[Corpora-List] Phonetic corpora as a tool for language classification.

[Mike Maxwell]

sowa at bestweb.net wrote:
> French and Italian, for example, are very close in vocabulary, but 
> farther apart phonetically because the people in Gaul who learned Latin 
> were native speakers of language(s) with very different phonological 
> patterns.

I vaguely recall an article (maybe a book review in Language) a couple 
decades ago that started out by saying that the above is what one might 
have expected, but.  And my recollection stops at the "but".  Does 
anyone have a better memory than mine?  A reference to the article, perhaps?

BTW, if the above is true, then Italian (particularly the Italian 
dialects spoken in central Italy) might be expected to be the closest to 
Latin, because apart from the invaders at the end of the Roman Empire, 
the people there were *native* Latin speakers.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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