haitian (French lexifier, many substrates but Fon is the most important) Romance or Volta-Niger? The answer is, again, neither.

We also cannot use normal historical linguistics methods (correspondences, etc) to reconstruct *French from a bunch of Caribbean French creoles. For example, "moon" in Haitian is "lalin" but "meat" isn't "lavian," it's just "vian." Whether Haitian has the definite article of the lexifier as part of the word or not appears to be random (except for a strong preference for retaining the article when there's liaison). This normally should not happen in a non-creole.
 
The classical creole has a lexifier and a substrate. Which is the parent? Is Haitian (French lexifier, many substrates but Fon is the most important) Romance or Volta-Niger? The answer is, again, neither.

To what extent isn't that the same relationship between Classical Latin and Modern Romance? Who/what draws the line between a language and a creole? Is there another practical and definitive definition beyond historical context?

We also cannot use normal historical linguistics methods (correspondences, etc) to reconstruct *French from a bunch of Caribbean French creoles. For example, "moon" in Haitian is "lalin" but "meat" isn't "lavian," it's just "vian." Whether Haitian has the definite article of the lexifier as part of the word or not appears to be random (except for a strong preference for retaining the article when there's liaison). This normally should not happen in a non-creole.

This particular observation is only pertinent to French-based Creoles, do you have a similar example in other Creoles?
 
It's only anecdotal, but I don't see why the creoles should be left out.

Just tagging you

To what extent isn't that the same relationship between Classical Latin and Modern Romance?
Not very? French Caribbean creoles are almost entirely French in vocabulary (Haitian has almost no African loanwords) but show extensive Gbe influences in grammar. This accords with the idealized model of a creole, where the entire lexicon comes from the lexifier (here French) but derives its grammar from the substrate.

More fundamentally, French derived from native speakers of V. Latin in Gallia teaching their languages to their children, then their children teaching the variety of V. Latin to their own children, and so on, until they reached the variety of V. Latin that is now called Old French instead. In the case of Haitian, the process was probably basilectalization; slaves learned French from French-speakers, then the second-language speakers of French taught other second-language speakers (new slaves from Africa) their French (which, due to plantation masters not being very interested in teaching slaves perfect French, usually meant French words affixed to a Gbe grammatical system), then those speakers taught other new slaves, and so on until Haitian emerged as a native language from the accumulation of second-language-speaker influences on the original lexifier, French. The process of language transfer is just completely different.

Who/what draws the line between a language and a creole? Is there another practical and definitive definition beyond historical context?
All creoles are fully developed languages. I'm not quite sure what you're asking here.

If you mean the definition of a creole vs a non-creole language, it's kind of vague, but a creole is most simply characterized as a language formed through extreme restructuring in a short period of time due to intense contact between different languages. Sometimes they're de novo, like Hawaiian Pidgin, a creole that evolved when children began learning an English-based pidgin (a pidgin is a very simplified "language" that's never a first language but used to communicate between people who don't otherwise share languages) as their native tongue. In other cases the process was basilectalization. Also possible is a relexicalization of the substrate language, in which the substrate grammar is actively retained but all the vocabulary changed.

Creoles don't abide by the "normal" rules of language transfer, which is 1st speaker --> 1st speaker. They generally have distinctive traits as a result, for instance that the morphology tends to be more restricted relative to the lexifier. In one part of Africa (the southeast DRC I think?) there's a creole known as Shaba Swahili, based on Swahili but mostly learned by speakers of local languages. Since both Swahili and the local languages all belong to the Bantu family, they all share a heavy reliance on noun classes. But despite both the lexifier and the substrate all featuring noun classes, Shaba Swahili removed or reduced many of the Swahili features associated with according for noun class.

All in all, they aren't considered part of the lexifier's language family.

This particular observation is only pertinent to French-based Creoles, do you have a similar example in other Creoles?
Sure. Sranan didibri "devil" (from the devil) vs. Sranan oso "house." We don't have dioso.

This is the type of changes that second-language speakers make (Spanish almohada from al-muẖádda or English alligator from el lagarto), but I can't think of any examples of definite articles sometimes becoming part of the word and sometimes not at random in any 1st speaker --> 1st speaker transfer. Napron --> Apron is the closest I can think of, but even that is far from the level of reanalysis which happened in the formation of e.g. Haitian.
 
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More fundamentally, French derived from native speakers of V. Latin in Gallia teaching their languages to their children, then their children teaching the variety of V. Latin to their own children, and so on, until they reached the variety of V. Latin that is now called Old French instead. In the case of Haitian, the process was probably basilectalization; slaves learned French from French-speakers, then the second-language speakers of French taught other second-language speakers (new slaves from Africa) their French (which, due to plantation masters not being very interested in teaching slaves perfect French, usually meant French words affixed to a Gbe grammatical system), then those speakers taught other new slaves, and so on until Haitian emerged as a native language from the accumulation of second-language-speaker influences on the original lexifier, French. The process of language transfer is just completely different.

I won't argue with you about that, that's what we learn in academy. That said, critically analyzing it, you'll see that most of your arguments are based on historical observation, not the actual "scientific" analysis of the language. In a nutshell, the definition of a creole is more related to the historical process behind it than the blind analysis of language. I've highlighted the interesting parts for you.

Not very? French Caribbean creoles are almost entirely French in vocabulary (Haitian has almost no African loanwords) but show extensive Gbe influences in grammar. This accords with the idealized model of a creole, where the entire lexicon comes from the lexifier (here French) but derives its grammar from the substrate.

The bolded part is the "scientific" definition of a Creole: basically, a language with a lexicon from language A and grammar from language B. Can we all agree on that? Considering only that defintion we can very well say that French is a Latin-based Creole language with a Germanic grammatical system, can't we?

Let's check the first phrase of the Oaths of Strassbourg (the first French text):

English translation: For the love of God [...]

Old French: Pro Deo amur [...]

Modern French translation: Pour l'amour de Dieu [...]

C. Latin translation: Quia caritas Dei [...] / (if we use the word 'amor': Quia amoris Dei)

From this example you can see that the most important difference between Romance languages and Classical Latin is grammar, mostly due to the influence of Germanic substrate. It's also quite telling that linguistics agree that the Standard Average (Western) European sprachbund started to exist during the Middle Ages and, interestingly enough, SAE pretty much summarizes characteristics originate in Germanic grammar borrowed into most Western European languages.

That said, I don't disagree with the fact that the construction of Atlantic Creoles was a much quicker and dramatic event. However, I need also to point out that the main difference between Classical Latin and Romance is the grammatical influence of substrate languages (mostly Germanic). At the end of the day, where do you draw the line between a Creole and a Language? IMHO in history. I admit, however, that's a very personal point of view.
 
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JJohnson

Banned
Indeed. Languages, even Sardinian, change. For instance, English(pre William I) used to sound more like other Germanic languages, Spanish had grammar more like Portuguese, Arabic had syllables now rarely heard outside reciting the Quran, and China ironically spoke a language more like modern Tibetan at one point.
Unrelated to the OP, but someone should create a timeline where China adopted a new, highly simplified alphabet like Korean and Hangul. Imagine how much easier it would be to read Chinese if they had done that about 500 years ago, with a real syllabic/tonal 'alphabet.'
 

samcster94

Banned
Unrelated to the OP, but someone should create a timeline where China adopted a new, highly simplified alphabet like Korean and Hangul. Imagine how much easier it would be to read Chinese if they had done that about 500 years ago, with a real syllabic/tonal 'alphabet.'
I always found what the Koreans did to their own language as interesting.
 

JJohnson

Banned
I won't argue with you about that, that's what we learn in academy. That said, critically analyzing it, you'll see that most of your arguments are based on historical observation, not the actual "scientific" analysis of the language. In a nutshell, the definition of a creole is more related to the historical process behind it than the blind analysis of language. I've highlighted the interesting parts for you.



The bolded part is the "scientific" definition of a Creole: basically, a language with a lexicon from language A and grammar from language B. Can we all agree on that? Considering only that defintion we can very well say that French is a Latin-based Creole language with a Germanic grammatical system, can't we?

Let's check the first phrase of the Oaths of Strassbourg (the first French text):

English translation: For the love of God [...]

Old French: Pro Deo amur [...]

Modern French translation: Pour l'amour de Dieu [...]

C. Latin translation: Quia caritas Dei [...] / (if we use the word 'amor': Quia amoris Dei)

From this example you can see that the most important difference between Romance languages and Classical Latin is grammar, mostly due to the influence of Germanic substrate. It's also quite telling that linguistics agree that the Standard Average (Western) European sprachbund started to exist during the Middle Ages and, interestingly enough, SAE pretty much summarizes characteristics originate in Germanic grammar borrowed into most Western European languages.

That said, I don't disagree with the fact that the construction of Atlantic Creoles was a much quicker and dramatic event. However, I need also to point out that the main difference between Classical Latin and Romance is the grammatical influence of substrate languages (mostly Germanic). At the end of the day, where do you draw the line between a Creole and a Language? IMHO in history. I admit, however, that's a very personal point of view.

An interesting alternate history would've been if French, Spanish, et al, had inherited much more Germanic grammar on their Latin-based lexicon and preserved some older features:

1. simple past as the common past instead of present perfect; beber(to drink) would be commonly bebido, bebides, bebide, bebidemos, bebideis, bebiden in Spanish, for example, rather than having both imperfect and preterite
2. comparative/superlative with -ior- and -ism- infixed: rojo, rojoro, rojismo being red, redder, reddest
3. genitive endings ending in -s for named people at a minimum: Spanish: con Carlas auto "with Carla's car" rather than using "de" all the time; this may expand to 'es' but preserves a distinction in most cases between genitive and plural
4. Use the derived verbs from "esse" (ser, etre, etc) with verbs of motion, location, becoming like Germanic languages have done rather than 'stare' derivations: Spanish: soy andando; French: je suis marchant; soy andado and je suis marcheté for 'I have walked'
5. A more preserved derivation from 'habere' in the daughter languages: Spanish: habeo, habes, habe, habemos, habeis, haben; él habe un auto rojoro que mi 'he has a redder car than me' (pardon my grammar, it's been a few years)
6. Use 'habere' instead of 'tenere' and preserve the distinction between them of 'have, possess' and 'hold, grasp (but not own)'
7. Spanish filio and filia instead of hijo/hija and so on, preserving initial f- and middle -l- instead of changing to h- and -j-
8. Adopt and expand ablaut series from Germanic verbs onto Latin-origin verbs: salir, solo, saleno (type 6 strong verb ablaut); yo soy saleno/salido "I have departed" rather than yo salí

Unlikely, but as some kind of creole between the Goths and Latins or the Gauls, Franks, and Latins, that would've been a cool language to see.
 
In a nutshell, the definition of a creole is more related to the historical process behind it than the blind analysis of language.
We usually exclude second-language speakers in a descriptive grammar or such because a language is defined by the way native speakers speak. Native speakers can always make certain types of mistakes, that's why tongue-twisters are a thing, but it's an axiom of linguistics that native speakers are always grammatically correct. By contrast, second-language learners make mistakes all the time, including grammatical ones. A vegetarian Fon slave saying Moi pas mange viande is not a normal evolution of grammar in the same way French speakers using on est instead of nous sommes would be.

Going back to the original topic of whether French Atlantic Creoles are Romance languages, basilectalization is sufficient to provides a break in the normal type of transmission so that it's pointless to call e.g. Haitian a Romance language, since its formative stages appear to have been shaped entirely by second-language speakers (no pidgin stage is attested for Haitian).

Old French: Pro Deo amur [...]
Constructions akin to pro Deo amur, like courrouz le roi (Modern French courroux du roi; courrouz de roi actually connoted "anger toward the king") or fille le roi, actually survived well into Middle French, so their disappearance wouldn't seem to have much to do with Germanic.

SAE pretty much summarizes characteristics originate in Germanic grammar borrowed into most Western European languages.
That's not really a fair appraisal of SAE. There are a lot of Germanic elements, but things like the HAVE-perfect (one of the most distinctive SAE features) is likely to be from Romance (there are no HAVE-perfects in Old High German until the 9th century, only 0.8% of Old English verbs referring to the past use it, etc). Other characteristics, like A-and-B conjunction, long predate the Migration Period.

I will also argue that going from pro Deo amur to pour l'amour de Dieu in almost 1000 years is not any evidence of creolization, while a change of Ce que vous avez dit, c'est vrai to Ça vous dit là, c'est vrai, with acting as a definite article of all things (in Haitian orthography sa ou di a, se vwe), in less than 200 years, is very clear evidence of creolization.

A creole necessitates extreme restructuring in a short period of time.
 
An interesting alternate history would've been if French, Spanish, et al, had inherited much more Germanic grammar on their Latin-based lexicon and preserved some older features:


4. Use the derived verbs from "esse" (ser, etre, etc) with verbs of motion, location, becoming like Germanic languages have done rather than 'stare' derivations: Spanish: soy andando; French: je suis marchant; soy andado and je suis marcheté for 'I have walked'

To an extent this currently exists: one can say "je suis en train de ________" to speak of something you are currently in the process of doing. Also certain verbs (frequently involving motion) do in fact use être as their auxiliary rather than avoir - "je suis arrivé, je suis entré, etc.
 
Even if you know the context you can often connect wrong dots or translate words to words with similar meanings but not exactly correct, all in all it would take effort to start to get some on the spot ability to understand, plus we are not even talking about the oral aspect of it we can't exactly test, with all the Latin->Romance consonants shifts(hard Cs, V being /w/, I being /j/ and so on)

I agree. But it can also depend on the quality of the translation being sought.

For example, with out context, I could see myself thinking that the latin Dimmite seems to correspond to the modern Spanish verb diminuir (diminish). Then translating it as: "diminish our debts". Likewise, with out context I would probably translate the latin libera nos a malo using the modern Spanish verb liberar and get: "You set us free from a bad condition."

Though none of the above is good enough for a good translation of Forgive us our sins.... deliver us from evil, it is enough to get a vague meaning.
 
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