On Lukashenka: some tangents

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

I couldn't help expressing my surprise.
  |
  |>vice versa).  By the same token, although Portuguese, Castilian Spanish and
  |>Catalan  (to give an analog of geographic proximity) are related languages,
  |>no one formulates the relationship in terms of  "coming" "from a common
  |>root."
  |
  |I do. Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Languedocian,
  |French, Italian, and many others come from a common root : Latin.

That they have come down from Latin is a typical myth that
"language teachers" of these languages are paid to assert.
  We in the academic world know that "Latin" was a normative language
of the Roman Empire (it was already "literary" in Cicero's time), based
on the Roman dialect of ancient Italic language(s). (Contemporary Italian is
based on Florentine dialect, not Roman, incidentally). It is like saying the
ancestors of humans are apes -- the truth is that the ancestors of apes and
humans are very likely the same. I am saying Latin was not the only
language/dialect within the Roman Empire although the dialectal diversity
of Italic languages seems to be much smaller than today.
  Or do you believe all the Roman colonists spoke exactly the same language
("single vulgar Latin") everywhere?

  The same thing applies to Ukrainian/Belarusan/Russian as well: it is wrong
to say Russian is a off-spring of Ukrainian. Just have a look of the
Old Slavonic and you will notice a considerable diversity of local features.
It is too early to establish a "common Slavonic language" that was the mother
of all Slavonic languages because we don't have adequate evidence to do that.

Cheers,
Tsuji

--------
I can afford to concede to the argument that contemporary Romance languages
have come from Latin. It is like finding a famous war lord among your
ancestors. It is pure nonsense to say "my ancestor was a samurai" because
everyone has 128 paternal ancestors eight generations back. As samurai
constituted one per cent of the population, everyone is very likely to
have one as their ancestor. But the status of samurai was transferred only
to the eldest son, and all the other children were worthless. Considering
every samurai had four to six sons, the greatest chances are that off-springs
of samurai eight generations down are practically all commons.

  It is very likely that many of the military chiefs stationed in the
provinces of Roman Empire were genuine Romans, but does it hardly matter?
The majority of peole who had settled in the provinces are very unlikely
to have been the rightful Roman citizens. I would imagine they were
slaves from everywhere.