Re: linguistic ethnocentrism.

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think this thread entered the well-trodden but wrong path of teleology. Had
King John not lost his French posessions, that would not have entailed the
demise of the _English_language, but only the speedier demise of the
_Anglo-Saxon_ language, which actually happened! After all, what is the actual
English language but a liberal admixture of Medieval French vocabulary and
grammatical rules, together with Scandinavian and Latin influences, grafted
onto an Anglo-Saxon basis? Also, as to the existence of written vernaculars in
Middle Ages, one would do well to remember that, in the case of the romance
languages, the dividing line between "bad" Latin and romance is fuzzy in the
extreme. As to _literary_ works, I would like to remember that already in the
XIIth. Century there were written recording of tourbadours' songs in
Portuguese (or Galizian-Portuguese, to be precise).

Carlos Rebello


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.