From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61930
Date: 2008-12-06
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
The usual identifying mark is that the word could not derive regularly
from its Latin antecedent. This misses some borrowings and a certain
latitude must be allowed for vagaries of development. Sometimes you
can't tell the origin, just as when trying to work out whether English
has borrowed a word from French or from Latin.
=======
I don't like this idea of "borrowing".
This suggests that Latin is a kind of foreign language.
And I also somewhat disagree that French is a language that has evolved from
Latin as if in a kind of phonetic freefall.
Connections between oral Latin to become French and written Latin were never
severed to the point of making Latin something foreign to oral varieties.
The notion of "regular" evolution is somewhat artificial.
The word siècle "century" is regular as regards the vowel e > iè
it's irregular because it should be siègle with g.
This suggests this word has not severed connections with written Latin.
Latin until a rather recent time was a kind of diglottic upper variety.
I suppose Greeks would never accept the idea that a word from Ancient Greek
is a borrowing into modern Greek.
This sounds definitely flawed.
A.