Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>a parent who would have coexisted in its last days with the first phases of
its Romance daughters.

-- Language is a continuous process of change through time.  We attach names
to points on the trajectory, calling them "Latin" or "Italian", but the
trajectory is a seamless curve.  The language at any given time is like a
single frame in a movie.  What we do with the CM is to run the film backward.

>Similarly, what central to what we call the Standard German is not ceaseless
>change whether material , but how German speakers use the same sounds and
>syntax.  If they didn't they're would be no German language.

-- and when enough changes have accumulated at some time in the future, there
_won't_ be any Standard German, as the term is understood today.

And back before enough changes had accumulated, there _wasn't_ any Standard
German either; in fact, if you subtract enough changes, you get PIE, which
isn't at all like German.

That's why the change is the central fact, you see.

A language looks like a fixed set of sounds and grammatical relationships
only if you look at it as it is at a fixed moment in time.  Then it looks
like a describable "thing".

But if you add in the time dimension, you see that the 'language' is a moving
picture, not a freeze-frame.  The whole process of language is a process of
change.

>In a post just before this one, Larry Trask writes "we have good evidence
>that ancient Aquitanian was an ancestral form of Basque...."  I suppose this
>supports the idea that Latin might be just an ancestral form of French.

-- yes, actually, if you don't start mistaking the map for the territory.
Latin _is_ an ancestral form of French (and Italian and Spanish and Catalan
and so forth).

Does anyone doubt that?