--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry" <waluk@...> wrote:
> When has Latin ever had "native" speakers?
For a while in the Roman Empire. But it depends on what you mean by
Latin. Do you include regional dialects such as Praenestine and
Faliscan? Do you include the bad and progressively worse colloquial
Latin which has to be postulated as the immediate common ancestor of
the Romance languages? For example, it had an intruding German-type
new perfect tense "habeo scriptum librum" (or rather, "abyo iscrito
libro" or the like) which produced French "(j')ai e'crit (un) livre".