Re: Droppin' D's Revisi

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> En réponse à Robert Hailman <robert@...>:
<snip>

> > "Roumant" I could understant, pretty much, without the translation. It
> > was probably just the choice of words, though, because my knowledge of
> > French isn't that great, and my knowledge of other Romance langs is
> > pretty much non-existant. I'd imagine that someone who had a working
> > knowledge of French and another Romance lang or two could understant
> > "Roumant" without much trouble.
> >
>
> I think so too. Just like thanks to the fact that I'm a L1 speaker of French and
> have a good knowledge of Spanish (and also some memory of Latin), I can
> understand written Portuguese and Italian (and also Occitan) without much
> trouble. Things are much more different with spoken languages though.
Spoken languages are trouble in that regard, yes. I've heard Icelandic
cited as an example of this, as it hasn't changed gramatically very much
over the last 1000 years or so, and Icelandic schoolchildren can study
the Sagas and such in the original language without explanation of words
and such (as we have when studying Shakespeare), but if an Icelandic
scientist were to invent a time machine and go back to that time, they
wouldn't understand a word of the language.

--
Robert