Re: Latin and Oscan


Marco Pagliero wrote:

I put the borderline between a merely modified language and a real
pidgin there, where the original language not only got some mixed
vocabulary and another pronunciation, but lost also some important
structure. Here it is at least the case structure. For a language with
cases you cannot lose the case-structure and maintain it is still the
same language.
(Well, you can of course, but then I don't like you any more.)

That is why we call modern Greek "modern Greek" but we don't call
Italian "modern Latin".

Who is this "we"? Greek in English is just Greek, unless a contrastive
sense is needed and then it's modern versus ancient but neither is in
that case called "Greek" tout court. The reason we don't call Latin
"modern Italian" has nothing to do with case attrition but with the
fact that Italian post-Dante and Italian coexisted with Italian
developing as a national idiom while Latin was still a current language
of wider communication.


Anyway, soon in the Gauls the native Latin speakers stopped using
dative and genitive and ablative not because they were just tired of
using cases, but because their counterpart could not do anything with
them. Maybe they kept on using cases when speaking with other native
Romans, but in my opinion French didn't arise form a case language but
instead from a caseless language.

And you are demonstrably wrong. Old French certainly did have cases.
Consider

Artus li boens rois de Bretaingne

From Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier au Lion (line 1 as it happens).
The noun phrase "Artus le boens rois" is in nominative case. Old
French still distinguished nominative and oblique. Well, either you
accept - with all the evidence and experts - that French developed from
a Vulgar Latin variety with case morphology or you posit that Old
French redeveloped case in the noun. The facts just don't accord with
your "feelings" in this matter.


So I say that French arose from (and is the modern form of) some
gallo-roman creole and not from Latin directly, you state that this
most certainly didn't happen.

French developed not "directly" from anything but over centuries in
increments. The fact is that there is little Celtic substrate in
modern French and the vast majority of the lexicon and the grammar are
traceable through the evolution of the modern language to Vulgar Latin
sources.


It seems to me that in order to be sure that French most certainly did
not arise out of a creole I had to believe that such a gallo-roman
creole never existed from where French could arise, or I had to believe
that primitive French had cases.

Please don't use inflamatory language like "primitive French". Old
French which is well attested had cases. Your case is unmade.


Even the theory
that Middle English, a much more radical case of language mixture than
the coexistance-but-not-fusion of Latin and Celtic, was a creole is
not taken seriously.

This is possibly a matter, to first defining how you can recognise a
creole if you meet one.

Anyway you can call primitive English "a real and genuine saxon having
regrettably but incidentally completely lost both the whole case
structure and the whole article structure but having gained 60% of
French vocabulary" but I call it a french-saxon creole and life is
easier.

Easier but possibly wrong. It's easier not to worry about what the
terminology of a science means and use the words as we will, but creole
has a specific meaning in modern linguistics. Using the word
perversely is just to be wrong.


Marco P

By the way, did really somebody pretend before me, French to have
arisen from a creole, so that really somebody could prove that French
_most certainly_ did not?

.

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