romance languages

Mutations are not exclusive to genes. Languages mutate too and often in a similar way as genes, with just single letter changes (like SNPs in genetics). This happens because humans aren't perfect. They mishear words or mispronounce them. It was all the more frequent before universal education...

One striking characteristic of Spanish language is the number of words that start with 'a'. Many among those are Arabic loan words (adobe, ajedrez, alcade, aldea, alquiler), including words that are an amalgamation of the Arabic preposition al (the) + the word itself (e.g. albahaca, alcázar...

Anyone who speaks Spanish and at least one other Romance language will probably have noticed that many f sounds have disappeared entirely in Spanish, usually at the beginning of words. This atavistic 'f' has been replaced by a silent 'h', which at one point during the Middle Ages might have been...

One particularity of French is that many 'c' sounds changed into 'ch' (pronounced 'sh'). I have made a list of most of the words I could think of derived from Latin that underwent that mutation. Many of them were inherited by English (chain, chamber, change, chapel, charge, chaste), but a few...

Many of you probably have heard of Esperanto, the world's most famous constructed international auxiliary language. The concept is admirable: creating a new language that is easy to learn for speakers of most European languages. Esperanto has over 100,000 fluent speakers and is taught on...

I have come across four or five forumites of Sicilian background, with a good grasp of Sicilian, its linguistic history, etc, and I thought it might warrant its own thread - noting I have made a habit of waylaying other threads, which I prefer not to do. Either way, the linguistic history of...