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

Actually it's Sardinian. Out of the "major" languages, it's Italian, then Spanish, then Romanian. (French is the most divergent by far.) This has been proven by research.


Very poorly. It would be a little easier (but not much easier) than you going to Germany 2000 years ago and trying to understand this sentence:
Þat hauzidaz awiz akrą flauh.​

Or like Xi Jinping landing in Chang'an in 100 AD and trying to understand this sentence:
Kruk ne de gwep te, pe ghak lot gha?​

To be fair, Xi Jinping is familiar with the Analects of Confucius, so he would have very few problems if he could manage to deal with literate people. As I understand it, his calligraphy isn't heinous either, so he'd be quite able to communicate if he didn't slip up and write in simplified characters.

And spoken language barriers wouldn't necessarily be the barrier we might intuit. The guy was born in Beijing, and probably only ever needed to learn Henan and Shaanxi dialects, if those. Both are relatively similar to Mandarin - like adjacent dialects of Italian maybe. But he'd have been around people speaking utterly unintelligible languages his whole life; that's just the reality of China. I would hazard a guess that he'd be able to fudge a conversation better than I might in 18 AD Holstein, even though I'm probably a lot more multilingual than Mr Xi.
 
To be fair, Xi Jinping is familiar with the Analects of Confucius, so he would have very few problems if he could manage to deal with literate people. As I understand it, his calligraphy isn't heinous either, so he'd be quite able to communicate if he didn't slip up and write in simplified characters.
Huh, a little googling suggests that Mr. Xi seems to know at least how to read Classical Chinese fluently. Now, reading isn't writing (especially given a language like Classical Chinese), but yeah, he might have it more easier than I assumed.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
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.
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I'm not sure I buy the Gbe thing, Mauritian Creole grammar is very similar, as is that of Jamaican Patwa. I was interested to see that you are mostly right re. the language family thing, even though it seems absurd to me.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
We are almost completely certain that Vulgar Latin is not a creole.

Though it's worth pointing out that some linguists believe that there is nothing really special about creoles, and that they are just extreme forms of a continuum of language contact. So in effect, all languages are creoles. I don't know how useful the idea is, but there we go.

However, it's true that Vulgar Latin has less of the features which are typical of creoles than English, for example.
 
And spoken language barriers wouldn't necessarily be the barrier we might intuit. The guy was born in Beijing, and probably only ever needed to learn Henan and Shaanxi dialects, if those. Both are relatively similar to Mandarin - like adjacent dialects of Italian maybe. But he'd have been around people speaking utterly unintelligible languages his whole life; that's just the reality of China. I would hazard a guess that he'd be able to fudge a conversation better than I might in 18 AD Holstein, even though I'm probably a lot more multilingual than Mr Xi.
Except the consonant clusters, which are totally absent from any Chinese language today, would be a formidable barrier to any modern Chinese speaker. The lack of tones and disyllabic words and a different sentence structure wouldn't help either.

EDIT: Not entirely sure when tonogenesis really took off in Chinese, but regardless it would still have been pretty incomprehensible to modern day speakers.
 
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Strange, is that spoken/colloquial French? I was always taught it was /sɥi/ , maybe with a hint of /ʃ/ ?
"Suis" in itself is /sɥi/, but the word (some linguists don't even think it's a word) doesn't work alone. It needs a je in front. And when I speak French, I'd say J'suis /ʃɥi/ instead of Je suis with the schwa and all.

Interestingly, I wouldn't say /ʃɥi/ if I mean "I follow" instead of "I am."
 
Huh, a little googling suggests that Mr. Xi seems to know at least how to read Classical Chinese fluently. Now, reading isn't writing (especially given a language like Classical Chinese), but yeah, he might have it more easier than I assumed.

Interesting; I hadn't known he was at quite that level. I knew he had made a personal study of it, and he quotes Confucian classics more than any leader since the 1911 Revolution.
 
Except the consonant clusters, which are totally absent from any Chinese language today, would be a formidable barrier to any modern Chinese speaker. The lack of tones and disyllabic words and a different sentence structure wouldn't help either.

True, true. That said, the tones paralleled existing systems of consonant clusters - people dropping consonants in part used tones to distinguish words that were becoming homophones because of lost phonemes. Which is to say that there might be patterns of consonant clusters to tones that would be relatively intuitive to native speakers - even if they were completely unable to produce the sounds themselves - even if all that is opaque from my perspective as a language learner.

EDIT: Not entirely sure when tonogenesis really took off in Chinese, but regardless it would still have been pretty incomprehensible to modern day speakers.

Tone proliferation was sometime after the fall of the Later Han, and when the Sui and Tang were reforming and merging Northern-Southern Chinese, it was already there. Middle (Tang) Chinese is a lot more recognizable than Classical.
 
True, true. That said, the tones paralleled existing systems of consonant clusters - people dropping consonants in part used tones to distinguish words that were becoming homophones because of lost phonemes. Which is to say that there might be patterns of consonant clusters to tones that would be relatively intuitive to native speakers - even if they were completely unable to produce the sounds themselves - even if all that is opaque from my perspective as a language learner.



Tone proliferation was sometime after the fall of the Later Han, and when the Sui and Tang were reforming and merging Northern-Southern Chinese, it was already there. Middle (Tang) Chinese is a lot more recognizable than Classical.
It's pretty opaque to a native speaker as well. IIRC, tones corresponded to syllable final consonants more than they did to initials, and all the tone splits and merges that have occurred since have basically obliterated any pattern detectable to a non-linguist since most of the Chinese languages outside of the south have lost the majority of final consonants. As a native speaker of Hokkien, which along with the other Min languages arguably kept some key features of Old Chinese that the rest of China did not, having split from Old Chinese before Middle Chinese arose (namely preservation of alveolar stops, some voiced initials, and most of the final consonants), the best I can do is sometimes guess the correct initial consonant in an Old Chinese word.
 
It's pretty opaque to a native speaker as well. IIRC, tones corresponded to syllable final consonants more than they did to initials, and all the tone splits and merges that have occurred since have basically obliterated any pattern detectable to a non-linguist since most of the Chinese languages outside of the south have lost the majority of final consonants. As a native speaker of Hokkien, which along with the other Min languages arguably kept some key features of Old Chinese that the rest of China did not, having split from Old Chinese before Middle Chinese arose (namely preservation of alveolar stops, some voiced initials, and most of the final consonants), the best I can do is sometimes guess the correct initial consonant in an Old Chinese word.

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

I should have remembered the tones were stuck to finals, not initials. Dumb. I use Mandarin and one of the more divergent varieties of Henanese mostly. That means a lot of this sort of thing I encounter on Wiktionary and nowhere else.

I am gradually piecing together survival competency in Cantonese and Wenzhounese, but at this point my insights top out at "oh, they have that sound". I'd love to learn Hokkien, but it seems the new normal is I always put more languages on my plate than I can possibly handle. &)
 
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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).

I think it's reasonable to say based on linguistic analysis that the French Atlantic Creoles aren't Romance languages, being a scientist myself. However, I do think that you also have to note that what is or isn't defined as a language, and what languages are defined to be part of a "family" is often shaped by societal perception rather than linguistic analysis in the popular consciousness. For instance, most Jamaicans I know regard Jamaican Patois, even the forms farthest away from English on the dialect continuum, as being dialects of English even though that's not the case. There's also the case of speakers of Darija and 'Ammiya to both refer to their languages as dialects of Arabic despite mutual incomprehensibility. So likewise, I think speakers of French-derived Creoles defining their languages as "Romance" are typically doing so in order to indicate a sense of kinship with other "Romance" countries, generally in contrast to nearby Anglophone and Protestant countries. It doesn't make the statement any more accurate, of course, but it just goes to show the social dimensions of what languages we consider to be related.
 
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