On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Roger Mills wrote:
> 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.
Indeed. Whose Modern English is "Modern English"?
> 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.
Certainly agreed.
Padraic.