The UPenn IE Tree (a test)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/1/99 11:28:56 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<In both the case of Latin and of Sanskrit, the earlier litrary/liturgical
language was artifically preserved thru a specific prescriptive, scholarly
effort.  Beyond a certain point, I doubt that they were anybody's native
language.>>

There was a bit of discussion on this list about all this last year.
I won't rehash it and I don't know about Sanskrit.
But Latin went clearly quite beyond "artifical" preservation.
It was a hard-working, spoken language of international trade, of law
and of court and science.  I think it was E.B. White who once demonstrated
that there were whole communities of merchants, clerics and administrators
who never spoke anything but Latin their whole lives. (or something like
that.  I lost the quote.)

It was not the language of the majority of the people, of course.  And it was
probably mainly a second-language.  But Latin sure did represent the main
language of a large "language community" in medieval times.  And its
precision, vocabulary (see Othrid's letter) and multinationalism made it at
least as
effective at performing as a language than many vernaculars.

But I want to mention that I think Larry Trask's statement about
parent-duaghter co-existence (that they can't) is a methodological
assumption.  I think.  Obviously there's nothing logically that keeps
speakers of a parent tongue from continuing to speak the parent tongue
the day after some distant dialect officially becomes a different "language."

Regards,
S. Long