IE "break-up", dates, etc.

[Roger Wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
>Roger Wright <Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Most noticeably in the case of the Romance languages,
>>perhaps, for in this field modern datings for when they "broke up" range
>>from the third century B.C. (Robert de Dardel's view) (no, I'm not
>>making that up) to the sixteenth century or so (Rebecca Posner's).
>
>You're making that up :-)
 
 
No. Well, not quite ....
 
 
>
>There's a difference between "started to break up" and "had become
>mutually unintelligible".  The Roland is not written in the same
>language as the Cid.
>
 
 
Yes, indeed, that's certainly part of the point.
That's the period where I've been putting the break at myself; the idea
that these texts and others were in different languages was catalysed by
the invention of different reformed spelling systems for Romance in
different places, which was the thing that led people to think they
represented different languages.
        The conceptual distinctions between Latin and Romance, and soon
thereafter between different types of Romance language, needn't
have happened at all, though, if they'd been happy to keep using Latin
spellings but without the old morphology.
        We're left wondering if the cognate languages of physically
contiguous peoples with cognate "languages" can really break up without
the aid of external political catalysts such as this -
                                                RW
 
 
 
 
 
>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl
>Amsterdam
>