Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Latin, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Persian, German, ... they are all indo-european languages (languages from India (Sanskrit) to Europe. Sometimes you will read "indo-germanic" since the Germanic languages (Islandic) are at the other extreme. That became politically incorrect after the war. Romanian, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian are simply what happened to Latin when it got used in daily life. Eventually these areas stopped calling themselves "Latin" (I think Dante still called his language Latin) and they took on new names. In general, you can say that "languages" are "dialects" that have acquired an army and a navy. In other words, the names of languages are usually determined by political factors, not linguistic characteristics. Just go the the border between European countries. Ask the people on each side of the border what language they speak and you will get a different answer on each side of the border, even though they speak and understand each other :) In Sweden a distinction is made between English and American. There is a difference. You can read "Translated from the American by so-and-so" or "Translated from English by so-and-so". English is required in schools, but students can, in the best of worlds, opt for the American variant if they wish (have American parents, for example). You don't have to check it out. I have my doctorate in classical languages :) Daniel On Thu, 14 Aug 2003 Afterswift@aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 8/13/03 10:27:39 PM Pacific Daylight Time, > daniel.ridings@muspro.uio.no writes: > > > Latin got daily-used-to-death ... and became French > > in one place, Italian in another and Portuguese and Romanian someplace > > else. > ----------------------- > I don't know about Romanian, but the rest hark back to Indo-European. It's > too simplistic to say that Latin took root in barbarian languages (as described > by the Romans). I'll need to do some research to refresh my memory. > > br > -- > To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html > - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html