Re: [tied] Re: Franco-Provençal

>
>> The issue is about the use and misuse of the word "language".
>>
>> If one applies your approach of the word "language" to English
>> varieties currently spoken around the world, there is no English
>> language.
>>
>> I consider that there is an English language of which current
>> varieties are dialects.
>
> This is yet another special case that cannot be compared with that
> of the origin and development of Italian and its so-
> called "dialects".
>
> The varieties, sub-varieties and sub-sub-varieties of English spoken
> in countries colonized by the British

=======

You're rewriting history.
Many of these people were not British,
and most of them did not speak (any variety of) English.

A.

============

in the course of the Modern

> Age (the U.S.A., Canada, Australia etc.) are the outcome of a
> process of divergence (especially as regards pronunciation) from a
> relatively homogeneous mother tongue, English,

=======

English has _never_ been homogeneous at any period of its history, least of
all relatively homogenous.

And this is not a reason at the same time to think English does (did) not
exist.

A.
=======

which was spoken by

> the white colonizers themselves (N.B. I won't take into account here
> the varieties of English spoken by the colonized non-Caucasian
> natives of former British colonies in Asia and Africa, which is an
> entirely different matter: English speakers in those countries are,
> indeed, for the most part bilingual). Thus, Modern English came
> first; further to colonization, Modern English differentiated into
> new geo-cultural varieties of English -- American English,
> Australian English etc. -- with their own sub-varieties and separate
> linguistic histories (including a very moderate tendence to
> creolization). This process of linguistic differentiation, motivated
> by geo-cultural reasons, is quite understandable (the same cannot be
> said for the internal differentiation of British English dialects).
>
> Can you maintain a similar process to have occurred in the case of
> the historical differentiation of Italian "dialects"? Did the latter
> diverge from a homogeneous Italian "language" spoken in the Middle
> Ages, or did they rather diverge directly from Vulgar Latin as I
> have pointed out in my earlier post? And, what is older, Italian or
> its "dialects"?
>

========

American English is clearly an aborted attempt at linguistic unification.
This is more a story about convergence than divergence.
It has achieved a limited level of unity in a very large area in the USA,
but New-England English still is not Californian English, and probably never
will.

A.

=========

>> There is an Italian language, of which regional varieties are
>> dialects.
>
> This statement looks quite dogmatic and inspired by nationalistic
> prejudices to me. It doesn't tell all the story.

========

The main problem is you don't understand the difference between a dialect
and a language.
Sicilian is not a language but a dialect of Italian.
Among all varieties based on LAtin, it shares more with standard Italian
than with any other official language like French or Spanish.

A.
=======

>
>> The farmers and soldiers who conquered western Europe with their
>> feet and hands were not speaking a pre-packaged official language.
>> Typical garbage rewriting history.
>
> What did they speak then? Were they the speakers of some already
> differentiated varieties of Latin which, in the European lands they
> conquered, turned magically into 'Proto-French', 'Proto-
> Castilian', 'Proto-Rumanian' etc. etc.? Or wasn't their own common
> Latin language, to a great extent, a standardized one which evolved
> locally into the various Romance languages and dialects long after
> the Romans conquered those lands?
>
> Regards,
> Francesco

=======

Latin was not itself a standardized language.
If you were not incompetent and ignorant about basic facts about your own
language, you would know that.

Most of the immigrants who moved out of "Italy" during the expansion of the
Roman Empire were not native speakers of Latin and most of them were not
_citizens_ of the Roman Empire.
And we can easily imagine that many of them spoke Osco-Umbrian varieties,
possibly Etruscan and some of them Greek or maybe unattested idioms native
to Italy.

A.