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- "Quot urbes in America sunt?"
28 Comments
546
Sunt is cognate with German 'sind' or Dutch 'zijn' and Polish 'są' (nasal vowel for an earlier 'san'). Very Indo-European.
293
Yes. It seems one in particular annunciates as if she is saying lines for a part in a soap opera. I don't need any dramatic context - just clear pronunciation.
Btw where is the cognate for 'sunt' in Russian? It seems to have been lost somewhere along the way from the Indo-European predecessor.
293
Latin influenced English in more than one way: by being the root of Norman French and through the influence of the church, which caused medieval Latin words to be introduced. The Roman invasion of Britain did not influence English.
English wasn't a language and England did not exist at the time of the Roman conquest of southern Britain. The Romans conquered the southern part of Britain - not just Southern England. They conquered much more of Britain than just the southern part of England. (The city, formerly known as Eboracum, is in northern England.) The ancestors of the English, the ones who brought with them the basis of the English language, were living over in Northern Germany and Denmark at the time of the Roman occupation.
The Roman conquest was an influence on place names, which remained after the Romans left, e.g. Londinium, but the Roman conquest of southern Britain was not an influence on English.
The inhabitants of Britain who fought the Romans, i.e. the Britons, were Celts. Over a period of centuries the two ethnicities began to mingle into a Romano-British culture. When the various Germanic tribes invaded from the fifth century onwards, the Britons (Celts) were pushed westwards into Wales and Cornwall. If there is any significant language influence on the island of Britain caused by the Roman invasion, I would expect to be found in Welsh and Cornish.
106
Hello,
"Americae" would be the locative case... which does not exist for countries. You can only use locative for names of cities and small islands (plus a handful of common nouns).