Language  |
Beauty & a key
to knowledge |
This page began with a project to learn how to format a table in HTML, but I had to have something to put in the table and this is what I chose. As it took shape, I began to see patterns emerging which did not surprise me a great deal, but confirmed things I already knew. The table highlights certain well known facts about the languages of Europe which I have studied. For example, it makes it clear that German and Dutch are remarkably similar. There are differences in pronunciation and consequently in spelling, but the two languages form part of a language continuum covering a huge swathe running from the North Sea to the Alps. English, which is related to the two languages, differs markedly from them and this is because, for hundreds of years, it developed in relative isolation and then underwent significant influence from the North Germanic speech of the Scandinavian settlers. The effect they had on English is far more profound than that produced by the Norman Conquest, which introduced a French-speaking élite.
Similarly, the close relationship between the Romance languages of western Europe is discernible, while there are noticeable differences between them and Romanian, which developed in isolation for hundreds of years and underwent influence from the languages of its neighbours, particularly the Slavs.
Something that struck me is that the two languages which are out on a limb, English and Romanian, both developed, independently of each other, the habit of placing a marker in front of infinitives. This is not done in the other languages to the same extent, although Dutch uses te and German uses zu in some contexts.
Common verbs (infinitives) | West Germanic | | Romance | Italic |
| | Romanian | |
| English | German | Dutch | | French | Spanish | Italian | long(1) | short(2) | Latin(3) |
| to be | sein | zijn | | être | ser | essere | fire(4) | a fi(4) | esse(5) |
| to have | haben | hebben | | avoir | haber | avere | avere | ^a avea(6) | habēre |
| to do | tun, machen | doen, maken | | faire | hacer | fare | facere | a face | facere |
| (can) | können | kunnen | | pouvoir | poder | potere | putere | ^a putea(6) | ^posse(7) |
| Notes | |
| 1) | This is used only as a verbal noun and is now quite rare. |
2)
| This is the more common form of the infinitive and is used after finite verbs, although this construction is increasingly replaced by a subordinate clause with să and the subjunctive. |
| 3) | This is the ancestor of the Romance languages and is shown for comparison. |
4)
| Strangely an f has appeared in the Romanian infinitive. However, there is one in certain Latin forms of the verb, e.g. fui and futurus. |
| 5) | Esse appears to have been replaced in Late Latin by the more regular *essere. |
6)
| Verbs derived from the Latin second conjugation have acquired an extra a in the short form, no doubt because the e is stressed in the long form and has evolved into the diphthong ea. |
7)
| Posse appears to have been replaced in Late Latin by the more regular *potēre. However, in the first person singular of the present tense possum has survived in Italian as posso, whereas in Spanish it has been replaced by *poto, which has evolved into puedo. French pouvoir appears to be derived from *potēre by way of forms such as poeir and pooir. (The asterisk denotes an assumed intermediate form which may not be attested in any written document.) |
- Posted 1 February 2017.
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