Re: The relationship betwen Spanish, Galician and Portuguese

cybalist message #688cybalist: Re: The relationship betwen Spanish, Galician and Gerry writes: >

Piotr, In your reply to David James, you failed to explain why he could (with knowledge of Spanish) understand Galician but could not understand Portuguese. Is there an easy answer to his question, or is the answer very difficult?

I am not speaking for Piotr. He is quite capable (and more capable than I) to answer the question, and he may correct me here.

In the case of Portuguese, the problem is partly phonological: Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, has an 'accent'. It has sounds not present in Spanish, and realizes other sounds differently.

I like the way you expressed the network effect of dialects rather than a branching tree. But then you used the branching tree analogy when you traced the Romance dialects back to Latin. It seems to me that way back 1.5 millenniums ago, the folks who spoke "Latin" didn't ALL speak the same language; there were still regional variations which some folks might have called dialects.

In the case of Romance, the picture is relatively well-understood. Even by AD 1, differences between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin were apparent, something like the difference between educated RP and uneducated Cockney. By the time of St. Jerome, only the educated spoke what we call Classical Latin, and it was Jerome who undertook the job of putting the bible into spoken popular Latin; this is the Vulgate. By the 600s, even Vulgar Latin was dead, and the ancestors to the present-day Romance languages had emerged.

I think we need to somehow attain a simultaneous fusion and separation of languages but at present I don't have any concrete suggestions.

The branching tree diagram is useful. When expressing differences between widely different languages, they provide a quick shorthand diagram showing relationships. With closely related languages, however, their usefulness is limited.

When we speak of animal species, and how an individual species arises, the reality is not so much of a specific foundering ancestor, but rather, of a founder breeding group. If you look at a litter of puppies -- or even at your own siblings -- you see differences, sometimes quite marked differences; even though the ancestry is common, it is not identical. You and your siblings each share one-half of your two parents' genetic heritage -- but your halves are not identical to your siblings' halves. We can use a genealogical pedigree -- a tree diagram -- to show maternal and paternal descent, but such a diagram is quite limited in describing the genetic diversity involved.

With a language group, there is as much 'genetic potential' as there is in a breeding group. As generations progress, some of this potential will become 'dominant', while other of it may be lost. With a breeding group, you have individual specimens breeding with each other. With language groups, you have individual speakers interacting with each other. Just as no two people (save identical twins) are genetically identical, so no two people speak absolutely identically.

The forces that shape language evolution are not quite the same as those that shape the evolution of a human breeding population, but there is enough in common to be useful.

Mark.
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