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Reichenau Glossary
The Reichenau Glossary is a collection of Latin glosses likely compiled in the 8th century in northern France to assist local clergy in understanding certain words or expressions found in the Vulgate Bible. Background Over the centuries Jerome’s translation of the Bible (c. 382–405) became more difficult to read for novice clergy as a result of the various grammatical, lexical, and phonological changes that spoken Latin was experiencing. To facilitate interpretation, scribes would put together glossaries or collected explanations of words or phrases found in the Vulgate. The words used as glosses tended to be those that were destined to survive in Romance, while the words that needed glossing generally were not. What we now know as the Reichenau Glossary was compiled circa the eighth century at the Abbey of Corbie in Picardy. From there it eventually found its way to the Abbey of Reichenau, in southern Germany, where it was ‘discovered’ in 1863 by the philologist Adolf H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dissimilation
In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such as /r/ and /l/ when they occur in a sequence. Examples Dropped initial /r/ in /r..r/ sequence (r-Deletion) When a sound occurs before another in the middle of a word in rhotic dialects of English, the first tends to drop out, as in "" for ''berserk,'' "" for ''surprise,'' "" for ''particular'', and "" for ''governor'' – this does not affect the pronunciation of ''government,'' which has only one , but English ''government'' tends to be pronounced "", dropping out the first n. In English, ''r''-deletion occurs when a syllable is unstressed and may drop out altogether, as in "" for ''deteriorate'' and "" for ''temperature,'' a process called haplology. When the is found in , it may change to . (, ' → ''February,'' which has been explained by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexical Changes From Classical Latin To Proto-Romance
As Classical Latin developed into Proto-Romance it gained and lost lexical items for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the new vocabulary came from contact with neighbouring languages, and other times it was coined from native elements. Much of the inherited Latin vocabulary also underwent semantic drift, regularization, or other linguistic changes. Overview Irregular nouns and verbs tended to be either regularized or replaced with preexisting regular equivalents; cf. the loss of ''esse'' 'to eat' in favour of its own regularized compound ''comedere.'' Similar motives underlie the general replacement of ''ferre'' 'carry' with ''portare'' or ''loqui'' 'speak' with ''parabolare'' and ''fabulare''. Semantic drift affected numerous words, notable examples of which are ''causa'' ('subject matter' ''→'' 'thing'), ''civitas'' ('citizenry' ''→'' 'city'), ''focus'' ('hearth' ''→'' 'fire'), ''mittere'' ('send' → 'put'), ''necare'' ('murder' ''→'' 'drown'), ''pacare'' ('placate' ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Romance Language
Proto-Romance is the comparatively reconstructed ancestor of all Romance languages. It reflects a late variety of spoken Latin prior to regional fragmentation. Phonology Vowels Monophthongs Diphthong The only phonemic diphthong was /au̯/. Allophony *Vowels were lengthened in stressed open syllables. *Stressed /É›, É”/ may have yielded the incipient diphthongs ͜ɛ, o͜ɔwhen followed by a syllable containing a close vowel. **Whatever the precise outcome, Maiden argues that this would have been limited, at the Proto-Romance stage, to open syllables. That is, it would have applied only to instances of /É›/ and /É”/ that had been subject to stressed-open-syllable lengthening. Constraints *Neither a distinct /É›/ nor /É”/ occurred in unstressed position on account of having merged into /e/ and /o/ respectively.Ferguson 1976: 76; Gouvert 2015: 78–81, 121–122 *Neither a distinct /i/ nor /u/ occurred in the second syllable of words with the structure ŒÏƒÏƒËˆÏƒÏ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Appendix Probi
The ''Appendix Probi'' ("Probus' Appendix") is the conventional name for a series of five documents believed to have been copied in the seventh or eighth century in Bobbio, Italy. Its name derives from the fact that the documents were found attached to a copy of the Instituta Artium, a treatise named after (but probably not written by) the first-century grammarian Marcus Valerius Probus. The Appendix was likely composed in Rome around the first half of the fourth century AD. It is specifically the third of the five documents that has attracted scholarly attention, as it contains a list of 227 spelling mistakes, along with their corrections, which shed light on the phonological and grammatical changes that the local vernacular was experiencing in the early stages of its development into Romance. The text survives only in a carelessly transcribed water-damaged manuscript of the 7th or 8th century which is kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III as MS Lat. 1 (forme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frequentative
In grammar, a frequentative form (abbreviated or ) of a word is one that indicates repeated action but is not to be confused with iterative aspect. The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentative. The frequentative is no longer productive in English, unlike in some language groups, such as Finno-Ugric, Balto-Slavic, and Turkic. English English has ''-le'' and -''er'' as frequentative suffixes. Some frequentative verbs surviving in English, and their parent verbs are listed below. Additionally, some frequentative verbs are formed by reduplication of a monosyllable (e.g., ''coo-cooing'', ''cf.'' Latin ''murmur''). Frequentative nouns are often formed by combining two different vowel grades of the same word (as in ''teeter-totter'', ''pitter-patter'', ''chitchat''.) The present tense in English usually has a frequentative meaning. For example, "I walk to work" means "I walk to work most days" and is true even if ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiable by an adverb and being able to take a direct object. The term "''-ing'' form" is often used in English to refer to the gerund specifically. Traditional grammar makes a distinction within ''-ing'' forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern grammars as ''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' and ''The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language''. Traditional use The Latin gerund, in a restricted set of syntactic contexts, denotes the sense of the verb in isolation after certain prepositions, and in certain uses of the genitive, dative, and ablative cases. It is very rarely combined with dependent sentence elements such as object. To express such concepts, the construction w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ablative Absolute
Latin syntax is the part of Latin grammar that covers such matters as word order, the use of cases, tenses and moods, and the construction of simple and compound sentences, also known as ''periods''. The study of Latin syntax in a systematic way was particularly a feature of the late 19th century, especially in Germany. For example, in the 3rd edition of '' Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar'' (1895), the reviser, Gonzalez Lodge, mentions 38 scholars whose works have been used in its revision; of these 31 wrote in German, five in English and two in French. (The English scholars include Roby and Lindsay). In the twentieth century, the German tradition was continued with the publication of two very comprehensive grammars: the ''Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache'' by Raphael Kühner and Karl Stegmann (1912, first edition 1879), and the ''Lateinische Grammatik'' by Manu Leumann, J.B. Hofmann, and Anton Szantyr (revised edition Munich 1977, first edition 1926). Among works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammaticalization
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or prepositions). Thus it creates new function words from content words, rather than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb ''will'', which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much. For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance. Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereby l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literary Language
A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken language (''lects''), but the difference between literary language and non-literary language is greater in some languages; thus a great divergence between a written form and a spoken vernacular, the language exhibits diglossia, a community's use of two forms of speech. The understanding of the term differs from one linguistic tradition to another and is dependent on the terminological conventions adopted. Notably, in Eastern European and Slavic linguistics, the term "literary language" has also been used as a synonym of "standard language". Literary English For much of its history, there has been a distinction in the English language between an elevated literary language and a colloquial idiom.Matti Rissanen, ''History of Englishes: New M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deponent Verb
In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active in meaning but takes its form from a different voice, most commonly the middle or passive. A deponent verb has no active forms. Languages with deponent verbs ''This list may not be exhaustive.'' Ancient Greek Ancient Greek has middle-voice deponents (some of which are very common) and some passive-voice deponents. An example in classical Greek is (, 'I come' or 'I go'), middle/passive in form but translated into English using the active voice (since English has no middle voice). Some 'active' verbs will take middle-form futures, such as how (, 'I hear') becomes (, 'I will hear'), rather than the regular adding of a sigma (like (, 'I stop') becoming (, 'I will stop')). These are still translated into English as active. For these verbs, there is no future middle, but the future passive is unaffected. Koine Greek has a few verbs which have very different meanings in the active and middle/passive forms. For example, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Language
German ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and Official language, official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italy, Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also a co-official language of Luxembourg and German-speaking Community of Belgium, Belgium, as well as a national language in Namibia. Outside Germany, it is also spoken by German communities in France (Bas-Rhin), Czech Republic (North Bohemia), Poland (Upper Silesia), Slovakia (Bratislava Region), and Hungary (Sopron). German is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including Afrikaans, Dutch language, Dutch, English language, English, the Frisian languages, Low German, Luxembourgish, Scots language, Scots, and Yiddish. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic languages, North Germanic group, such as Danish lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
