Some Fundamentals of Romance Linguistics with Regard to Sardinian

摘要

When it comes to consider the vast space that Latin and the Romance languages occupy, geographical, temporal, and social dimensions pop up at least as unavoidable. In coming to grips with the evolution of the vulgar Latin into their extant reflexes, there is also unanimous agreement in regarding vowel quantity, syllable boundaries, and syllable weight as the three main concepts accounting for the progressive stages and the final aspect of the neo-Latin languages today. In reassuming such a theoretical frame, this paper is more particularly intended to give a picture of these features when applied to Sardinian. Its insular development beside the controversy on its alleged non Indo-European origin, the conservative forms the Sardinian took with regard to Latin, or the deep imprint the diverse linguistic superstrata exerted upon it are all these traits that, doubtlessly, contribute to making of the Sardinian a unique Romance standing for its own place in the scene of the minority languages.