Re: Old Languages

Padraic Brown wrote:


>On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Roger Mills wrote:
>
>> It's relationship to modern Jav.
>> seems to be about the same as literary Old English to modern Engl., or
>> Latin to Romance langs.-- closely related, but not the direct ancestor.
>
>Er. OE _is_ the direct ancestor of ModE.

Hmm. It's always been my understanding that the various surviving monuments
of _literary Old English_ are written in various dialects, none of which can
be called the direct ancestor of ModE.-- whereas the dialect of the London
area, which has little if any early literary history, is believed to be the
ancestor.  I could be wrong. (When my host school  in Indonesia asked me to
teach the history of English, I _did_ have the sense to give them an
emphatic NO.)

The analogy, which I think is universally accepted, is that Classical Latin
(as preserved in Caesar, Cicero, Virgil et al.) is not the direct ancestor
of Spanish, French etc.   Similarly with Sanskrit vis-a-vis modern Indic
languages.

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