THE LATINITY OF IBERO-ROMANCE
摘要
For the general Romance philologist like myself, who has not specialised deeply in any one particular branch, there is a special fascination in Ibero-Romance (IR), by which I mean the various dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, limiting the sense of the word to exclude Catalan. In their modern forms these two languages present features which are markedly different from the other Romance languages, including Catalan, and this on points where the other languages agree in the main. For example, there are only three conjugations, and these are all highly regularised with hardly any irregular verbs and with only the auxiliary haber (Ptg. ter) used to form the perfect; on the other hand they have retained the Latin pluperfect and future perfect (now only vestigial in Spanish). Then there are no-ir verbs with-esc- infix, but-ecer verbs with-ec- throughout. The interrogative pronoun shows forms derived from QUEM and CUIUS but not CUI. And there are many differences in vocabulary. The questions that naturally spring to my mind are, did IR undergo a separate development from earliest times, or at what stage or stages did it