(Not to be confused with the country Romania) 1. In a narrow sense, region inhabited in the Antiquity by speakers of Latin; 2. Set of the countries and/or peoples speaking Romance languages.
Romania
Romanic
Descendant of Vulgar Latin or the ancient Romances; the same as Latin (sense 2), Neo-Latin or Italic.
Romans
1. Inhabitants of the city of Rome; 2. Inhabitants of the Roman Empire.
Rounded vowel
Vowel articulated with the lips in a circle shape, such as [ɔ], [o] and [u], for example.
Secondary symmetry
See Symmetry.
Semantic
Concerning the meaning of words.
Semantics
Part of linguistics that deals with the meaning of words.
Sense
Each of the specific meanings of a word. For example, among the various senses of the word point, we have ‘geometric figure’, ‘stitch’, ‘location’, ‘end of a knife or needle’, ‘item of an agenda’, etc.
Sibilant
Fundamentally the sounds [s] and [z].
Specularity
See Symmetry.
Standard language
Language having a written tradition at formal level, i.e. in the production of literature, documents and other learned texts.
Stem
Part of the word containing its essential meaning, which refers to some concept and not a mere grammatical function. For example, in word globalisation, the stem is glob-, which refers to the idea of ‘globe, world, planet Earth’, whereas -al-, -is-, -a- and -tion are suffixes indicating respectively ‘transformation into adjective’ (global), ‘transformation into verb’ (globalise) and ‘transformation into noun’ (globalisation).