LIN376H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Linguistic System, Balkans
Document Summary
Latin and the romance languages occupy a vast space along at least three dimensions. Latin was carried with the expansion of roman power. The empire reached its greatest extent under the reign of the emperor trajan. It included modern-day britain, portugal, spain, france, italy, switzerland, A truly panoramic account of romance linguistic history would find few readers and probably no writers. Spanish is spoken as a second language by 60 million people, mostly in the us and. The word dialect is used in contrast to language. The five romance languages; italian, portuguese, french, spanish and romanian, are dialects of latin historically. The difference between language and dialect, is not always clear. Dialect is a trapdoor leading into a labyrinth of terminological confusion. Sicilian has over twice as many speakers as sardinian, yet sicilian is usually considered a dialect and sardinian a language. Sardinian is best known for retaining certain features of latin that elsewhere lost.
