On 2008-01-27 00:20, mkelkar2003 wrote:
> So there was never a prot-Romance language to start with. Latin is
> proto Romance.
No. The opinions you quote only question the reality of a clear "primary
split" within early Romance. As you say yourself, Latin (as spoken by
the common population of the Roman Empire) was Proto-Romance, which
makes Proto-Romance real enough. No-one to my knowledge insists that
actual protolanguages were homogeneous. That would be unrealistic. We
may not be able to reconstruct dialectal divisions within them, but
that's a separate issue.
> How could there be a proto-Indo-European language then?
Just as there was a language called Latin.
Piotr