From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts

Rating:
Summary: good, if narrow
Review: This is a handy and inexpensive little book, and you should get it if you have any dealings with Latin or the four languages this book talks about: Spanish, Italian, Portugese, and French.

Besides just good data, this book has good exercises to work out, making it very useful in a classroom setting.

However, one thing about this book: it's called /From Latin to *Romance* in Sound Charts/ [emphasis mine], and the blurb on the back says "This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into *the* modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates)" [emphasis mine].

So you'd think that it'd be about /the/ Romance languages, all of them. However, it is about /just/ Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

That's fine and well, but I hear PERSISTENT RUMORS circulating about a country (a whole country!) called "Rumania", where they speak Rumanian, a language that does seem to be descended from Latin -- and that makes it a *Romance* language, too, putting it in the set of *the* Romance languages. And yet, it's not covered in this book.

The same can be said for for Sicilian, Sard, and Catalan. And hey, while we're at it, what about Dalmatian, Provencal, Galician, Asturian, Occitan, and the Rhaeto-Romance languages? Or even the Romance creoles like Haitian and Papiamentu?

It's like going to a restaurant, ordering a four-course meal, and getting pancakes and iced tea. I really like pancakes and iced tea, but well, it's still not a four-course meal!

Frankly, this kind of misrepresentation is at least lazy ("oh, we could get someone to add Rumanian examples, but who has the time?"), and at worst dishonest ("if we say it's about Romance in general, more people'll buy it!"). Could one get away with this in anything but philology? Could a geologist write a text called /Geography of North America/ covering only Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois?

Granted, /From Latin to *Western* Romance/ is not as interesting a title as /Geology of the Ohio River Drainage in North America/, but it's honest. If they wanted to be able to call it, /From Latin to Romance/, they should have added coverage of the rest of Romance!

So, what should be done:

1) /you/ should get this book. It's handy and instructive about the four languages it's actually about.

2) /someone/ should come out with a new edition of this book that adds data from /at least/ Rumanian, so this won't be about just Western Romance.

In the meantime, I /also/ recommend Posner's /The Romance Languages/.

Rating:
Summary: a pleasure to browse
Review: What a neat book, and what a neat price!

This midsized paperback illustrates the regular sound changes that occurred as Late Latin developed into the major Romance languages.

After an introductory section about the development of Classical Latin into Vulgar Latin, the author lists 43 'rules', or regular phonological changes. He devotes about 2 to 3 pages to each rule, giving examples and explanations. For example, rule 9 treats the consonant cluster 'CT'
Latin nocte, Italian notte, Spanish noche, Port. noite, French nuit, English cognate nocturnal.
Latin lacte, Italian latte, Spanish leche, Port. leite, French lait, English cognate lactate.
Latin factu, Italian fatto, Spanish hecho, Port. feito, French fait, English cognate fact, feat

For each rule, there are a dozen or so examples. Each rule ends up with an exercise asking the reader to match up vocabulary. (The author thoughtfully gives the answers to these exercises.)

A definite help for those learning Latin or a Romance language. Heck, even if you're not learning a Romance language, it will increase your English vocabulary. And it's just plain fun to browse through it. Hoya Saxa!