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Re: R: [romanceconlang] About semantic shifts in Romance langs



En réponse à Mangiat <mangiat@hidden.email>:

> 
> > Hi everyone,
> 
> Hi, Christophe!
> 

I still have to work on greetings in Narbonósc, though the generic and 
cross-Romance "bouêne die": "good day" should work too (does it exist in 
Romanian and Sardinian? If so, then it's really cross-Romance :) ).

> > Lately I've been wondering about semantic changes from Proto-Romance
> to
> the
> > different Romance langs. Principally I've been thinking about the
> different
> > translations of French "parler": to talk, to speak, in different
> Romance
> langs
> > I know. Thus I found:
> > French: parler
> > Italian: parlare
> > Spanish: hablar
> > Portuguese: falar
> >
> > French and Italian seem to derive the verb for "to talk" from the same
> origin
> > (I would guess VL *parlare, tell me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, then I
> would
> > really like to know what it meant in Latin).
> 
> Which should be from 'parabulare', a verbalization of 'parabula', a
> Greek
> loan meaning 'short story with didactic purposes'. So Italian 'parlare'
> and
> French 'parler' originally meant 'to tell a short story', hence 'to
> talk'.
> Northern Italian dialects often use 'dis+currere', from the verb
> 'currere',
> 'to run'. Lombard has 'discurr'.
> 

From 'dis+currere', French has a noun "discours": speech, and a verb 
"discourir": to do a speech (generally with a negative connotation: to bore 
people with your speech :) ). Anyway, it's a nice idea to use simply 
'discurrere' for 'to talk'. Maybe I'll use it for Narbonósc (*parabulare is a 
very nice word, but I'm afraid that the sound changes of Narbonósc would make it 
into *parlâre, which is a little too much like French and Italian to me :). Or 
maybe *pablâre, from an early loss of the syllable (ra). Mmmm... the interesting 
part of this evolution is that it suddenly becomes similar to Spanish "hablar", 
though with the same origin as French parler and Italian parlare :) ).

> > For what I know of Spanish and
> > Portuguese sound changes, they derive their verb from an earlier
> *fablar
> that I
> > would connect with Latin *fabulare (not sure it exists) and fabula,
> which
> in
> > turn gave in French "fable": "(unbelievable) story" and "fabuler": "to
> tell
> > unbelievable stories".
> 
> So the semantic shift 'tale' -> 'to talk' is quite common... even if
> different langs have used different words for 'tale'.
> 

So 'to talk' comes from 'tale'? I didn't suspect it at all! :)

Christophe.