Latin fieri and the Romance verb ‘to be’. Thoughts on the problem of “standard language bias” in historical reconstruction

IF 0.2 4区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE Pub Date : 2022-06-01 DOI:10.1515/zrp-2022-0016

M. Maiden

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Abstract

Abstract This study examines the history of reflexes of Latin fieri ‘become’ in Romance, focusing particularly on Romanian, where this verb provides the subjunctive and some other forms of the verb ‘be’. Contrary to general assumptions, I offer comparative-historical evidence from other Daco-Romance varieties and from other branches of Romance that, in the earliest Daco-Romance, fieri had a different paradigmatic distribution from that of modern Romanian, and that most (conceivably all) forms of the subjunctive of this verb are in origin present indicative forms, which probably still conserved into early Daco-Romance the meaning ‘to become’. I argue that these findings demonstrate how our understanding of the mechanisms of language change is liable to be distorted by a “standard language bias” whereby, in the process of linguistic reconstruction, structures most familiar to us from the standard languages are tacitly or explicitly assumed to be ‘basic’ and ‘normal’. In illustration of this claim I will also sketch some other examples from Romance languages of the undesirable effects of such bias, showing how it can lead to misunderstandings of the history of the standard languages themselves, as well as of the history of their cognate varieties.

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拉丁语fieri和罗曼史动词“to be”。对历史重建中“标准语言偏差”问题的思考

摘要本研究考察了拉丁语fieri“成为”在Romance中的反射历史，特别关注罗马尼亚语，该动词提供了动词“be”的虚拟语气和其他一些形式。与一般假设相反，我从其他达科罗曼史变体和罗曼史的其他分支中提供了比较历史证据，证明在最早的达科罗曼斯中，fieri的语法分布与现代罗马尼亚语的语法分布不同，而且这个动词的虚拟语气的大多数（可以想象的是所有）形式都起源于现在的指示形式，这可能在早期的达科罗曼史中仍然保留着“成为”的含义。我认为，这些发现表明，我们对语言变化机制的理解很容易被“标准语言偏见”扭曲，在语言重建过程中，我们从标准语言中最熟悉的结构被默认或明确地假设为“基本”和“正常”。为了说明这一说法，我还将从浪漫主义语言中勾勒出一些其他例子，说明这种偏见的不良影响，表明它如何导致对标准语言本身的历史以及其同源变体的历史的误解。

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来源期刊

ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE Multiple-

CiteScore

0.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The journal Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (ZrP), was founded in 1877 by Gustav Gröber. In the field of literary history the subjects covered by the journal include Romance literature up to the Renaissance, as well as the entire scope of Romance language studies and related studies.