Re: [tied] Re: Franco-Provençal

From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 63156
Date: 2009-02-19

>> > 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?

=========
Is it not dazzlingly obvious ??

I let the native speakers answer.

A.
=========


>
>> 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).

==========
I did not say Sicilian originates in Sdt Italian.
I just stated that Sicilian, Corsian and Std Italian are basically all
dialects of Italian.
Std Italian happens to be the official "dialect", for that reason it's
considered the Italian Language with a Capital L.

A.
==========

>
>> 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
>
==============

Well,

Vulgar Latin is the ad-hoc black-box where all the problems of connecting
real Romance languages with Cicero's Latin have been mopped into.

You should know that, midget.

Try to think by yourself.

A.