Pico Turquino ( Spanish pronunciation: [ˌpi.ko tuɾˈki.no] ), sometimes erroneously spelled as Pico Torquino , is the highest point in Cuba . It is located in the southeast part of the island, in the Sierra Maestra mountain range in the municipality of Guamá , Santiago de Cuba Province . It is the only place in Cuba where snowfall has been officially recorded, which last fell in February 1900.
56-505: The name is believed to be a corruption of the phrase for " turquoise peak" ( Spanish : turquesa ), so-named for its apparent blue hues seen by the heights in certain views. The peak was first mentioned (under the name "Tarquino") on a map drawn by Geert de Kremer in the late 16th century. The first documented ascent of the peak was in 1860 by Fred W. Ramsden, a twenty-year-old Englishman then living in Santiago de Cuba. The climb
112-498: A dialect continuum , where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and as such there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even
168-400: A degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad. John Lyons notes that "any standard of evaluation applied to language-change must be based upon a recognition of
224-411: A hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly." Sound change —i.e., change in the pronunciation of phonemes —can lead to phonological change (i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language). For instance, if
280-587: A particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word "dog" itself has been broadened from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all domestic canines. Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language . Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. Massive changes – attributable either to creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within
336-598: A potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages , ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian ) to "severely endangered" ( Franco-Provençal , most of
392-561: A practical tool in all sorts of legal, judicial, administrative and economic affairs throughout the country. Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studying unconsciously used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose, they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time. Languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at
448-846: A single country. Portuguese is the official language of six African countries ( Angola , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique , Equatorial Guinea , and São Tomé and Príncipe ), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau , while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000 —are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians . In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants. In Oceania, Portuguese
504-483: A sliding window approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of both tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with time can be attributed to the government-initiated language "reform" of the 20th century. This reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they were in majority when
560-742: Is Spanish , followed by Portuguese , French , Italian and Romanian , which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries. In Europe, at least one Romance language is official in France , Portugal , Spain , Italy , Switzerland , Belgium , Romania , Moldova , Transnistria , Monaco , Andorra , San Marino and Vatican City . In these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Romansh and Catalan have constitutional official status. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of
616-465: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Corruption (linguistic) Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language , or of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics . Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in
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#1732776371991672-462: Is a "descendant" of its "ancestor" Old English. When multiple languages are all descended from the same ancestor language, as the Romance languages are from Vulgar Latin , they are said to form a language family and be " genetically " related. According to Guy Deutscher , the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all
728-764: Is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America , home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize ); and in Mexico . In the Caribbean , it is official in Cuba , the Dominican Republic , and Puerto Rico . In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish
784-422: Is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and other Italic languages , which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated
840-1088: Is spoken by many residents of Alghero , on the island of Sardinia , and it is co-official in that city. Galician , with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia , and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León . A few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, Asturian and Aragonese in Spain; Mirandese in Portugal; Friulian , Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; and Romansh in Switzerland. The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as
896-496: Is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor . Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain , together with Spanish. Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec , and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario . Canada is officially bilingual , with French and English being
952-628: The European Union . Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct Latin Union ; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations . Outside Europe, French , Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires . With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish
1008-568: The Latin or Neo-Latin languages , are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin . They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family . The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are: The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in
1064-593: The Occitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman Empire , together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin
1120-659: The Republic of Moldova , where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ( Vojvodina and the Bor District ), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ( Bukovina , Budjak ) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of
1176-417: The declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions . By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin . Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research
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#17327763719911232-482: The 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and parts of Africa . Portuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas . There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. All of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of
1288-407: The 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies . Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth-century Turkish literature using forty novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and
1344-694: The European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it). The term Romance derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice , "in Roman ", derived from romanicus : for instance, in the expression romanice loqui , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular ), contrasted with latine loqui , "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of
1400-715: The Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin. The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows: Catalan is the official language of Andorra . In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in Catalonia , the Valencian Community (under the name Valencian ), and the Balearic Islands , and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of Aragon known as La Franja . In addition, it
1456-824: The abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland ) causes immigration of at least some males, and perceived status change. Then, in mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women would often have chosen to transmit the "higher-status" spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. Romance language Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Romance languages , also known as
1512-546: The adoption of Latin. To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. With
1568-462: The criterion of mutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not. The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated genetic clades in a tree model . The Romance language most widely spoken natively today
1624-468: The dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain , the Roman province of Africa , western Germany , Pannonia and the whole Balkans . During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with
1680-561: The end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia . In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya , Eritrea and Somalia —it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. Romania did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includes not only
1736-606: The expense of other languages perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status". Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants. For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011) argue that in some cases there is a correlation of language change with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not with female mtDNA. They then speculate that technological innovation (transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in
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1792-597: The language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui , "to speak in Barbarian " (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice , or "in the Roman vernacular". Most of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been
1848-509: The main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm can also provide clues to earlier phonetic and phonological patterns. A principal axiom of historical linguistics, established by the linguists of the Neogrammarian school of thought in the 19th century, is that sound change is said to be "regular"—i.e., a given sound change simultaneously affects all words in which
1904-418: The meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include: After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration . Conversely,
1960-547: The most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea . Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic. It is currently spoken by a minority and taught in
2016-459: The norm." The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes. Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and
2072-624: The official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti , French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II , its language did not remain official after
2128-584: The other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe. Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages ; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology , morphology , and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost
2184-496: The peak in 1957 during their insurgency . According to Che Guevara , Castro's second-in-command, the mountain had an "almost mystical significance" to the revolutionaries, chiefly due to it being the highest point in Cuba. Turquino National Park is established on a 229.38 km (88.56 sq mi) area around the peak. [REDACTED] Media related to Pico Turquino at Wikimedia Commons This Cuban location article
2240-597: The population in Italy , Spain , and Portugal . Romanian is also spoken in Israel by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. The Aromanian language is spoken today by Aromanians in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece. Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between
2296-657: The pronunciation of phonemes , or sound change ; borrowing , in which features of a language or dialect are introduced or altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change , in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. Language change usually does not occur suddenly, but rather takes place via an extended period of variation , during which new and old linguistic features coexist. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes
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2352-516: The pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single phoneme, reducing the total number of phonemes the language contains. Determining the exact course of sound change in historical languages can pose difficulties, since the technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century, and thus sound changes before that time must be inferred from written texts. The orthographical practices of historical writers provide
2408-467: The properties of earlier, un attested languages and hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them. The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology . The ongoing influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately
2464-437: The reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already are used to " synchronic variation ", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or "wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that "[i]n
2520-441: The reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999). Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more specifically in newer works the preference of ama over fakat , both borrowed from Arabic and meaning "but", and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that
2576-597: The relevant set of phonemes appears, rather than each word's pronunciation changing independently of each other. The degree to which the Neogrammarian hypothesis is an accurate description of how sound change takes place, rather than a useful approximation, is controversial; but it has proven extremely valuable to historical linguistics as a heuristic , and enabled the development of methodologies of comparative reconstruction and internal reconstruction that allow linguists to extrapolate backwards from known languages to
2632-554: The rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern , western , central , and southeastern Europe , and northern Africa along parts of western Asia . Latin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries. After that time and within two hundred years, it became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them." By
2688-480: The same token, they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete". Standardisation of spelling originated centuries ago. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the manuscripts that survived often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference. Semantic changes are shifts in
2744-434: The school curriculum. Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal , is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil , it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay . This accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in
2800-450: The syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change. The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the context of linguistic heterogeneity . She explains that "[l]inguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as
2856-527: The various functions a language 'is called upon' to fulfil in the society which uses it". Over a sufficiently long period of time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English , even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two may be thought of as distinct languages, but Modern English
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#17327763719912912-415: The vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history , English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words . Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By
2968-469: The western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal , Spain , and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to
3024-468: The word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of 2009 of 'brilliant'. Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" ( Old English hund ) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only
3080-520: The word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors. Kadochnikov (2016) analyzes the political and economic logic behind the development of the Russian language. Ever since the emergence of the unified Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries the government played a key role in standardizing the Russian language and developing its prescriptive norms with the fundamental goal of ensuring that it can be efficiently used as
3136-528: Was not widely publicized at the time. In 1915 the Swedish botanist Erik Leonard Ekman climbed the mountain and speculated that he was probably the first person to have done so. The following year, in response, Ramsden's son published a letter his father had written to his own mother describing the original ascent. A bust of José Martí sculpted by Jilma Madera was placed on the peak in 1953 to celebrate his centenary. Fidel Castro and his soldiers summitted
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