Okay, an etymological question for Cecil and the Teeming (and hopefilly More Expert Than I) Millions*:
What’s up with the word “romance”? My dictionary (Collins’) gives various meanings related to romantic love and the appreciation of beauty. The etymology is traced back to Old French romans = romance.
Okay, fine–but then where does the usage of “Romance” in “Romance languages” come into it? Is it just a misspelling of “Roman” languages?
I’m deliberately avoiding the issue of “Romania”.
(Parenteze, wouldn’t “Cecil and the Teeming Millions” be a great name for a rock band?)
Rigardu, kaj vi ekvidos.
Here’s the crash course:
There’s a big city in Italy called Rome. The inhabitants used to speak Latin, from whence the modern “Romance” languages are derived (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, to an extent). English, on the other hand, is a Germanic language, with the structure and syntax of German. (useless etymolygical knowledge)
Thus, Romance refers, technically, to anything Roman, or relating to romance languages.
Incidentally, Rome is often know as “the city of love,” which obviously refers to the emotional attachment to the word.
(And who said three years of Latin and Classical Studies wouldn’t pay off?")
‘Romance’ has a lot of different meanings:
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=romance
The meanings are all probably related, with the Romance Languages early, and ‘love’ late.
Here is the link that is not coming out in the various definitions and etymologies. (It is there, but the link is not clear.)
Romans was the name given to the language that developed from Latin in France. The application of “Franks” with its later mutation into “France” had not fully occurred when the language began to develop, so the language was not originally called “French.” The name Romans (not Roman’s or Romans’) was given to it to distinguish it from the languages of the various Celtic/Hunnish/Gothic/Germanic/Vandal tribes that were wandering around the countryside, settling down and being killed off by the next invaders.
During the middle ages, a variety of literature arose that depicted various courts of honor and heroes who went wandering about doing great deeds. These came to be known by the language in which they were first collected, romans.
Later, many of these tales had the aspect of courtly love inserted into them. (Compare Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur to Thomas Malory’s Arthur. In the earlier ones, you expect to see the knights kiss their horses as in a 1930’s Western movie. In the later tales, the knights are all attempting to please their ladies–although they still do a goodly amount of head-bashing.)
As the tales became more and more entwined with the idea of courtly love, the word romance came to be identified more with the ladies fair than the head-bashing.