Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>So a parent language "gradually" dies while daughter languages "gradually"
>develop.  So, logically - while this "gradual" process is happening - a
>parent and daughter can co-exist.  Gradually, of course.

-- At no point were Classical Latin and, say, Tuscan (substitute Romance
language of choice) spoken at the same time.

To understand the process, consider a thought experiment. Take a farmer from
some Tuscan village, and sit him at a table.  Next, resurrect his father,
grandfather, great-grandfather, etc., back to the time of the Emperor
Vespasian.

Sit them all the same table in chronological order.  Each man will be able to
speak to his neighbor, and to a few on either side.

The first man and the modern Tuscan will _not_ be able to speak to each
other.  He speaks Latin; the contemporary Tuscan speaks Italian.  These are
distinct languages.

Go down the table.  You won't find anyone who learned Latin _and_
Tuscan/Italian from his mother.  There's no overlap.  The daughter and the
parent do not coexist.

Because the parent _is_ the daughter and vice versa.  The process of the
development of the daughter is the _same thing_ as the death of the parent.
They occurr simultaneously, as part of the same process.

NB: If there were no other Romance languages, we'd call Italian "Latin", as
we call Modern Greek "Greek" even though it's not the same language as
Classical Greek and Classical isn't the same language as Mycenaean.

(Just as we call the language we're talking in "English" and Alfred the Great
called his "Englisc". They're not the same language, and a speaker of one
would have to learn the other like a foreign tongue.)

If Greek had survived outside the Aegean area -- say, if Southern Spain had
become Greek speaking in the 5th century BCE and stayed that way, and the
Bactrian Greek kingdom hadn't been overrun by nomads -- then we'd have three
languages, "Aegean", "Tartessian", and "Bactrian", all members of the
"Hellenic family of languages".