Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 12:04 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Ah, look at all the lonely languages
Hi Anthony, hi all
<<<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?<<<
What do you mean by "bad and progressively
worse coloquial Latin"? Do you intend to
say that language change is language decay?
And why not asking: "Do you include that almost
artificial language (nowadays called Classical Latin) which was confined to a
very specific (social, cultural) context?
Frank