Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/17/1999 4:20:38 AM, alderson at netcom.com writes:

<<At no time in the history of a language do its (unsophisticated) speakers
perceive themselves as speaking anything other than the language of their
remotest ancestors,...
Language, although mostly a political concept, is best defined in terms of
mutual comprehensibility, and different, contiguous generations of a single
language community do not suffer a lack of mutual comprehensibility.>>

I'm on the run but I must point out that the terms "parent" and "daughter"
languages have been used hundreds of times on this list without the least
reference to "political concepts" or "mutual comprehensibility."  These terms
was used in the same sense that "proto" language has been used time and time
again.  Parent and daughter languages have been referred to again and again
and they identified an ancestral relationship between two apparently distinct
identifiable languages.

The idea that the speakers awareness of ancestry was somehow a factor in
identifying "PIE" "proto-Germanic" versus "Germanic" has never come up.

Please go back in the archives and check out how you've used the words in the
past and you will see that they simply referred to the descent of one
language from another.  E.g., proto-Germanic/Germanic.  No one has bothered
in the past to note that Basque isn't really a political language but a
polymorphous mass of bubbling speech that never stayed the same but has
always changed in its very essentials on a regular basis and therefore not
exist alongside of anything that on this list would be called proto-Basque,
which wasn't really a language but a similar bubbling mass of speech.

What's so difficult about believing "Latin" was a living recognizable
language at the same time an early Italian language was developing among some
Latin speakers?  We see documents where the two exist along side of one
another.  So?

But more importantly why is there so much effort being expanded in trying to
avoid the possibility that language might be said to coexist with its parent
(as the word has been used a thousand times on this list)?

Regards,
Steve Long