One should not be so shocked that a Romance tongue uses terms of endearment borrowed from LAT or even from a barbarous tongue. The now-extinct Mozarabic Spanish dialect which once was the most conservative of the Ibero-Romance tongues (and what a beauty it was!) used the word HABIBI derived from Arabic to express the concept of DARLING/BELOVED.
What is even more pertinent to the question at hand is that the FREN word AMOUR was originally borrowed from Medieval Latin and refashioned on a Provencal model during the era of the troubadors.
Here follows an excerpt from Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Francaise ( Paris, 1998):
AMOUR n.m. d'abord sous la forme AMOR (fin Xe s.) surtout feminin jusqu'au XVII s. est un emprunt au latin AMOR; sa forme atuelle, AMOUR, est influencee par l'ancien provencal ,AMOR, illustre' par la conception des troubadours, LA FINE AMOR.
So a single swallow (golondrina, hirondelle, rondine) does not a summer make!
Here are some more ROM words expressing affection which were borrowed (not inherited) from LAT as they were also borrowed (not inherited) from LAT into ENG and into most of the Romance tongues:
AFECTIUNE
AFECTUOS
AMANT
ARDENT
DEVOTAT
PASIONAT
ROMANTIC
SEX
None of the above (particularly the last term) requires any translation.
Yours,
Dinis
What is even more pertinent to the question at hand is that the FREN word AMOUR was originally borrowed from Medieval Latin and refashioned on a Provencal model during the era of the troubadors.
Here follows an excerpt from Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Francaise ( Paris, 1998):
AMOUR n.m. d'abord sous la forme AMOR (fin Xe s.) surtout feminin jusqu'au XVII s. est un emprunt au latin AMOR; sa forme atuelle, AMOUR, est influencee par l'ancien provencal ,AMOR, illustre' par la conception des troubadours, LA FINE AMOR.
So a single swallow (golondrina, hirondelle, rondine) does not a summer make!
Here are some more ROM words expressing affection which were borrowed (not inherited) from LAT as they were also borrowed (not inherited) from LAT into ENG and into most of the Romance tongues:
AFECTIUNE
AFECTUOS
AMANT
ARDENT
DEVOTAT
PASIONAT
ROMANTIC
SEX
None of the above (particularly the last term) requires any translation.
Yours,
Dinis