This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes. The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change. From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

No detailed description available for "Readings in Romance Linguistics".

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the XII Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), held in April 1982 at Penn State University. These papers reflect the general state of the art in Romance Linguistics. Some of the studies are theoretical papers that seek to establish general principles based on the analysis of a Romance language, others apply the principles of a particular theory to the solution of a problem in some Romance language, or provide data-oriented descriptions of linguistic phenomena in Romance languages.

The papers in this volume are a selection from the paper presented at the 13th Annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (1983). The languages discussed include Romance in general, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Gascon. The diversity of the topics encompassed by these papers conforms to the principal goal of the LSRL conferences: to contribute to the synchronic and diachronic description and analysis of the Romance Languages within the context of current developments in linguistic theory.