On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 06:58:25 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<
gknysh@...> wrote:
>******GK: The point may have been made before, but I
>gather that what this implies is that Proto-Romance
>and Vulgar Latin (at some stage: which century?) are
>one and the same?******
Yes. Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance are virtually the same. One may
distinguish them for a particular purpose (e.g. actually attested
forms = VL, reconstructed forms = PR). The "which century" question
is more difficult to answer, as is the "where" question. In a sense,
the modern Romance languages started to diverge from spoken Latin as
soon as Latin started to be spoken in the provinces. That is why
Sardinian seems to be derived from quite a different stage of
Vulgar/spoken Latin than the other languages. In another sense, the
influence of spoken Latin throughout the Empire kept the Romances more
or less together until such influence stopped (with the breakdown of
unified administration), and even then, written Latin continued (and
continues) to have a certain influence on the Romance languages.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...