The Almost Romance Languages

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Reading time: 15-20 minutes

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If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbrella term for a big group of modern tongues, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and Romanian. The key criterion behind this grouping is that they (and many more besides) are all linguistic descendants of Latin.

As the Roman state expanded beyond its original central-Italian heartland, its legionaries and ruling class spread its de facto official language across the conquered territories. Wherever the Romans ended up, people began to speak Romanly. In much of the empire, Latin went from an alien language of invaders, to an elite language of administrators, to a prestige language of general society, and finally to a mother tongue for all. This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason behind the Romance family and its wide spread.

While we do have this concrete historical reason for saying whether a language is a Romance one or not, matters aren’t clear cut. All of the accepted Romance languages include things that don’t have a Latin origin. These may pre- or post-date the arrival of the Romans. The French in France for example has its vestigial vigesimal counting system, calculating eighty as ‘four-twenties’ (quatre-vingts), which is a possible legacy of Gaulish. Spanish has gained many words from Arabic, thanks to the Islamic states of medieval Iberia. Romanian vocabulary likewise includes words of an unclear pre-Roman substrate language, as well as from local Slavic speech which later arrived on the scene.

Does this then make French, Spanish and Romanian ‘bad’ or ‘partial’ Romance languages? No! It does not, but it’s a good reminder that recognising membership of a language family isn’t an easy binary yes/no. Family member is a metaphor and an imprecise status, based on estimation, impression, history and certain fundamental qualities, and recognised by scholars looking in from the outside. Language is infamously hard to pin down.

Latin would have competed with local languages for some time, slowly gaining ground in different social circumstances, different demographics and different generations. The adoption of Latin was not a simple switch, but rather affected the many components of language (vocabulary, morphology, phonology, etc.) at different rates. We can imagine that a Gaul in 52 BC would have good reason to adopt some specific kinds of Latin words, like military terms, but no reason to give up the endings of Gaulish grammar. There would have been some aspects of local language that the linguistic newcomer took much longer to affect, or even never touched at all. There may even have been local influences on Latin.

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So, with all that in mind, I’d like to offer some nuance to our understanding of the Romance family, and introduce you to two Almost Romance languages.

Now, this is a tongue-in-cheek term of my own, with basically no scientific justification, but it can serve at least to make us think. Contrary to the binary distinction of ‘Romance vs. not Romance’, it is reasonable to expect that in some parts of Europe, Latin would have had a slightly weaker influence on the local languages. In such cases, that influence would still be clear today, but less thoroughly present throughout the language. We might expect to see plenty of Latinate vocabulary, but also some core words and grammatical structures that have endured since pre-Roman times.

The historian Peter Brown (1971) uses the metaphor of a tide in his overview of Roman history. Romanity, once bound to the Mediterranean, washed far inland and flooded much of Europe beneath its waves of influence. I like this metaphor, because the effects of Rome, like waves and the tide, had no clear edges, but rather diminished the further inland it reached. I apply it to the spread of Latin. Where Latin engulfed the linguistic scene entirely, we find the Romance languages. Where Latin didn’t drown the local languages, but just gave them a very good drenching, we find Almost Romance.

English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate origin. That being said, 1066 was some time after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west, and it wasn’t Latin that the invaders were speaking. Also, frankly, I’ve written enough about English.

Instead, my two candidates for Almost Romance today are Albanian and Welsh, two languages that continually fascinate me and that I adore. Allow me to share the love and show you what I mean!

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Albanian

Albanian is today a language native to over seven and a half million people, most of whom live in the country of Albania or in Kosovo next door. It’s a member of the larger Indo-European family, although it forms its own solitary branch within it, something I do not dispute. Our sources for Albanian emerge pretty late by comparison with other European languages; the first mention of it dates to 1285, while our oldest written text, a mere fourteen words, dates to 1462.

There's a lot of difference between the Indo-European languages as to the dates of their oldest surviving sources.

While we have Hittite sources from the 2nd millennium BC, the earliest Albanian text is from 1462 AD.

It's a baptismal formula, quoted by the Archbishop of Durrës. pic.twitter.com/jtTo2wSYPa

— Danny Bate (@DannyBate4) November 14, 2021

This means that the prehistorical development and origins of Albanian are very murky. There have been efforts to connect it back to the Illyrian language of antiquity, spoken in the same region, but our sources for Illyrian are extremely sparse, and there’s evidence that Albanian was once spoken further inland and away from the Adriatic Sea.

Here’s the cool thing: despite the historical near-silence of Albanian between the Proto-Indo-European starting point and 1462, we can still propose two distinct developmental stages of Albanian in that long period. These stages are named ‘Pre-Proto-Albanian’ and ‘Proto-Albanian’. The former presumably existed in the 1st millennium BC, while Proto-Albanian had developed by c. 600 AD.

On what basis then can we propose this difference? In brief, the Romans!

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The Roman state first made its presence felt on the other side of the Adriatic in the 3rd century BC. Their impact went from warfare to conquest, their territorial gains consolidating into the provinces of Illyricum, Macedonia and Epirus. Wherever the linguistic ancestor of Albanian was, Latin came to exert a huge influence on it. Since this contact occurred centuries ago, Albanian has since had time to undergo certain changes, which can obscure the connections back to Latin. Most famously, the Tosk Albanian dialects, on which the modern standard is based, underwent a process of rhotacism, in which an /n/ sound became /r/. Because of this, verë ‘wine’ and rërë ‘sand’ don’t much resemble their Latin ancestors, vīnum and arēna. In Gheg Albanian to the north, venë and rânë remain closer.

Believe me though, the connections are there in their hundreds! Take a look at these words in Standard Albanian, beside their likely Latin ancestor:

Albanian	Latin Source	Translation	Albanian	Latin Source	Translation
shkallë	scālae	stairs	gjinde	gēns	people
kishë	ecclēsia	church	femër	fēmina	female
portë	porta	gate	gaz	gaudium	joy
shtëpi	hospitium	house	kuq	coccum	red
mik	amīcus	friend	verdhë	viridis	yellow
armik	inimīcus	enemy	vjetër	vetus	old
peshkop	episcopus	bishop	lepur	lepus	hare, rabbit
mbret	imperātor	king	peshk	piscis	fish
dhuroj	dōnāre	I give	korb	corvus	raven
vij	venīre	I come	kalë	caballus	horse

With all these in mind, I dare say Albanian becomes a bit more familiar to English speakers! Thanks to Latin, there are plenty of cognate connections to spot, like portë and portal, mik and amicable, mbret and emperor, or kalë and cavalry!

The specific form of words like lepur and vjetër also tell us something about the grammatical situation of Latin at that time; they appear to come from words not in the nominative case, hinting at the general decline of the case system.

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The lexical contribution of Latin to Albanian is simply vast; one previous estimate for the total today is around 600 words, another around 800 (Gramelová 2013: 101). Many loanwords are unsurprisingly culturally specific. There are those to do with government and ruling, and those to do with viniculture, both of which make sense in light of the Roman way of life. Yet there some that belong to more basic domains of vocabulary.

For example, pak ‘little, few’ and shumë ‘many’ are common words, yet come from Latin paucus and summus. The core ingredients of a family (mother, father, sister, etc.) would have hardly differed between the Roman and the ur-Albanian cultures, so we wouldn’t expect the prestige language to have made such an impact there. However, even some family terms in Albanian seem to come from Latin!

Albanian	Latin Origin	English	Albanian	Latin Origin	English
prind	parēns	parent	ungj	avunculus	uncle
thjeshtër	fīliaster	stepson	emtë	amita	aunt
njerkë	noverca	stepmother	ndrikull	mātrīcula	godmother

Numbers usually remain stable in cases of language contact, and yet qind ‘hundred’ and mijë ‘thousand’ are also potential borrowings of Latin centum and mille. There is even some evidence for the borrowing of functional words and grammatical structures. Relative clauses with që (‘which, who, that’) could an influence of Latin quī, but without knowledge of Pre-Proto-Albanian grammar, this remains speculative. We must also be careful not to overstate the Latin impact, as there are Albanian words that could equally be borrowed from Latin or inherited all the way from Proto-Indo-European, like qeni ‘dog’ and ve ‘egg’. Latin may have canis and ōvum, but that’s not the only way Albanian has acquired Indo-European-looking vocabulary.

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In sum, it must be said that there are many ingredients that have gone into Modern Albanian; it has Greek, Latin, Slavic, Venetian, Turkish and now English loanwords, as well as of course its own inherited systems of grammar, sounds and vocabulary. Yet it was the Romans that left the biggest external impression on it. Even the Albanian for ‘Albanian’, shqip, has been derived by Hamp (1999) from a Latin verb!

However, the impression was not quite big enough to completely replace Pre-Proto-Albanian and create a new Romance language, or to qualify Albanian today for the status. So, it gains my esteemed personal accolade of Almost Romance.

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Welsh

Moving over now to the west of Europe, the island of Great Britain has been home for centuries to the Celtic language family. When the Romans landed in the first century AD, the locals (at least in what is now England, Wales and southern Scotland) seem to have spoken one language, or dialects thereof. This language was Common Brythonic, or simply ‘British’.

By the time the Roman administration packed up in the fifth century, the Romans had drastically altered the linguistic lie of the land. British still thrived in some areas, but in others Latin must have become the common mother tongue, as it did on the Continent. Presumably it was into such Latinised parts that the Angles and Saxons later migrated, as otherwise we have a more difficult time explaining the conspicuous absence of Brythonic influences in the newcomer to Britain, Old English.

Brythonic unity was not to last. Out of the changing socio-political situation in Britain arose three distinct languages: Breton, Cornish and Welsh. These three bear witness today to the linguistic landscape of Britain in those first few centuries AD. Welsh, while still a Brythonic language, was born out of that complex landscape and shows all the signs of intense and long-term contact with Latin.

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One such sign is vocabulary. Parina (2010) has compiled a set of the thousand most common words in Welsh, out of a corpus of one million. Of those thousand, 87 are of Latin origin, which even my poor maths can calculate as a noticeable minority of 8.7%.

Many of these still resemble their Latin ancestor, such as eglwys ‘church’, capel ‘chapel’, corff ‘body’ and syml ‘simple’. Many are quite basic in their meaning, such as pobl ‘people’, llaeth ‘milk’ and cadair ‘chair’, which come from Latin populus, lac and cathedra. Many unsurprisingly concern Christianity, a religion transmitted via and later promoted by the Roman state. Nadolig, the Welsh for ‘Christmas’, goes back to a Latin adjective for things to do with birthdays (nātālicius), while ysbryd ‘spirit’ and esgob ‘bishop’ derive respectively from spīritus and episcopus. Meanwhile, the Pagan gods of Rome endure in the Welsh days of the week!

Welsh	Latin Source	Translation
Dydd Llun	Diēs Lūnae	Monday (the day of the Moon)
Dydd Mawrth	Diēs Mārtis	Tuesday (the day of Mars)
Dydd Mercher	Diēs Mercuriī	Wednesday (the day of Mercury)
Dydd Iau	Diēs Iovis	Thursday (the day of Jupiter)
Dydd Gwener	Diēs Veneris	Friday (the day of Venus)
Dydd Sadwrn	Diēs Sāturnī	Saturn (the day of Saturn)
Dydd Sul	Diēs Sōlis	Sunday (the day of the Sun)

As with Albanian, Welsh has had many subsequent centuries to undergo additional sound changes, altering and obscuring the Latinity of some words. Llyfr ‘book’ looks very Welsh and has the famous /ɬ/ sound, but it derives from Latin liber. A library is a llyfrgell, which a Roman might recognise as a cella (in English: cell) for books.

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Welsh also spoils us with the glimpses it offers into ordinary Latin in Roman times, often called ‘Vulgar Latin’. Like any language, Latin had its differences in prestige and register, but it can be hard to see the daily low-register language of the majority in our surviving sources. Welsh can help. The Welsh colour coch and Albanian kuq together tell us that people widely used a word for ‘red’ (or some similar colour) derived from coccum, a berry that produced a scarlet dye. Likewise, diwrnod ‘day’ goes back to Latin diurnāta, apparently an alternative word for ‘day’ that also led to French journée and Italian giornata.

Latin words written with an initial H appear borrowed into Welsh without an /h/ sound, such as awr ‘hour’ from Latin hōra. This absence of H is unlikely to be the result of Welsh’s assimilation of loanwords, since Welsh does and did have a /h/ sound. Instead these H-less words may reflect the widespread loss of /h/ within the Late Latin input, which is a well-known step in the development of Romance. Furthermore, words that started with sc- and st- in Latin now begin with ysg- and yst- in Welsh, having gained an extra vowel.

Welsh	Latin Source	Translation
ysgol	schola	school
ysgol	scāla	ladder
ysgrythur	scrīptūra	scripture
ystafell	stabulum	room
ystad	status	state

This phenomenon, called prothesis, has been productive in Welsh, and hasn’t only affected words of Latin origin. However, it’s plausible to connect it to the prothesis seen in Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, in which a vowel was added in the same contexts. Latin schola and status have become not only ysgol and ystad in Welsh, but also escuela and estado in Spanish and école and état in French. Welsh may have therefore taken on and preserved a common phonetic feature of everyday Latin in the Roman Empire.

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So, not only do we have evidence for Latin’s lexical influence, but also for a lasting legacy in Welsh phonology. Furthermore, various grammatical features of Welsh have been laid at Latin’s door too. Russell (2011) discusses four of the big contenders, and dismisses two, but concludes that the creation of compound prepositions and a pluperfect tense pass his strict criteria for a Latin origin. All in all, while still meriting the status of a Celtic and Brythonic language, Welsh is also a product of Roman Britain and as such it maintains the effects of that interesting chapter in British language. With all due respect and much affection, it joins Albanian as one of my Almost Romance languages.

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To Conclude

Here are my two candidates for my not-entirely-serious language family of Almost Romance. I think considering them in this light offers necessary nuance for the history of European languages, and adds complicating colour to the life of Latin. That famous Roman tongue may have won great popularity, much of it at the point of a sword, but that popularity varied from place to place and from people to people. Latin had a spectrum of influence, with Albanian and Welsh attesting to the upper-mid-range of that scale. They therefore take their place alongside French, Spanish, Italian and the rest in illuminating the subsequent history of Latin and the creation of members of a new language family – well, members and almost members.

END.

References

• Brown, P. (1971). The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Gramelová, L. (2013). Latinské a románské prvky v albánštině. Dissertation. Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy.
• Hamp, E. (1999). Lectures on the Albanian language: History and dialectology. Ohio State University.
• Lloyd-Jones, J. (1910). Some Latin Loan-words in Welsh. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 7(1). 462-474.
• Parina, E. (2010). Loanwords in Welsh: Frequency Analysis on the Basis of Cronfa Electronaeg o Gymraeg. Studia Celto-Slavica 3. 183–194.
• Rusakov, A. (2017). Albanian. The Indo-European Languages. Second edition. 552-608. Routledge.
• Russell, P. (2011). Latin and British in Roman and Post-Roman Britain: methodology and morphology. Transactions of the Philological Society 109(2). 138–157.
• Schrijver, P. (1995). Studies in British Celtic historical phonology. Volume 5 of Leiden studies in Indo-European. Brill Rodopi.
• Schrijver, P. (2002). The rise and fall of British Latin: evidence from English and Brittonic. The Celtic Roots of English. 87-110.
• Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.

SPQR flag image from here. Skilfully edited by me.