Talk:Romance language
Latest comment: 3 years ago by Surjection in topic RFD discussion: April–October 2020
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Tagged but not listed. Keep, idiomatic. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:27, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
Ridiculously strong keep — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 15:18, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
- Kept, no deletion rationale given. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:35, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
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RFD'd once before, but kept with one vote two votes. This is arguably just Romance (see the senses on that page) + language, and in that sense, not any less SOP than Germanic language, Italic language, whatnot. Also note related discussion at Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Non-English#romaaninen kieli. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 22:59, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
- I think the big question is, which came first? Did the adjective "Romance" come from "Romance language", or did it have its current sense (rather than just "related to Rome") when it was used to describe languages? If "Romance" as an adjective in the current sense came before "Romance language", the latter should be deleted. Otherwise, it should be kept. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:50, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
- It's going to be difficult to determine - the etymology of Romance says that the term was extended for all languages derived from Latin, but not whether this was due to use in Romance language. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 10:09, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
- Rees's Cyclopædia of 1819 has an entry “Romans, Romant, Romanic, or Romance, the polite language formerly ſpoken at the court of France”. After calling French ”only an improvement” (!), the rest of the text gives a more general meaning to the term Romance, mentioning Tuscan, Spanish, “the Romanſh language” spoken “near the ſources of the Rhine and the En”, and Provençal. This suggests that the use of the single term Romance as a noun preceded that of the attributive use for the language family. However, from reading the rambling and not particularly clear full entry, too long to reproduce here, I have the impression that the author thinks that Romance was one specific language that emanated from the French court and spread from there to Spain and Italy, were it was corrupted instead of improved as in France. Only two years later François Just Marie Raynouard published his Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine, in which he explicitly formulated the theory that what we now call the Romance languages were derived from a common post-Latin language. The present view that all in their own way derive from Latin – in other words, that Latin was the most recent common ancestor, and not a hypothetical ancestor dubbed “Romance”, was put forward by George Cornewall Lewis in his 1835 book An Essay on the Origin and Formation of the Romance Languages, in which he writes, “M. Raynouard, however, constantly applies the name of Romance to the language of the Troubadours: and M. Champollion-Figéac, who has since discussed this subject, adheres to his use of the word, and makes the Romance language a common term for the dialects of Provence, [...], and Catalonia. [...] I shall attempt to show that although the ancient language of oc, the language spoken in Southern France and Catalonia, was a Romance language, it was not the Romance language: that it was merely one of the dialects arising out of the change produced in the Latin by the Teutonic invasion.” (pp. 56–57.) A footnote on page 57 points out that George Ellis had already observed that the term Romance in its widest sense had been used for any dialect based on Vulgar Latin. In conclusion, the situation is unclear. The current sense of the term Romance language arose of a reappraisal of the meaning, originally being a SOP of attributive Romance (a putative language being a descendant of Latin and the common ancestor of French, Spanish and Italian). After the change of meaning, is it still an SOP? The first component cannot be Raynouard's Romance, but it could be Ellis's. In that case the meaning is not the one we list for the noun (a group of languages), but instead “any language derived from Vulgar Latin”. But then it is slightly unnatural to keep using (as Lewis does) the forms a Romance language and the Romance languages instead of simply a Romance and the Romances – just like we do not say a patois language or the dialect languages. Therefore I lean towards inclusion. I’d like to see the attestation for the 17th-century date given at Romance; based on the preceding, it appears unlikely that the term had already then the collective sense of our definition. --Lambiam 12:09, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
- I would guess that the attributive noun came first, but I don't know if it really matters. I usually figure that compound entries like oak tree, tuna fish, &c. are unnecessary when they are really not idioms that cannot be understood by the components. But I realize I'm in the minority. -Mike (talk) 17:36, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
- Keep per the non-binding WT:LEMMING: M-W[1], Macmillan[2]. For reference, kept in previous RFD in 2009. If not keep, at least redirect. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:48, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
- Keep per the lemming principle. Khemehekis (talk) 02:09, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
- Keep - Dentonius (my politics | talk) 15:37, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
- RFD-kept - the tag was erroneously removed out of process, but it's clear the consensus is to keep it anyway. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 16:47, 21 October 2020 (UTC)