Re: Evolution of Romance (was: **Answer to Pete**)
| From: | ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, February 11, 2008, 4:00 |
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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.........
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