French is probably the most internationally significant, but Spanish, the official language of nineteen American countries and Spain and Equatorial Guinea, has the most speakers.Īmong the more important Romance languages are Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Occitan, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, and Spanish. The major Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are national languages. Romance languages consists of groups of related languages derived from Latin, with nearly 920 million native speakers. Modern knowledge of the language is based on statements of Roman grammarians concerning "improper" usages, and on a certain number of inscriptions and early manuscripts, "lapses" in the writings of educated authors, some lists of "incorrect" forms and glossaries of Classical forms, and occasional texts written by or for people of little education. Written materials in Latin almost always make use of Classical Latin forms hence, written documentation of Vulgar Latin is uncommon. The form of Latin that was the commonly spoken language of the western Roman Empire.
The common speech of the ancient Romans, which is distinguished from standard literary Latin and is the ancestor of the Romance languages.Ģ. These basic words and their related forms can be seen in this carpo-, carp- (cerp-) unit of "to pluck, to pick out, to gather, to select" words.ġ. The result is that the idea of "plucking" streams through the three widely divergent words just as a scarce thread of color can be woven through the carpet with which this excerpt started. It's like "plucking" from the cookie jar until the cookies become "scanty" and scarce.Īnother related word is excerpt, from Latin excerptus ( ex, "out" and carpo, "pluck") which refers to something that has been "plucked out" of its context.
Then there is the term scarce, which English inherited from the French escars, "scanty", originally from the Latin ex, "out", and carpo, "pluck". The word carpet, for example, ultimately derives from the Latin carpo, which meant to "pluck" or to "card" wool, and it is believed that the first carpets were of wooly cloth made of unravelled threads. It appears to be impossible that such far-flung words as carpet, scarce, and excerpt all come from the same Latin verb however, they do, and their histories show the astonishing and unpredictable way some words have developed.
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