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

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:00:29 -0500, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
wrote:
>
>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.........
Well, the difference between a dialect (or sociolect in this case) and a
language is almost purely political, so I suppose he could call VL a "separate IE
language", if he really wants to. I don't know why he'd call it "Ancient Italian",
unless he's reinventing the wheel (otherwise he's just remarketing old
information). It might be interesting to compare what he reconstructs ....

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