"Books" from Lisbon to Bucharest
"Books" from Lisbon to Bucharest
This is a newsletter about languages and books. Today, I decided to travel through Europe, looking at "books" — the word itself in the plural form — in many Latin languages.
Books in Lisbon
We begin in Lisbon, where I’m writing these words.
“Book”, in Portuguese, is “livro”. So, to talk about books, we use “livros”. It seems quite straightforward: the plural is formed with an “-s” at the end of the word.
When we actually hear the plural “-s” coming out of the mouths of the Portuguese, it becomes a bit more complex. Syllable-ending “-s” can be read as (I’m using the International Phonetic Alphabet):
[ʃ] if the word is isolated or the following sound is a voiceless consonant (“livros todos”);
[ʒ] if the following sound is a voiced consonant (“livros dados”);
[z] if the following sound is a vowel (“livros azuis”).
Curiously, few Portuguese notice this. If asked, most would say they read the letter always in the same way. That’s because the difference between these three sounds, when at the end of a syllable, is never used to distinguish different words. The speaker doesn’t even realise it is making these distinctions — a linguist would say these differences are phonetic, but not phonological.
With these same sounds, but at the beginning of the syllable, it’s possible to create different words. In that place, all speakers notice the difference between the sounds:
Chás [ʃ]
Jaz [ʒ]
Zás [z]
The same distinctions are either quite noticeable or rather imperceptible depending on the position of the sound inside a syllable.
Speakers know much less about their language than their own linguistic brains! It’s one of the amazing facts about human language.
This is a summer trip and we are still discussing phonetics in Lisbon. Let’s keep going…
The French-Andalusian connection
Let’s move on to Spanish-speaking lands. Just imagine you are arriving at an Andalusian town, the Mediterranean glimmering on the horizon. If you listen to people speaking, it’s probable you’ll find the plural “-s” pronounced always in the same way, with no differences depending on the following sound. So:
“¿Un libro?”
“No: ¡dos libros!”
This is true if the speaker is using Standard Spanish. Andalusian Spanish has its own phonetic rules — in practice, you may have some difficulty hearing the final “-s”.
Is that a problem? We’ll see.
Further North, we find Catalan-speaking lands. “Book” is “llibre”. The “e” is read in such a way that to my Portuguese ears it sounds like an “a”. The plural of this word is not difficult to guess: “llibres”.
Crossing the Pyrenees and moving on to Occitan, we find a related word, but with a different initial sound: “libre”, “libres”.
If we look at French, we find again the “v” we lost when we left Portugal. “Book”, in French, is “livre”. The plural? "Livres", as expected. Ah, but when you ask a French speaker to say the word aloud, you’ll get a bit confused. "Livre" and "livres" are pronounced the exact same way! The final “-s” is silent.
Is that a problem? Not really. French people understand quite well sentences about books (in plural) — just like Andalusians! The only difference between the two cases is the fact that we are talking of the standard language when looking at French, while Andalusian is a nonstandard variety of Spanish.
We love libri
In Italian, plurals are not marked by an “-s” — at least, in Standard Italian, based on the language of Tuscany. A book is “libro”. Books are “libri”. A vowel change marks the plural.
However, there are other Italian languages — often called “dialects” in Italy — in which the plural of words is created by adding an “-s”.
The boundary between Latin languages in which the plural is made with an “-s” and Latin languages in which it is made in some other way is called the La Spezia-Rimini Line.
This is not the only feature changing when we cross that line. There are so many differences between languages to the North and West of the line and languages to the South and East that La Spezia-Rimini Line is usually considered to mark the separation between the two main groups of Latin languages: Western Latin languages and Eastern Latin languages.
Now, notice how this line breaks Italy in two:
Standard Italian was based on the Romance spoken in Tuscany. So, Italian ended up in the Eastern group of Latin languages. If the standard had been developed a few kilometers to the North, Italian would be part of the Western group (and it would be a very different language from the one we know today).
This line is now blurred by the use of Standard Italian throughout the whole of Italy. Even so, it helps us understand how political borders can be quite misleading when looking at languages.
What about Romanian?
We can’t look at all Latin languages today. We must leave some of them behind. Even so, I still want to look at Romanian…
The word for book is quite different from all other Latin languages: it’s “carte”.
An interesting aspect of the Romanian grammar is the way articles are put at the end of the word. “Book” is “carte”, but “the book” is “cartea”. We find this feature in some other Balkan languages, either Latin or Slavic. It’s a sign that languages do not just exchange words or expressions: they also borrow bits of grammar from each other.
And the plural of “carte”? Here it is: “cărți”. Just like in Italian, plural in Romanian is marked by changing vowels, not by adding a consonant. (Those diacritics deserve a whole article just for them. Maybe one of these days…)
If you want to talk about “the books”, then you need “cărțile”. Notice how “le” is quite similar to definite articles in other Latin languages — it just seems to be in the wrong place.
You may have noticed that, on the map at the beginning of this article, our trip only really ends in Malta. The rest of the journey will be covered in the next issue…
If you also love books and languages, don’t forget to subscribe to this newsletter — and, if I may suggest, send it forward to other people. Thanks!
New section: Language in Books
If you can speak any Latin tongue and want to know more about the others, I suggest PanromanIC, a small textbook to teach how to read in several Romance languages. It does not teach you how to speak, but how to read.
The book is focused on the six most widely spoken Latin languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian), but there are exercises in several more languages. The idea behind the book is not very different from the idea behind Gaston Dorren's book I mentioned two weeks ago…
