No venimos del lat�n by Carme Jim�nez Huertas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: No venimos del latín by Carme Jiménez Huertas John M. Ryan Carme Jiménez Huertas. No venimos del latín. Las Sandalias de Mercurio Press, 2016. 160p. No venimos del latín's scholarly analysis argues against the traditional position that Latin was the progenitor of the modern Romance languages. Following Christina Bescan's Foreword, Jiménez Huertas explains the "influence" of Latin and asserts that it was primarily a written, rather than spoken, language, with both the Iberian and Latin writing systems coexisting throughout the Peninsula well into the second century CE. Chapter 1 concludes that the first Roman settlers of Hispania were decidedly not Latin speakers, many of whom were mercenaries foreign to Rome, speakers of other Italic languages, or even Iberian locals. The subsequent chapter underscores that internal linguistic changes are necessarily slow. It reasons that morphosyntactic changes, thought to have occurred between Latin and the Romance languages in the very narrow window of 400-500 years, could not have taken place, based simply on the notion that people speak the way they think, and could not possibly change the way they think in such a short span of time. In Chapter 3, Jiménez Huertas denies the simultaneous existence of a written "Classical" Latin alongside a spoken "Vulgar" Latin. Drawing on the historic proclamation of the Council of Tours of 813 CE and select early texts, such as the San Millán Glosses, the Strasberg Oaths, and the Valpuesta Charters, the author proposes instead a scenario in which written Latin existed alongside not the purported Vulgar Latin, but rather a variety of several "other" languages, be they Italic or not. The chapter ends with the assertion that due to distance, isolation, and separate evolution, the various Romance languages should have manifested many more differences than they currently exhibit, and instead, that many of the characteristics that they share were not in fact features of Latin. The remaining four chapters address certain shared characteristics [End Page 70] at the levels of phonetics, lexicology, and morphosyntax, respectively. Chapter 4 showcases common sound patterns and processes such as palatalization and diphthongization, as well as suppression and addition of sounds. It also makes more general comparisons between syllable structure, vowels, and consonants in Latin and modern Romance languages and pays particular attention to stops, fricatives, affricates and sonorants. Chapter 5 on lexicon points out that several words shared among the different Romance languages did not arise from Latin words used for the same concepts, concluding with a discussion of toponyms and etymologies. Chapter 6, the longest chapter, discusses the nature of Romance morphosyntax and its differences from Latin. This includes generalities among the inflected grammatical categories on the one hand, consisting of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, determiners and verbs, and uninflected forms, such as adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, on the other. It closes with a discussion of the generalized loss of grammatical case markers, change in word order, and the formation of interrogatives. The book's conclusion, in the form of an unnumbered final chapter, poses the overarching question as to origin of the Romance languages and proceeds to explain that they come from no one place in particular. Rather, it suggests that they were already in existence at the time of Roman conquest and that they definitively did not arise from Latin, but probably from some combination of Oscan, Umbrian, and Sabellic languages. The author adds that the case of Rumanian as an outlier language serves as strong additional evidence against the idea of a Latin origin, asserting that modern Rumanian is spoken throughout the entirety of Rumania despite the fact that the Romans only occupied a fourth of this region. According to Jiménez Huertas, this lends credence to the notion that Latin was not a mother tongue at all for the Romance languages but rather a sibling. The author calls for additional research into the language spoken by the Iberian substrate in order to have a better idea of the true origins of Ibero Romance. She suggests that current evidence from its writing system of two sibilants, consonant lenition, dual rhotic sounds, and vowel distribution similar to Ibero Romance varieties make it a promising...