Parent & Daughter

ECOLING at aol.com ECOLING at aol.com
Wed Sep 22 02:36:43 UTC 1999


In a message dated 9/21/99 9:36:20 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:

>>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".

In this particular exchange, Steve Long was the more precise one.
He specified "some Latin speakers" (as distinct from other Latin speakers).
In the reply, the two were lumped as one:  "they" is used as if there were
only one "they", whereas in fact, SOME Latin speakers might have not changed
a range of significant features of their language, while OTHER Latin speakers
might have already changed them very significantly in the direction of
Italian.

If at any point the difference between two dialects of this sort became great
enough to impair communication, so that we must accept two different language,
then the unchanged dialects are the parent language, the strongly changed
languages are a daughter language, and the two do coexist.
Steve Long was in principle correct about this.

I think it is rare that one dialect changes this far before another changes in
any significant ways, though it should not be rare that one dialect changes
enough to become a distinct language, while another changes so little as to be
still the same language (by the mutual intelligibility criterion).

However, this entire discussion has taken us far afield
from our starting point, which I believe involved principaly the question
whether the standard form of Stammbaum family trees
leaves innovations unspecified on what appears to be a "stem".
I discussed this in a message recently submitted to the IE list.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics



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