[ANSTHRLD] Linguistics

[Diane Rudin]

Daniel wrote in an earlier post:

> Unless you're calling *French* a "hopelessly corrupted form of
> Latin", and while I appreciate the slam, that cannot be called
> accurate at all.

And then Daniel wrote in this most recent post:

> It's a court report.  I don't see anything notably Latin in it: I
> recognize most of the words as either English or French (or something
> really close: "pur" is "pour", I think).  Except I don't recognize
> "per prisoner" and "Et pur ceo".  I think that when they called it
> "law French", they meant it.

Latin words in that quote (which may also still be retained in French
for all I know, but they haven't been changed at all from their Latin
origin):  fuit, per, que, et, de.  The rest looks about 2/3 French and
1/3 English.

Now that I've had the chance to skim over the material in the links you
provided, I don't see any place that says that French isn't a corrupted
form of Latin.  Any linguist knows that French, Italian, Spanish,
Portugese, and (the other Romance language the name of which escapes me
at the moment) are *all* corrupted forms of Latin; hence the name,
"Romance", as in, of Rome or the Roman people = Latin.

Okay, to be precise, law-French was, by the seventeenth century, a
hopelessly corrupt dialect of the Norman French brought over by William
the Conqueror from Normandy, which was in turn a corrupt language
originally derived mostly from Latin, which was a corrupt language
originally derived mostly from..., and on back to "Indo-European".
English is a hopelessly corrupt mismash of languages, about half of
which go back to Latin and another chunk of which are from the
Scandinavian languages.  Every language spoken today is a corrupt form
of an earlier language which is a corrupt form of an even earlier
language which is....

I thank Daniel for providing me with this opportunity to clarify my
earlier post.

--Serena

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