Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>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

-- actually, that's a fair description of any language.  All languages do
change all the time.  And they're all pretty polymorphous bundles of
dialects.  Except for the dead ones, of course.

>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?

-- because the very fact of developing "Italian" features means that they're
shedding the features which make us refer to what they're speaking as
"Latin".  "Birth of Italian" is the _same thing_ as "death of Latin".

>We see documents where the two exist along side of one another.  So?

-- so what?  We see documents today where Latin coexists with every modern
language; that doesn't mean that Latin is a living language in 1999 CE.

It just means that the Vatican chancery uses it, as innumerable people have
used it as a secondary, "learned" language.

None of them speak it as their first language.