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

> (Sorry for the delay, I used the wrong email addr.)
>
>
>> Ray Brown wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:00:29 -0500, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 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. ....
>>>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Well, yes, Vulgar Latin was not " a colloquialized form of what we call
>>> Classical Latin." Indeed, I find that description somewhat misleading.
>>
>> Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. What I meant was, CL and the language of
>> the man in the street should better be considered as _registers_ of a
>> single language, just as, I assume, the language of the KJV was not that
>> of contemporary everyday speech; nor e.g. the language of serious writing
>> on history, literature, religion, science et al. nowadays is not the
>> speech of everyday Americans or Brits. But they are variants of a single
>> language, not sister languages-- and the latter, I gather, is what M.
>> Cortez is claiming for Roman times.
>>
>>>>> Well, slap my ass and call me Cato-- has M. Cortez never heard of
>>>>> Proto-Romance?
>>>
>>> Isn't Proto-Romance late Vulgar Latin?
>>
>> That's certainly been the conventional wisdom for years....Some
>> respondents to the thread have said "Well, there's no written evidence
>> for anything like VL in Roman times"-- ignoring known dialectal features,
>> Plautus, Pompeiian graffiti, etc., and the later CE writers who complied
>> lists of correct/incorrect pronunciations and spellings. When one poster
>> mentioned these, the response was "How do you know that?" Duh. Read a
>> book, people, there's good, though not vast, documentation. Too bad the
>> Romans apparently rarely pursued the idea of writing "realistic" stuff to
>> provide us with lots more everyday language to ponder.
>>>
>>> If all that M. Cortez is doing is to say "French ain't descended from
>>> Classical Latin," then I go along with that. But if he's saying
>>> something radically different, i.e. that Proto-Romance was not related
>>> to any sort of Latin then, of course, I disagree. But, as I said,
>>> methinks one needs to read the book.
>>
>> Agreed. I've asked the ideolenguistas where I can get it. Amazon-US
>> doesn't turn up anything. Is there an Amazon-France, or equivalent...? I
>> haven't searched yet.
>>
>>
>

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