Re: The relationship betwen Spanish, Galician and Portuguese

Mark writes:
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.

Gerry here: Of course! In addition to geographic seperation one needs
to include education and class. Also, now that language families are
all related, so too must be ethnic groups.