jsem chtěla napsat něco o tom, že takhle jsem se aspoň začala učit latinu, ale v rámci ověřování jedné věci, která mě zaujala (že "muž" je "vir", zatímco v románských jazycích "homo", což ale v latině je "člověk") jsem narazila na tuhle zajímavou stať o jazykové evoluci, o kterou se s váma musím podělit :-)
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Why was the term homo prioritized over vir during the evolution of Romance languages?
"why" is pretty difficult to answer. The change must have been happening in Vulgar Latin quite early, since vir was clearly already gone from the spoken dialect by the time the Romance languages started to break off and differentiate. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way we can determine the real reason.
Sometimes we can speculate as to why a Classical Latin word, prevalent and standard in literature, doesn't make it into the daughters. feles "cat", for instance, yielded to cattus (whence "gatto", "chat", "cat", etc.) almost definitely because the latter was ultimately derived from a borrowed Egyptian word, and it was there that the Romans first encountered domesticated cats. Others are more difficult to track: omnis "all" gave way to totus (originally "whole" or "complete") and only survived in the more nuanced Italian "ogni" ("each"). Classical equus "horse" lost out to caballus (originally more specific for "nag") for reasons that aren't securely reconstructable. homo and vir fit this category. Basically, we just have to accept the fact that Vulgar Latin (sort of a blanket term for the various regional varieties of non-literary Latin spoken all over the Roman Mediterranean) and Classical Latin, the literary and prestige dialect which had roots in a spoken language but had become crystallized and somewhat resistent to natural changes already in the Golden Age of Latin Literature, were quite different in many regards.
This phenomenon, when a word that is familiar from the literary dialect is edged aside by an unattested synonym or even a similar word with a more or less nuanced meaning, is actually pretty common. It's not always so obvious that you're even looking at a form that replaced the classical word you'd see in Cicero or Verigl. For instance, it's very clear from the daughters that frequentative forms of verbs were extremely productive in Vulgar Latin, to they extent that they not only lost the sense of repetition or frequency that is etymologically inherent to them, but they even squeezed out many of the radical verbs. Italian "gettare" and French "jeter" are the reflexes of a Latin verb iactare that actually meant "keep throwing" (i.e., to iacere frequently).
The same thing happened with diminutive nouns. It's not at all uncommon for a diminutive form unattested in our literary sources to have become the standard and unmarked form of the noun in some or all of the daughters. When it only happens in some of the daughters, we can make a crude stab at the timing (since any dialect that split before the change happened wouldn't manifest the change in the same way or at all). For instance, Classical avis "bird" became *avicellus or similar in Vulgar Latin, and that is the form that developed into French "oiseau", Italian "uccello", and a most of the other Romance languages (or "dialects", depending on who you ask) along the French and Italian coast, but is pretty much absent on the Iberian Peninsula (except in Catalan, which is more closely related to Occitan and Provençal than to Castilian Spanish and Portuguese) and seems to have missed Romanian as well (Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian all have a word that comes from Latin passer "sparrow" for the general term "bird").
So, great question. Sorry there isn't a really clear answer to it. Historical Romance Linguistics can be very frustrating because the written record, which should be our best means of recovering the spoken form, remained an approximation of Classical Latin up until basically Dante. Lots of changes were going on in there, and they can't always be recovered.