Re: Evolution of Romance (was: **Answer to Pete**)

ROGER MILLS skrev:
 > This is OT w.r.t. this thread, but--
 >
 > Over the last several weeks, there has been an interesting
 > and rather astounding thread on Spanish "Ideolengua"
 > (yahoo groups) regarding a recent (?) book by one Yves
 > Cortez, Le français ne vient pas du latin. (And by
 > implication, neither do the other Romance languages). Have
 > any of you been following it, or has anyone else heard of
 > this book?
 >
 > His theory, as I understand it without having seen the
 > book (only the Prologue has been quoted), seems to be,
 > that the bulk of the Roman population spoke not a
 > colloquialized form of what we call Classical Latin, but a
 > separate IE language _closely related to_ Classical Latin
 > but which was already headed toward being a more analytic
 > language. He calls this "Ancient Italian", and it, not CL,
 > is the source of the Romance languages.
 >
 > The amazing thing is that some of the respondents are
 > taking this seriously !!! and are immune to all arguments
 > to the contrary.
 >
 > Well, slap my ass and call me Cato-- has M. Cortez never
 > heard of Proto-Romance? It would almost be worthwhile, and
 > certainly amusing, to actually get the book, to see how he
 > dismisses almost 200 years of scholarly research.........
 >
 >
 >

It seems to me that Cortez has simply misunderstood the
nature of the relation between CL and VL. In fact "a
separate IE language _closely related to_ Classical Latin
but which was already headed toward being a more analytic
language" is, given the shadiness of the language/dialect
distinction a fitting description of VL: the both descended
from Old Latin but diverged around 200 BCE at the latest. So
if Scots and English are two closely related languages both
descended from Old English a similar description fits CL--
VL. VL was emphatically not a daughter of CL, but a sister
-- to the extent that CL was not a conlang derived from a
mix of OL and VL!

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
   à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
   ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
   c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)