Re: [tied] Thracian , summing up

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 23650
Date: 2003-06-20

Alex in response to the fact that Latin still survives in the guise
of a large chunk of modern European languages:
>Yeessss. It looks like Zorro. The man with several masks. Ups, you
>forgot to say it looks like Lithuanian too.

No language evolves in a straight line. Dialects happen in every
language. That's how a language evolves over time, like waves
in a puddle. It would appear on the surface, for example, that
Basque is an isolated language and has managed to evolve without
fragmenting into dialects. Yet the reality is that it has many
dialects and that others had existed before the modern day as
well, only to die out before they could ever be recorded.

So if Alex can't accept that French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan,
etc is the living modernday Latin, then there may be no hope for
our poor misguided Romanian comrad.


= gLeN

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