Romance Languages

The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European Language Family , comprise all languages that descended from Latin , the language of the Roman Empire . The Romance languages have more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa ; as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.

All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin , the language of soldiers, settlers, and slaves of the Roman Empire , which was substantially different from the Classical Latin of the Roman literati. Between 200 BC and 100 AD, the expansion of the Empire, coupled with administrative and educational policies of Rome, made Vulgar Latin the dominant native language over a wide area spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Western coast of the Black Sea . During the Empire's decadence and after its collapse and fragmentation in 5th century, Vulgar Latin began to evolve independently within each local area, and eventually diverged into dozens of distinct languages. The oversea empires established by Spain , Portugal and France after the 15th century then spread Romance to the other continents — to such an extent that about 2/3 of all Romance speakers are now outside Europe.

In spite of multiple influences from pre-Roman languages and from later invasions, the Phonology , Morphology , Lexicon , and Syntax of all Romance languages are predominantly derived from Vulgar Latin. As a result, the group shares a number of linguistic features that set it apart from other Indo-European branches. In particular, with only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the Declension system of Classical Latin, and as a result have a relatively rigid SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of Prepositions .

HISTORY

Vulgar Latin

There is very little documentary evidence about the nature of Vulgar Latin, and that little is often hard to interpret or generalize. In any case, many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers — that is, more likely to be natives of the conquered lands than natives of Rome. It is believed that Vulgar Latin already had most of the features that are shared by all Romance languages and distinguish them from Classical Latin — such as the almost complete loss of the declension system and its replacement by prepositions, the loss of the Neuter gender, of comparative inflections, and of many verbal tenses, the use of articles, and the change in pronunciation of and .

Fall of the Empire

The political decadence of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and the large-scale migrations of the period, notably the Germanic incursions, led to a fragmentation of the Latin-speaking world into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, Huns , and Turks , isolating Romania from the rest of Latin Europe. Latin also disappeared from England , which had been for a time part of the Empire. On the other hand, the Germanic tribes that had entered Italy , France , and the Iberian Peninsula eventually adopted Latin and the remains of Roman culture, and so Latin continued to be the dominant language in those areas.

Latent incubation

Between the 5th and 10th century, spoken Vulgar Latin underwent divergent evolution in various parts of its domain, leading to dozens of distinct languages. This evolution is poorly documented, since the written language for all purposes continued to be a Latin close to the Classical variant.

Recognition of the vernaculars

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, some local vernaculars came to be written, and began to supplant Latin in many of its roles. In some countries, such as Portugal, this transition was speeded up by force of law, whereas in other countries, such as Italy, the rise of the vernacular was the result of many prominent poets and writers adopting it as their medium.

Uniformization and standardization

The invention of the press apparently slowed down the evolution of Romance language from the 16th century on, and brought instead a tendency towards greater uniformity of language within political boundaries. In France, for instance, the "Francien" spoken in the region of Paris gradually spread over the whole country, while the Langue D'Oc and Franco-Provençal of the south lost much ground.

History of the name

The term "Romance" comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb ''romanice'', derived from ''romanicus'', in the expression ''romanice loqui'' (which designated the vulgar languages of Latin origin, and which contrasted to ''barbarice loqui'', the non-Latin " Barbarian " languages of the invaders, and ''latine loqui'', used for the Latin taught in schools)¹. From this adverb originated the noun ''romance'', which applied initially to anything written in a ''romanice loqui''.

STATUS

The most spoken Romance language is Spanish , followed by Portuguese , French , Italian , Romanian and Catalan . These six languages are all main and official National Language s in more than one country each. A few other languages have official status on a regional or otherwise limited level, for instance Sardinian and Valdôtain in Italy, Romansh in Switzerland, Galician , and Aranese in Spain.

The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative, or military liability, and a potential source of Separatist movements; therefore they have generally fought to eliminate it — by massively promoting the use of the official language, by restricting the use of the "other" languages in the media, by characterizing them as mere "dialects" — or worse.

In the last decades of the 20th century, however, increased sensibility to the rights of minorities have allowed those languages to recover some of their prestige and of their lost rights. However, it is not clear whether those political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of the non-official languages.

LINGUISTIC FEATURES

Features inherited from Indo-European

As members of the Indo-European (IE) family, Romance languages have a number of features that are shared by other IE subfamilies (such as the Celtic , Germanic , Slavic , and Indo-Persian Languages , Albanian , Armenian , Greek , Lithuanian , etc.), and in particular with English ; but which set them apart from non-IE languages like Arabic , Basque , Hungarian , Tamil , and many more. These features include:

Almost all their words are classified into four major classes — Noun s, Verb s, Adjective s, and Adverb s — each with a specific set of possible syntactic roles.

They have a complex system of word Inflection s to indicate syntactic relationships between words and to create derivative words in the same or in other classes.

Inflection almost always consists in replacing a Suffix of the word, and each word has relatively small set of "suffix slots".

They are Verb-centered ; meaning that the basic Clause structure consists of a verb, expressing an action involving one or more nouns — the Arguments Of The Verb — that play specific semantic roles in the action and specific syntactic roles in the clause.

The verb is inflected to indicate various aspects the action, such as time, completeness or continuation; and also according to the Grammatical Person and Grammatical Number of one of the arguments, the Subject .

The verb can be further modified by adverbs, or by additional nouns preceded by prepositions that indicate their semantic roles.

Nouns are classified into several Grammatical Gender s and grammatical numbers.

Adjectives are noun modifiers; each adjective is normally inflected so as to echo the gender and number of the noun it is attached to.

Verbs are not inflected according to the gender of the subject (unlike Arabic and Hebrew, for example).

Tone (voice Pitch) is used only at the sentence level, e.g. to indicate surprise or interrogation (unlike Chinese and Yorùbá , for example, where pitch changes the meaning of words).

Features inherited from Latin

The Romance languages share a number of features that were inherited from Classical Latin, and collectively set them apart from most other Indo-European languages.

They have lost the Dual number, retaining only Singular and Plural .

They all have retained at least three of Latin's verbal tenses: present, e.g. ''DĪCIT'' "he says", past perfect ''DĪXIT'' "he said", past imperfect ''DĪCEBAT'' "he was saying".

For each tense, there are usually six distinct verbal inflections, encoding each of the three persons (I, you, he/she/it) and two numbers (singular and plural) of the subject.

They all had originally two Copula verbs, derived from the Latin ''STARE'' (mostly used for "temporary state") and ''ESSE'' (mostly used for "essential attributes"). However, the distinction was eventually lost in some languages, notably French, which now have only the first copula.

All those languages are written with the "core" Latin Alphabet of 22 letters — ''A'', ''B'', ''C'', ''D'', ''E'', ''F'', ''G'', ''H'', ''I'', ''L'', ''M'', ''N'', ''O'', ''P'', ''Q'', ''R'', ''S'', ''T'', ''V'', ''X'', ''Y'', ''Z'' — subsequently Modified And Augmented in various ways.

In particular, the letter ''K'' is rarely used in Romance languages — mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words, as it was in Latin.

In the case of standard Italian, the Latin stressed pronunciation of double consonants is preserved.

Features inherited from Vulgar Latin

Romance languages also have a number of features that are not shared with Classical Latin. Most of these features are thought to be inherited from Vulgar Latin.

There are no Declension s, that is, nouns are no longer altered to indicate their grammatical roles. (An exception is Romanian , which retains a combined Genitive / Dative case. Also, Old French initially had an Oblique Case .)

There are only two Grammatical Gender s, having lost the Neuter Gender of Classical Latin . (An exception is Romanian , which retains Neuter Gender )

The normal clause structure is SVO , rather than SOV , and is much less flexible than in Latin.

Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.

Many Latin constructions involving nominalized verbal forms (e.g. the use of accusative plus infinitive in Indirect Discourse and the use of the Ablative Absolute ) were dropped in favor of constructions with subordinate clauses.

There are definite and indefinite Grammatical Article s, derived from Latin Demonstrative s and the numeral ''UNUS'' ("one").

The Latin Future Tense was replaced by new synthetic future and Conditional Tense s, based on Infinitive + present or imperfect tense of ''HABERE'' ("to have"), fused to form new Inflection s.

Most Latin synthetic perfect tenses were lost, generally replaced by new compound forms with "to be" or "to have" + past Participle .

There is an elaborate system of pronouns which partially retain the distinction between Latin cases, some of them being Clitic .

The distinction between Long And Short Vowels , believed to have been present in Classical Latin, was lost and replaced by a system of Lexical Stress , where one vowel of each word is pronounced slightly louder than the rest.

Many Latin combining prefixes were incorporated in the lexicon as new roots and verb stems, e.g. Italian ''estrarre'' ("to extract") from Latin ''EX-'' ("out") and ''TRAHERE'' ("to drag").

The Latin letters ''C'' and ''G'' — which usually sound like and — have other sounds when they come before ''E'' and ''I''. (See below.)

Other shared features

The Romance languages also share a number of features that were not the result of common inheritance, but rather of various cultural diffusion processes in the Middle Ages — such as literary diffusion, commercial and military interactions, political domination, influence of the Catholic Church, and (especially in later times) conscious attempts to "purify" the languages by reference to Classical Latin. Some of those features have in fact spread to other non-Romance (and even non-Indo-European) languages, chiefly in Europe. Here are some of these "late origin" shared features:

Most Romance languages have polite forms of address that change the person and/or number of 2nd person subjects, such as the ''tu''/''vous'' Contrast in French or the ''tu''/''Lei'' contrast in Italian.

They all have a large collection of prefixes, stems, and suffixes retained or reintroduced from Greek and Latin, used to coin new words. Most of those have cognates in English, e.g. "tele-", "poly-", "meta-", "pseudo-", "dis-", "ex-", "post-", "-scope", "-logy", "-tion".

They all replaced the Latin letter ''V'' by a new letter ''U'' when it had a vowel sound.

Many of them introduced the new letter ''J'' (originally the Semitic version of ''I'', which in time acquired various sounds in different languages).

They are all presently written in a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet, "uppercase" and "lowercase", with similar rules for their usage.

They also use very similar sets of punctuation characters.

DIVERGENT FEATURES

In spite of their common origin, the descendants of Vulgar Latin have many differences. These occur at all levels, including the sound systems, the orthography, the nominal, verbal, and adjectival inflections, the auxiliary verbs and the semantics of verbal tenses, the function words, the rules for subordinate clauses, and, especially, in their vocabularies. While most of those differences are clearly due to independent development after the breakup of the Roman Empire (including invasions and cultural exchanges), one must also consider the influence of prior languages in territories of Latin Europe that fell under Roman rule, and possible inhomogenities in Vulgar Latin itself.

It is often said that Portuguese and French are the most innovative of the Romance languages, each in different ways, that Sardinian and Romanian are the most isolated and conservative variants, and that the Languages Of Italy other than Sardinian (including Italian ) occupy a middle ground. Some even claim that Languedocian Occitan is the "most average" western Romance language. However, these evaluations are largely subjective, as they depend on how much weight one assigns to specific features. In fact all Romance languages, including Sardinian and Romanian, are all vastly different from its common ancestor.

Romanian (together with other related minor languages, like Aromanian) in fact has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans , such as Albanian , Bulgarian , Greek , and Serban . These features include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (''cer'' = "sky", ''cerul''= "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called the Balkan Linguistic Union , may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.

Sound changes

The vocabularies of Romance languages have undergone massive change since their birth, by various phonological processes that were characteristic of each language. Those changes applied more or less systematically to all words, but were often conditioned by the sound context or morphological structure.

Some languages have dropped letters from the original Latin words. French, in particular, has dropped all final vowels, and sometimes also the preceding consonant: thus Latin ''LUPUS'' and ''LUNA'' became Italian ''lupo'' and ''luna'' but French ''loup'' and ''lune'' . Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian ( Daco-Romanian ) lost the final vowels in most masculine nouns and adjectives, but retained them in the feminine. Other languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Franco-Provençal, and the Southern dialects of Romanian have retained those vowels.

Some languages, like Portuguese, Spanish, and Venetian , have lost the final vowel ''-E'' from verbal infinitives, e.g. ''DĪCERE'' → Portuguese ''dizer'' ("to say"). Other common cases of final truncation are the verbal endings, eg. Latin ''AMĀT'' → Italian ''ama'' ("he loves"), ''AMĀBAM'' → ''amavo'' ("I loved"), ''AMĀBAT'' → ''amava'' ("he loved"), ''AMĀBATIS'' → ''amavate'' ("You pl. loved"), etc..

Sounds have often been dropped in the middle of the word, too; e.g. Latin ''LUNA'' → Portuguese ''lua'', ''CRĒDERE'' → Spanish ''creer'' ("to believe").

On the other hand, some languages have inserted many Epenthetic vowels in certain contexts. For instance Spanish and Portuguese have generally inserted an ''e'' in front of Latin words that began with ''S'' + consonant, such as ''SPERŌ'' → ''espero'' ("I hope"). French has gone the same way, but then dropped the ''s'': ''SPATULA'' → ''épaule'' ("shoulder").

Lexical stress

The position of the stressed syllable in a word generally varies from word to word in each Romance language, and often moves as the word is inflected. Sometimes the stress is lexically significant, e.g. Italian ''Papa'' ("Pope") and ''papà'' ("daddy"), or Spanish imperfect subjunctive ''cantara'' ("he would sing") and future ''cantará'' ("he will sing"). However, the main function of Romance stress in appears to be a clue for Speech Segmentation — namely to help the listener identify the word boundaries in normal speech, where inter-word spaces are usually absent.

In Romance languages, the stress is usually confined to one of the last three syllables of the word. That limit may be occasionally exceeded by some verbs with attached clitics, e.g. Italian ''mettiamocene'' ("let's put some of it in there") or Spanish ''entregándomelo'' ("delivering it to me"). Originally the stress was predominatly in the next-to-last syllable, but that pattern has changed considerably in some languages. In French, for instance, the loss of final vowels has left the stress almost exclusively on the last syllable.

Formation of plurals

Some Romance languages form plurals by adding (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of the Latin nominative ending ). See La Spezia-Rimini Line for more information.

Plural in : Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian.

Vowel change: Italian, Romanian.

No marking: French (formerly marked with , but this has been lost in the spoken language; plural marking is now indicated on the associated Determiner rather than the noun itself)

Borrowed words

Derivations

Words for "more"

Some Romance languages use a version of Latin ''plus'', others a version of ''magis''.

''Plus''-derived: French ''plus'' , Italian ''più'' , dialectal Catalan ''pus'' (this word is exclusively used on negative statements in Mallorcan Catalan), Romansh

''Magis''-derived: Portuguese (''mais'', mediaeval Galician-Portugueses retained both versions: ''mais'' and ''chus''), Spanish (''más''), Catalan (''més''), Occitan (''mai''), Romanian (''mai''), Italian (''mai'', used only in the construction ''non... mai'', meaning "never")

Words for "nothing"

The common word for "nothing" is ''nada'' in Spanish and Portuguese, ''rien'' in French, ''res'' in Catalan, ''nimic'' in Romanian, and ''niente'' and ''nulla'' in Italian. It is said that all three roots derive from different parts of a Latin phrase ''NULLAM REM NATAM'' ("no thing born"), an emphatic idiom for "nothing".

The number 16

Romanian constructs the names of the numbers 11–19 by a regular pattern which could be translated as "one-over-ten", "two-over-ten", etc.. All the other Romance languages use a pattern like "one-ten", "two-ten", etc. for 11–15, and the pattern "ten-and-seven, "ten-and-eight", "ten-and-nine" for 17–19. For 16, however, they split into two groups: some use "six-ten", some use "ten-and-six":

"Sixteen": Catalan ''setze'', French ''seize'', Italian ''sedici'', Franco-Provençal ''sèze'', Occitan ''setze'', Sardinian ''sédichi''.

"Ten and six": Portuguese ''dezasseis'' or ''dezesseis'', Spanish ''dieciséis''.

"Six over ten": Romanian ''şaisprezece'' (where ''spre'' derives from Latin ''super'').

To have and to hold

The verbs derived from Latin ''HABĒRE'', ''TENĒRE'', and ''ESSE'' are used differently for the concepts of "to have" (something), "to have" ( Auxiliary Verb for complex tenses), and "there is" (existence statements). If we use T for ''TENĒRE'', '''H''' for ''HABĒRE'', and '''E''' for ''ESSE'', the various languages classify as follows:

TTH: Portuguese/Galician.

THH: Spanish, Catalan.

HHH: Occitan, French.

HHE: Romanian, Italian

For example:
:Portuguese: ''(eu) tenho'', ''(eu) tenho feito'', ''há'' (TTH)
:Spanish: ''(yo) tengo'', ''(yo) he hecho'', ''hay'' (THH)
:French: ''j'ai'', ''j'ai fait'', ''il y a'' (HHH)
:Italian: ''(io) ho'', ''(io) ho fatto'', ''c'è'' (HHE)
:Romanian: ''(eu) am'', ''(eu) am făcut'', ''este'' (HHE)

Most of these languages also use the ''TENĒRE'' verb for the sense of "to hold", e.g. Italian ''tieni il libro'', French ''tiens le livre'', Spanish ''tienes el libro'' ("you hold the book"). However, Portuguese normally uses a different verb for that sense, usually ''segurar'' (from the Vulgar Latin ''ASSECURARE'', "to make secure"). On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese informally uses the T verb in the existential sense, besides the '''H''' verb, e.g. ''tem água no copo'' instead of ''há água no copo'' ("there is water in the glass").

To have or to be

Some languages use their equivalent of "have" as an Auxiliary Verb to form the perfect forms (e. g. French ''passé composé'') of all verbs; others use "be" for some verbs and "have" for others.

"Have" only: Catalan, Spanish, Romanian, Sicilian.

"Have" and "be": Occitan, French, Italian.

Unaccusative Verb

Unergative Verb

Portuguese is unique in that its equivalent of the ''passé composé'' — usually made with ''ter'' (Spanish ''tener'') but occasionally with ''haver'' — is uncommon and does not have the same meaning as for other Romance languages. The phrase ''eu tenho feito'' means ''I have been doing'' rather than ''I have done'', which would be rendered with the simple past (''eu fiz'').

I did or I have done

Some languages (e.g. Spanish, and written French and Italian) make a distinction between a Preterite and a Perfect tense (cf. English ''I did'' vs. ''I have done''). Others (Portuguese, spoken French and Italian) contain only one tense, which renders both meanings. French and Italian use the compound past for this, while Portuguese and Sicilian use the simple past.

WRITING SYSTEMS

Letter values

While most of the 22 basic Latin Letters have similar sound values in all Romance languages, the values of some letters have diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notably ''H'' and ''Q'', have been variously combined in Digraph s or Trigraph s (see below) to represent phonetic phenomena not recorded in Latin, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.

A characteristic feature of the the writing systems of all Romance languages is that the Latin letters ''C'' and ''G'' — which usually sound like and — have other sounds when they come before ''E'' and ''I''. This is due to a general Palatalization or Affrication of the and sounds before front vowels, like and , which is believed to have occurred in the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin. Since the written form of all the affected words was tied to the Classical language, the shift was accommodated by a change in the pronunciation rules. However, the new sounds of ''C'' and ''G'' in those contexts differ from language to language.

The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly complex, and subject to considerable regional variation. To a first approximation, the pronunciation of non-combined letters can be summarized as follows:
:''C'': generally , but "softened" before ''E'' or ''I'' in all languages — to in French, Portuguese and Catalan, in Italian and Romanian, or in Spanish.
:''G'': generally or , but "softened" before ''E'' or ''I'' in all languages — to in French, Portuguese and Catalan, to in Italian and Romanian, to in Spanish.
:''H'': silent in French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese; pronounced as in Romanian. Used in various digraphs (see below).
:''J'': pronounced in most languages; in Spanish; in Sicilian and Italian, but normally replaced with '''''I''''' in native Italian words.
:''Q'': always used before '''''U'''''. (See below.)
:''S'': usually between vowels in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan. In Spanish, between vowels.
:''W'': used only in Walloon Language . Pronounced in French, with the exception of words borrowed from English.
:''X'': normally in Old Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, but also , , and , in loan words from Latin or Greek, and in French. Either or or in Spanish. Not used in Italian. Either or in Romanian.
:''Y'': used in French and Spanish as a vowel , and in Spanish also as a consonant , or .
:''Z'': either or in Italian; or in Spanish; in most of the other languages.

Otherwise, letters that are not combined in digraphs generally have the same sounds as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), whose design was in fact greatly influenced by the Romance spelling systems.

Digraphs and trigraphs

Since most Romance languages have more sounds than can be accommodated in the Roman Latin alphabet they all resorted to the use of digraphs and trigraphs — combinations of two or three letters with conventional sound values. The concept (but not the actual combinations) derives from Classical Latin; which used, for example, ''TH'', ''PH'', and ''CH'' when transliterating the Greek letters "θ", "φ", and "χ". Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:

:''CH'': used in Italian and Romanian to get the sound before ''E'' or ''I''; for in Spanish; for in most other languages.
:''ÇH'': used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for Voiceless Palatal Fricative
:''DD'': used in Sicilian for .
:''DJ'': used in Walloon for .
:''GI'': used in Italian and Romanian to get the sound before ''A'', ''O'', or ''U''.
:''GH'': used in Italian and Romanian to get the sound before ''E'' or ''I''; not used in other languages.
:''GL'': used in Italian for .
:''GN'': used in French and Italian for , as in ''champignon'' or ''gnocchi''.
:''GU'': used before ''E'' or ''I'' for the sound or , in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some standards of Norman.
:''JH'': used in Poitevin-Saintongeais for aspirated .
:''LH'': used in Portuguese and Aranese for .
:''LL'': used in Spanish, Catalan, Norman and Dgèrnésiais, originally for but often pronounced , . Pronounced either or , in French.
:''L•L'': used in Catalan for a Long .
:''NH'': used in Portuguese and Aranese for .
:''NY'': used in Catalan for .
:''QU'': used before ''E'' or ''I'' for , in all Romance except Italian, Romanian and some varieties of Norman.
:''RR'': used between vowels in several languages to denote a Guttural R (trilled in Spanish and Italian) instead of simple .
:''SC'': used before ''E'' or ''I'' in Italian for , and in French and Spanish as etymological alternate to .
:''SCI'': used in Italian for before ''A'', ''O'', or ''U''.
:''SH'': used in Aranese for
:''SS'': used in Italian, French, Portuguese and Catalan for between vowels.
:''TH'': used in Jèrriais for (as in English "thick"); used in Aranese for either or

While the digraphs ''CH'', ''PH'', ''RH'' and ''TH'' were at one time used in many words of Greek origin, most languages have now replaced them with ''C/QU'', ''F'', ''R'' and ''T''. Only French has kept these Etymological spellings, which are now pronounced or , , and , respectively.

For most languages in this family, , long consonants are marked with an apostrophe: ''S'S'' is a long , ''SS'S'' is a long , ''T'T'' is a long .

Diacritics and special characters

Diacritics common across Romance languages are the Acute Accent (''á''), the Grave Accent (''à''), the Circumflex Accent (''â''), the Diaeresis Mark (''ü''), the Cedilla (''ç''), and the Tilde (''ñ'', ''ã''). French spelling includes the etymological Ligatures ''œ'' and (more rarely) ''æ''. Romanian has a few diacritics of its own.

An accent mark placed over a vowel may denote Stress , Height , or both. In Spanish, only stress is indicated, with an acute accent. Italian marks stress with a grave accent, except on the Close-mid Vowel s, which are sometimes marked with an acute accent. Catalan marks stress with an acute accent, except on Low Vowel s, which take a grave accent. Portuguese marks stressed vowels with an acute accent, except for Close-mid or Central Vowel s, which take a circumflex accent. In French and Romanian, diacritics just indicate vowel height. French ''é'' is a Close-mid Vowel and French ''è'' is an Open-mid Vowel , like in Italian and Catalan. Romanian ''â'', ''î'', ''ă'' are Central Vowel s, like Portuguese ''â''.

Homophone s are distinguished by a grave accent in Italian and French, and by an acute accent in Spanish.

Upper and lower case

Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "cases" of the alphabet: "uppercase" (or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and "lowercase", derived from Medieval Quill Pen handwriting and adapted by printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In particular, all Romance languages presently capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete Sentence , most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. Text in all upper case is used for emphasis and is generally interpreted as shouting. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizes ''Francia'' ("France") and ''Francesco'' ("Francis"), but not ''francese'' ("French") or ''francescano'' ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.

LIST OF LANGUAGES

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Romance Languages