pielewe wrote:
> to explain the suspiciously Italian characteristics of Albanian
> phonological development you need a sizeable body of speakers of late
> Latin who switched to Albanian and transplanted their articulartory
> habits to it.
[snip]
> You don't need long periods of time to get this type of effect, what
> you need is language shift. As soon as I start speaking English, what
> you get is a variety of English with Dutch phonetics and an
> impressive series of semantic and syntactic phenomena that come
> straight from Dutch.
I'd amplify the idea of the necessity of a "sizeable body
of speakers:" it must be a... population. So much so,
that the scarce those few (if any!) able to correct
mistakes will have no chance whatsoever. (As for the
collapse of the official "Romania" (schools, administration
etc.): this was the... mother of the neo-Romance languages.
Otherwise the differentiation of Latin wouldn't have
been so extreme, would it?
Making use of Latin by such populations as those in
question, in S-E-Eur. during the decline and fall of
"SPQR," I'd say, seems comparable with... Yiddish -- a
mixture of Oberdeutsch and Mitteldeutsch (with rests
of Mittelhochdeutsch, e.g. some of the [u:] that haven't
changed to [au] yet), the main features being shared
with Bavarian German (i.e. between Suebia and Balaton
area of Hungary). Y. preserves some archaic variants
that even Bavarian and Austrian peasants in the Alps
have meanwhile forgotten. But in spite of myriads of
dialectal peculiarities (some surprising, indeed) that
have been preserved, the pronunciation differs, often
the sentence construction, grammar (I leave aside the
non-German vocabulary included: Hebrew, Slavic, Latin
[Latin: bentschn < benedicare or -dicere]). It has
become another dialect, another kind of German (in
numerous patterns closer to common Deutsch than Low
German dialects, which in turn are closer to Dutch
and Danish).
After all, within "Romania" but also in the outside world,
Latin was not only the language of native speakers. As it
is the case with English today (even on this mailing-list :)).
I.e., in all three cases, the language is a lingua franca
at the same time.
> Willem
George
PS: Would it be perceived as an offence if said that
what's spoken West of Venlo & Herlen can also be
deemed as dialects of German? (Net bees sein! :-))