Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction Review

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Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction ReviewROMANCE LANGUAGES: A Historical Introduction by Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen is a textbook describing the phonological and morphological changes that produced the major varieties of Romance out of late Vulgar Latin. The textbook assumes prior experience with linguistics (namely a general linguistics course and a historical linguistics course) and at least a couple of years of Classical Latin. There's quite a few Romance languages, some of which are little-known. The authors have chosen to focus on five in this textbook: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Occitan, Rhaeto-Romance, Aromanian and Dalmatian, not to mention the host of regional Italian dialects that could be viewed as separate languages, are thus not covered. The first eight chapters cover Italian, French and Spanish together. The remaining two languages, Portuguese and Romanian, get their own chapters, though the Italian-French-Spanish portion is a necessary prerequisite as terminology introduced in the first portion of the book is frequently referred to. The final chapters cover the formation of the Romance lexicon and the timeline of the emergence of the Romance languages.
It is nice to see Romanian covered in such detail, with some mention even of dialectal features and obscure verb conjugations. Unfortunately the authors have unquestioningly adopted Dacian Continuity Theory -- the belief that Romanians are descendants of the indigenous population vanquished by Trajan, instead of migrants from considerably further south who reached their present home nearly a millennium later. This leads the authors to make all kinds of claims about what kind of Latin "reached Dacia".
While I read the book outside of a course, I nonetheless enjoyed its textbook features. There are exercises at the end of each chapter that let you flex your diachronic linguistics muscles, and the authors present a good many mnemonic devices to help you retain the sound changes. The bibliography at the end will spur you on to more specialized treatment of these historical phenomena.Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction OverviewTi Alkire and Carol Rosen trace the changes that led from colloquial Latin to five major Romance languages, those which ultimately became national or transnational languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Trends in spoken Latin altered or dismantled older categories in phonology and morphology, while the regional varieties of speech, evolving under diverse influences, formed new grammatical patterns, each creating its own internal regularities. Documentary sources for spoken Latin show the beginnings of this process, which comes to full fruition in the medieval emergence of written Romance languages. This book newly distills the facts into an appealing program of study, including exercises, and makes the difficult issues clear, taking well motivated and sometimes innovative stands. It provides not only an essential guide for those new to the topic, but also a reliable compendium for the specialist.

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