Talk:Language names gender

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Latin[edit]

About Latin: How to translate, "French is a Romance language" or "Russian is a Slavic language" ? In which cases, the language names are nouns, not adjectives. Yann 09:50, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I would say "lingua Francogallica est lingua Romanica", "lingua Ruthenica (or lingua Russica) est lingua Slavica". (It might be possible to get by with just "lingua Francogallica est Romanica", the French language is Romance, but I'm not sure.)
Whoever it was that wrote w:la:lingua Francogallica and w:la:lingua Russica used phrasing like "lingua Francogallica lingua ex linguis Indoeuropeis est et sub familia Latina subsummata..." ("the French language is a language of the Indoeuropean languages and subsumed under the Latin family", apparently).
However I don't know any way to phrase your sentence where "French" is both a substantive and good Latin. I will have to ask someone with better Latin skill than me if it is possible, and how it would be done. —Muke Tever 07:10, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)