The four layers of Spanish / español / castellano, the Language of the Senses/Mastery/“intelligential overflow”:
- pasión = passion
- primor = mastery
- Hispanidad
- provecho = avail
The four layers of French / français, the Language of L<3ve/Adoration/Study/l’encadrement:
- passion = passion
- sophistication = sophistication
- Françaisité
- dextérité = deftness
The four layers of Italian / italiano, the Language of Pleasure/Letters/Culture:
- passione = passion
- raffinatezza = refinement
- Italianità
- serendipità = serendipity
The four layers of Portuguese / português, the Language of Satisfaction/Eloquence/“posição na vida”:
- paixão = passion
- requinte = refinement
- Lusofonidade
- prazer = pleasure
Studying Spanish in school, I found it easy but struggled on a personal level, finding my own introverted frigid English disposition problematic up against Hispanic gregariousness. My personality didn’t work and I found it so awkward, no matter how amazing my scores were, even as the best in class. I started to reflect on why that was from a young age, marvelling at the difference in perspective.
Later on, a while after I finished high school in fact, I stumbled upon the theory of linguistic relativism, which proposes that “the structure of a language determines a native speaker’s perception and categorisation of experience”, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I was perplexed. There are some aspects of English communication that previously made it impossible for me to fathom how cognition can possibly work on the other side, from the side of all native speakers of languages that aren’t the current lingua franca of the globalised world. I now know that is because of the Buzz-Concept success streamlining our perspectives for beneficial traits like dynamism, ambition, conscientiousness, astuteness, forward-thinking, and responsibility. After much consideration I finally understood that I was approaching the issue wrong: different languages are different languages, they use different sound patterns and tactics to convey meaning. Of course they don’t have the same associations that we do. The laws of physics come into play here. In exquisite Romance languages like French, Italian and Spanish they treasure their words, their time with their mother tongue. Their world thus revolves around their languages, creating a cyclical structure to their lives where in English, in adhering to the Buzz-Concept success, life is direct, streamlined and rather straightforward. In English we utilise the succinct monosyllabic “Hi!” to greet people much of the time, our facial muscles engaging in abrupt kinesis thus. It’s a massive thing for us, the “HI.” moment. That physical experience is not something they have in other languages.
Speakers of Romance languages are obsessed with the concept of passion. That had already registered in me at a young age, wondering why I felt so awkward about learning Spanish. Being passionate myself about linguistics and languages, in turn, I set myself apart as a “linguist” when I was very young. It started as a flair, but in due course I got into comparative linguistics, and later on declared myself a philology fanatic as my knowledge flourished. I started with the Romance languages, as I really feel that any philologist should, because they literally invite linguistic analysis, differences and relationships crystal clear to see between them being so closely related and so recently diverged from the common ancestor Latin – just over a millennium ago.
The Romance languages are a family of modern European languages that all have Latin as a common ancestor. By the 9th century AD, the different dialects of Vulgar Latin i.e. common Latin spoken throughout the Roman Empire had become distinct languages that we term the Romance languages, i.e. languages which are descended from the prestigious ancient language of the Romans. Latin itself is still widely studied today, in part thanks to the global presence its daughter languages have maintained in the modern world. Latinity lives on. The five most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. Spanish is the most spoken with around half a billion native speakers, principally in Latin America and Spain itself. Second we have Portuguese with around a quarter of a billion speakers in Portugal and -mainly- Brazil. Third is French with the best part of 100 million speakers in France (obviously), Wallonia (the Francophone part of Belgium), la Romandie (French-speaking Switzerland), Québec (Canada) and in many parts of Africa. In fourth place is Italian with 69-85 million mostly speakers in Italy, with a small Italophone population in the Swiss canton of Ticino, notably. Romanian, for its part, has around a quarter of a million native speakers in Eastern Europe. Noteworthy minority Romance languages include Catalan of Barcelona, Catalonia and Valencia in Spain, and of the principality of Andorra. We also have Occitan, a close relative of Catalan spoken in southern France. And Galician of the Spanish region of Galicia, in the northwest of the Iberian peninsula above Portugal, very similar to Portuguese. And Romansh, spoken by about 0.5% of the population of Switzerland in the southeastern canton of Graubünden/Grischun. And within Italy, there are noteworthy regional languages like Sicilian, Corsican and Sardinian.
More broadly speaking, the Romance languages constitute a subbranch of the Italic branch of the proposed Indo-European macrofamily. The other commonly recognised living branches of the Indo-European family are Germanic (inc. English, German, Dutch); Celtic (inc. Irish, Scottish, Welsh); Slavic (inc. Russian, Polish); Hellenic/Greek; Albanian; Armenian, and Indo-Iranian (inc. Farsi, Hindi). All other Italic languages are now extinct; Latin belonged to the Latino-Faliscan branch along with its closest relative Faliscan, the Language of Tradition. Within the modern Romance family, languages are divided first between Western and Eastern. Romanian and its dialects principally make up the proposed Eastern branch. All the others mentioned are Western Romance languages. Although, Sardinian is often assigned its own independent subgrouping. Italian is classified as Italo-Romance, and French as Gallo-Romance. Spanish and Portuguese, meanwhile, are both Ibero-Romance languages.
The four layers of Latin were as follows:
- eximietas | excellency, selectness, exquisiteness
- caritas | esteem, dearness, preciousness
- Romanitas
- voluptas | pleasure, delight, enjoyment, living well
Latin was a unique phenomenon in that speakers really truly occupied their own special world. Latinophone communication consumed the soul. It was so rich and sophisticated. Latin was the ancient tongue that gave birth to the whole notion of sensorily pleasing language, language that was designed, honed or moulded especially to be pleasing to the visual and aural senses. The exquisiteness/excellency and the preciousness of Latin served to unite its speakers in ancient Rome, and foster productivity. A child would pick up the language and then be sent on a lifelong intellectual quest to pick up on, discover and learn to appreciate as many of the enshrined delights encapsulated within the Latin language as their capabilities, or lack thereof, allowed them to. Do it well and you would get to be literary. Excel and you would be a master of the language. The richness of the Latin language kept Roman minds and souls safe from and untainted by enmity. It was fail-safe mental back-up.
However, the stress of Germanic invasions from the 5th century caused a surge in internal violence and sexual misconduct. The intricate ecosystem disintegrated. People found solace in their regional identities. The decline of the Western Roman Empire was determined thus. And that is why Rome fell.
Overwhelmed and struggling to stay faithful to the intricacies of Latinity and Romanescence, Romance-speakers adopted a new Buzz-Concept as the radiance of the Latinophone world faded to soften the fall. The Buzz-Concept passion evolved out of the hedonism that spelled out the end for Roman hegemony, the concept encapsulating the buzz as neatly as possible.
Beyond that, the Buzz-Concept passion works primarily by ensuring things like inner conviction, zest for life and engagement. Even productivity. Native speakers of Romance languages are all ferociously passionate about their languages, savouring their usage on a momentaneous basis. They are strongly united, well-spoken, eloquent, sophisticated and quick-witted peoples thanks to this.
The term(s) passion / passione / pasión / paixão / pasiune is derived from the Late Latin passio “suffering, enduring”. Passio also meant “event, occurrence, phenomenon” and “passion, affection”. This in turn was derived from the past participle passus of the Latin verb pati, patior, which meant “suffer, endure, tolerate” or “allow, acquiese, permit, submit”. Pati was a rendering of the supposed Indo-European root *peh₁- meaning “to hurt” and the Greek pathos, πάθος “suffering; experience; something that one undergoes; condition, state; incident; feeling, emotion; passion”.
La Lingua del Piacere, delle Lettere… Classical Latinity was synthesised with the input of the various other ancient peoples of the Italian peninsul to create Italian Latinity, the legitimate although by no means purest heir to the Roman legacy. The modern Italian language is derived from Florentine Romance. The excellency of Latin is wholly preserved in the splendid Italian language…
Italians build exemplary intellectual architecture with the supreme exquisiteness of their beautiful language.
Gli italofoni costruiscono architettura intellettuale esemplare con la squisitezza assoluta della sua bellissima lingua.
La Langue de l’Adoration, des Études… The Romans inhabited the province of Gallia alongside different Germanic tribes, such as the Franks and the Burgundians, so modern French Latinity has streaks of “Germanic-ness”. The French are descended from the Germanicised Romans. French is derived from Gaulish i.e. Gallic Latin/Romance. Complete preservation of the authentic utility of the Latin language has been achieved thus…
French-speakers don’t communicate amongst each other. They instead decorate their lives with the transcending beauty of the French lexicon.
Les francophones ne communiquent pas parmi eux-mêmes. Ils décorent leurs vies, inversement, avec la beauté transcendante du lexique français.
La Lengua de la Sensorialidad, de la Maestría… Spanish Latinity has been orthographically very faithful to original Roman Latinity. However, the Iberian peninsula was also conquered by the Moors of North Africa who injected an intense, visceral, profound vein of Arabophone influence into Iberian/Hispanic/Castilian Romance, whose formal origins are otherwise monastic. Modern Spanish derives from the Castilian dialect of Romance, through which the semantic & expressive profundity and intensity of the prestigious ancient Latin language have been perfectly preserved…
Hispanophones engender sublime haute couture designs to adorn the soul in the show that passes through us called life.
Los hispanoparlantes engendran diseños de alta costura sublimes para adornar el alma en el desfile que nos traspasa llamándose la vida.
A Língua da Satisfação, da Eloquência.. When it comes to Lusophones… Portuguese is very closely related to Spanish, but differs in its gentle Celticised flair… In Portuguese the sensory marvellousness by which Latinophone communication was characterised has been partially conserved…
Just imagine every word is a flower or a leaf that you embroider into the tapestry of life.
Imagine só que cada palavra seja uma flor ou uma folha com que bordar a tapeçaria da vida.
The Buzz-Concept Project 