--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti"
> <frabrig@...> wrote:
> >
> > The varieties, sub-varieties and sub-sub-varieties of English
> > spoken in countries colonized by the British 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.
>
> You're rewriting history. Many of these people were not British,
> and most of them did not speak (any variety of) English.
> English has _never_ been homogeneous at any period of its history,
> least of all relatively homogenous.
1) Does the fact that, just to make an instance, many Irish, Germans
and so forth were among the early colonizers of the east coast of
the present U.S.A. have any bearing on the process of formation of
the different varieties of English spoken in the U.S.A. today?
2) Ditto for the internal differentiation of the English spoken by
the British colonists who settled in the east coast of the present
U.S.A. in the 17th-18th century. Does it have any bearing on the
process of formation of the different varieties of English spoken in
the U.S.A. today?
> 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.
You're probably right, but this still doesn't amount to saying that
Sicilian (or Sardinian, or Ligurian) is a sub-branch of Italian as
per your imaginary taxonomy, which appears to posit a dichotomy
between "official" languages and "unofficial" dialects stemming from
the former. This holds good in the case of the spread of the English
language (the "official" language there) over vast tracts of North
America and its regional dialectal differentiations in that land,
*not* in the case of the divergence of the various dialects of Italy
from as many varieties of Vulgar Latin and the gradual, later
formation of an "official" (initially, only literary) Italian
language based on one of such dialects (Tuscan).
> 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 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.
I can't see how this may have any relevance to the process of
formation of Romance languages in parts of Europe. Are you saying
that, for instance, Rumanian or Portuguese show Osco-Umbrian or
Etruscan influences in their lexicon or grammar? Are you suggesting
that the Italic immigrants who moved to the Roman provinces
continued to speak their native languages in the provinces instead
of adopting Latin, and thereby influenced the formation of the local
varieties of Romance? Are you claiming that such supposed, but very
elusive extra-Latin lexical and grammatical loans into the Roman
provinces could have been more determinant than the mingling of
standard Latin (yes, in this case, an "official" language!) with the
local substrate and adstrate languages for the rise of the regional
varieties of Vulgar Latin?
Mistero!
Please clarify, genius.
Regards,
Francesco