[Linganth] Interesting linguistic case study.

[Gerard Cheshire]

Fellow LingAnth members,

Those of you interested in the way new languages can emerge given appropriate sociocultural flux, might be interested in a couple of new papers.


Recently a Medieval manuscript was revealed to be a form of proto-Romance, which formed the transition between spoken Latin and the modern Romance languages. The interesting thing, from the anthropological point of view, is that the language came about due to trade, slavery, territorial conquest, royal marriage and general exchange of ideas in the Mediterranean.


Spoken Latin became simplified and injected with foreign words due to the requirement to communicate between people from many places who converged on the Mediterranean, which was the hub of civilisation in the Occidental world. So, proto-Latin was a mix of words and phrases that most people were able to understand, pronounce and remember.


When the political map subsequently became more fixed, populations became relatively isolated, so the modern Romance languages then began to evolve from this prototype.


The papers can be freely downloaded from the preprint website Lingbuzz;

1.  Linguistic Missing Links: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737

<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737>2.  Linguistically Dating and Locating: http:<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808>//ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808>

Regards,
G. E. Cheshire.
University of Bristol.
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