Reddit reviews Comprendre les langues romanes (Bibliothèque Lusitane) (French Edition)

There is absolutely no doubt that Romanian is a Romance language. It is true that many people in Western Europe might tend to forget it in the same way that they would forget, say, Romansh.

But I strongly agree with /u/Bezbojnicul: the concept of "closeness to Latin" is essentially meaningless: there is no natural distance in the space of languages, and depending on whether you emphasize the spoken or written language, grammar or vocabulary, intercomprehension or objectively measured differences, etc., you will get wildly different results.

While I'm on the subject, I'd like to mention what I think is an interesting project: a group of Romanicist linguists, coordinated by Jørgen Schmitt Jensen from the university of Aarhus¹, started the idea, in the early 2000's, of writing a series of books, targeting non-linguists who speak one of the Romance languages, to help them learn to understand the other Romance languages. So these books are supposed to be a bit like comparative grammars, but not really, because they're aimed at non-specialists. I don't know how many of these books eventually did come out, but I know the French version did: it's called Comprendre les langues romanes, by Paul Teyssier, and it describes Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian in relation to French (and for the benefit of French speakers); I can recommend it.

1. A similar project had earlied been formed for the Scandinavian languages (which, obviously, are closer to one another, by almost any metric, than the Romance languages). This might explain why a Danish scholar would end up leading a project to teach speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and French to understand each others.