Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Sat Sep 11 07:27:51 UTC 1999


>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

<<Common sense says that Latin as a native language would have had to co-exist
>with vernacular languages that lived on after it died.  Or those vernacular
>languages would have had to come out of nowhere the day Latin died.

-- no, they all developed simultaneously.  Latin "died" by becoming dozens of
dialects which gradually lost mutual comprehensibility.  The process is
gradual and cannot be given sharp dates, by its nature.

Latin was alive in 100 AD.  It was dead in 1000 AD.  That's about as close as
you can get.



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