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?
>==========
>> 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
>