La Forêt des Mânes (LITT.GENERALE) (French Edition)

Table 1 - Distribution and characteristics of the thermal facies. Relationship with dated charcoals. It is divided into two branches, one on either side of a large rocky pillar: It is in this last branch that traces appear here and there, up to the south of the Chamber of the Bear Hollows between 15 to 40 m away from the original entrance. Grey patches are visible in the area closest to the Chamber of the Bear Hollows, from 40 cm above ground fig. Traces of flaking off are confined to the vault, near the GE1 survey pit and on the left wall, above it. Thermal features are represented by colour changes pink and grey and flaked off patches.

Three bears were painted on the wall facing the entrance. The latter are particularly marked on the two bears located in the right part of the panel and correspond, on the one hand, to pinkish and grey colorations that penetrate 2 to 3 mm into the rock fig. Marks, sometimes reddened, result from the breaking off of small flakes, a few millimetres thick, and of some larger fragments, about 10 cm long. Heat features are also visible punctually at the entrance of the rotunda on the left wall.

Figure 2 - Location of the areas concerned with the thermal facies, of the pit located in the sector of Entrance, of the samples for the thermal study and the principal decorated panels of the cave. Two pale pink surfaces are visible just above on the right and left edges of the vault. No flaking is visible. Because of the distance imposed by the access path, it was not possible to carry out more detailed observations. The traces of heating are located on the ceiling, about 3 m before the beginning of the Hillaire Chamber, aligned with the axis of progression fig.

They affect two small domes located between rock pendants, at a place where the ceiling lowers to about 1. Blocks became detached along the cracks. Black coatings and grey stains a few millimetres in diameter may result from the accumulation and re-formation of the combustion residues as vermiculations. In the first part, the width is relatively small between 2 and 3 m and the ground relatively level. Then, from a local enlargement due to fractures, the dimension of the corridor reaches 6 m at its base and the floor lowers by successive projections.

The right and left walls show very abundant marks of human passage: The bear claw marks and bear polish are also numerous Feruglio and Baffier ; Philippe and Fosse ; Fosse and Philippe They are characterized by the frequent association of pink and grey colours and the importance of the flaking. Black coatings that could correspond to deposits due to smoke are also abundant fig. Five distinct areas, distributed from the entrance of the gallery to its outlet in the End Chamber, are observed: The first, on the left wall, extends over 3 m wide.

It affects the right side of the Rhinoceros Panel, a shaft that is over 3 m high, and below, a small dome 0. The pink shades are everywhere, up to 3 m high, and surround the grey areas appearing occasionally near the entrance and in the dome. The colouring penetrates a centimetre into the rock near the grey areas and 0. Heating up also changed the colour of the clays filling the cracks from brown to red. This change could be related to the transformation of goethite, identified by XRD, into hematite. The flaking covers large areas, especially at the entrance of the gallery, in association with the grey colouring.

Two types of thermoclasts — blocks and thin plaquettes — were detached. Edgings of small extent, dark brown to blackish, and a stain of identical colour, to the right of the decorated panel, are reminiscent of smoke-related residues. The second zone occurs at about 2 m from the previous one, still on the left wall, at the level of a sub-vertical edge, covered with large cupulas. It is constituted by a narrow area 0. The reddening and the flaking affect the limestone, and occasionally the top of the wall, covered by a coating from a phosphate alteration.

The third area is located just above a projection determined by a stalagmite floor overhanging the floor of the second part of the gallery. This is the most transformed sector by fire: The small width of the gallery, from 2. The grey colour is observed up to the vault. Flaking on both sides, has mainly produced thin plaques, some of which are not completely separated. A large block 1.

Smoke-related deposits evidence correspond to:. Wavy horizontal edgings that follow the asperities of the rock. They are greyish at the bottom of the walls, blacker upwards. Occasionally, they cover reddened areas or thermal flakes;. Black stains, on the right wall, one of which, 15 cm in diameter, is located in a concavity with a grey surface, intersected by the flaking. Reddening covers the left side of the Panel of the Felines, at the location of two vulvae, and continues on the ceiling.

It also affects the clays that form a thin coating on the wall and fill the cracks. The deposits due to smoke, slightly marked, in small areas, are found above the decorated panel and on the opposite wall. The second area shows, two meters further, two small reddened light stains, 25 and 40 cm in diameter, which are located 85 cm above the ground, on either side of the path, at a projection determined by a stalagmite floor.

The one on the right wall is associated with grey edging, similar to the areas whose colour evokes smoke residue in the other sectors. The reddening affects both the limestone and an alteration phosphate coating. It appears between 1. Continued at the base, it becomes sporadic at the top, where it is confined mainly to the hollow parts. The flaking off affects the base of the pendant and one of its edges fig. The thermoclasts form millimetre to centimetre thick flakes.

The scars of the former are sometimes coloured in pink. In places, larger cracks have determined the fall of larger fragments blocks. Figure 3 - In the Entrance area, heating traces correspond to gray and pink colours on the left wall and the ceiling. The desquamation is confined on the vault photo C.

Figure 4 - Diverticule des Ours. The bears were drawn on the wall which is opposite the entry. The farthest from the entrance appear at about 1. The rock is then flaked off, reddened with small grey areas and black stains several decimetres wide. Finally, a slightly pink area can be seen near the entrance, in a dome. Close to the entrance of the Salle du Fond, the ceiling shows heating marks. On the ground, the charcoals are accumulated in secondary position in the cave bear hibernation nests photo C. Table 2 - List and location of samples collected or the thermal study by thermoluminescence.

Luminescence properties of the selected samples were compared to that of an unheated reference limestone block coming from the same geological context tab. While addressing different minerals, calcite in Chauvet, quartz in Fraux cave, the general method remains the same Brodard et al. The step of thermal characterization of materials, fundamental for the dating of heated rocks, has been particularly developed here see e. Under the effect of surrounding irradiation, electrons torn from atoms by ionizing get trapped by crystal defects inner traps. Heating up can release some or all of these trapped charges following the temperature reached and its duration.

They may then recombine at the level of recombination centres electron vacancies causing the emission of light photons: An old heating could have partially or completely emptied the traps according to its intensity.

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Thereafter, and until the measurement of the TL signal by a laboratory heating, electrons were again trapped under the effect of natural irradiation. This process is at the origin of the dating method, in which the age of the heating is obtained by the ratio of the two physical units measured in the laboratory and partially on the ground, the archaeological dose, the amount of energy accumulated by the grains under the influence of natural radioactivity since the heating up, and the annual dose of irradiation, the amount of energy supplied each year to the grains by the presumably constant natural radioactivity Aitken In this work, thermoluminescence is used to determine a state of heating.

Conversely, the absence of saturation after irradiation in the laboratory implies that the material has been heated in the past. However, this test is only meaningful if the heating is not too ancient so that saturation is not reached again. Thus, a fragment of unheated Urgonian limestone, collected in the cave, was used as reference BDX , table 2: Then their TL curves, regenerated by laboratory irradiation here a dose of 68 Gy 9 , of the order of magnitude of the one received since the heating, assumed to be older than 30 ka were compared with those of reddened archaeological materials.

It is important to note that the test samples have stayed at these maximum temperatures for one hour, as the effects of heating depend on the duration-temperature association of the stage. The more the sample remains at a given temperature, the greater the effect will be because more time is left to thermodynamically possible processes to occur. It is therefore easy to show that a sample was heated or not.

Table 3 - Experimental details for the TL study of samples. Note the evolution of the colour. It seems today, after a radiochemical study Brodard and Guibert , that this sample, in contact with a rather radioactive sediment and in the presence of a large amount of radon Mangin et al. Note that the laboratory heating atmosphere is oxidizing, probably similar to the conditions of the Chauvet cave where the rock had to be in contact with the flames of Palaeolithic fires. Figure 7 - Set of thermoluminescence curves of aliquots of the reference sample BDX aliquots of which were submitted to a laboratory annealing process for one hour in air at the temperature given in the legend.

The curves were obtained by irradiating these annealed aliquots by a beta dose 68Gy. This preheat process is necessary to reduce thermally unstable components in oder to simulate a natural TL signal that is compared to the natural TL signal of archaeologically heated samples to determine the attained paleotemperature. This lack of consistency can have at least two causes: The sedimentological study showed that this level was disturbed by solifluction and runoffs Kervazo et al.

It was later covered by sediments brought by the same processes. It is therefore possible that potential hearths, located directly perpendicularly below the ceilings affected by thermal marks, were re-organized and buried during the progression of the scree towards the entrance of the Chamber of the Bear Hollows. Currently, this small gallery is crossed by temporary flow, the origin of a stalagmite floor that covers the ground.

Above, they correspond to inconspicuous incisions along the right wall and, lower near the entrance to the Apodemus Gallery, to a zone of natural filling. This organization can explain the possible burying of hearths. The presence of the latter, between and after the human Aurignacian incursions, is evidenced by the bear scratches and the polish overlapping drawings on the Megaloceros and the Horses Panels Feruglio and Baffier ; Fritz and Tosello The C14 dates obtained on bones, which indicate a stop in the visiting of the cave by these animals after 33 to 34, years cal BP , suggest that these disturbances may be relatively old.

Figure 8 - Same as fig. In the Megaloceros Gallery, the thermoclasts were accumulated under two projections formed by the stalagmite floor overhang. Their location, inexplicable by natural phenomena, presumably stems from an anthropogenic gesture. Cortez lists Romance and Latin words that are different, and German and English words that are similar, and declares that therefore as a whole , Romance and Latin are different, while German and English are similar.

As noted previously, one could list words to attempt to "prove" the exact opposite. There are many examples of languages losing both cases and genders, as well as developing articles. Among the Romance languages, Old French did indeed have a case system albeit a very reduced one , consisting of subject and oblique cases. A similar phenomenon may happened on the Iberian Peninsula. Italian and Romanian preserve Latin neuter gender nouns in a way that French does not; these are conventionally described as 'masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural'; e.

Asturian , likewise, preserves a neuter gender. Spanish preserves a relict of a neuter pronoun in "lo" which can be interpreted as the dative or accusative form i. In addition, there are several examples in the Germanic languages of loss of cases and gender. The gradual disappearance of case and gender in English is well documented. Indeed, Cortez even mentions the fact that English, unlike German, has no cases, but, bizarrely, makes nothing of it. Old English had three genders, four cases, and dual personal pronouns. Another example would be Bulgarian.

Modern Bulgarian is unusual among the Slavic languages in that, unlike all other Slavic languages, it has definite articles, no infinitive, and lacks cases. However, this was not true of Old Bulgarian, a much more typical Slavic language, with 7 cases, an infinitive, and no articles. In Middle Bulgarian, we see these features eroding, with "a general confusion of letters, inflexions, forms", the loss of the dual number, and the development of the definite article.

Also, Old Persian had seven cases and three genders, while modern Persian has neither cases nor genders. In addition, Cortez notes that in other language families, there is variation in the types and presence of articles. In Scandinavian, definite articles are added to the ends of words, German has declined articles, and English has undeclined articles. Bulgarian has suffixed definite articles, while Russian has none.

Since there are so many possible ways for articles to evolve within the same family, it is therefore improbable that Latin evolved in exactly the same way across all the entire Romance area. Rather, the language Old Italian that was spread across Europe already contained articles and did not evolve them. In actual fact, the amount of variation of articles within Germanic and Romance is roughly the same. If you take Old French into account which did decline its articles , then both Germanic and Romance have suffixed articles, declined articles, and undeclined articles.

Even ignoring Old French as Cortez does , the argument makes no sense. Germanic has three types of articles declined, non-declined, and suffixed , Slavic has two suffixed or none at all , and Romance also has two suffixed and non-declined , so therefore Romance articles are not as diverse? This is a very strange line of reasoning, and it is unclear how it is supposed to prove anything , let alone Romance not being Latin.

Linguists say nothing of the sort. While laymen may express opinions to the effect that words shifting semantically or new expressions and phrases coming into use is degradation for example, in the 18th century, one author decried the developing use of "you" to refer to only a single person as being "corruption" and "debasement" of the English language , [] linguists vigorously criticize such opinions as being unscientific. In Western Romance "b" did not "become" "r". The explanation is a bit more complex. Western Romance initially tacked a conjugated form of the auxiliary "to have" onto the infinitive e.

In fact, in Western Romance languages, the future tense suffixes are identical to the corresponding verb forms of the present indicative of "to have", as in the following examples keep in mind that h is silent: This development is amply attested in written documents, and is exemplified in Old Spanish sentences where the future tense is expressed as the infinitive followed by a conjugated form of aver , such as Matarlos emos a todos modern Los materemos a todos ; "We will kill them all". In addition, the loss of the future tense is also implied by Cortez's theory, since the mentioned Western Romance future tense suffixes do not exist in Romanian.

According to A History of the Spanish Language: Actually, Latin's word order was a bit more flexible than SOV although it was the general trend. This is because its extensive inflection system did much of that work - a speaker or reader would always know if a word was a subject or an object based on how it inflected, not where it was in the sentence a modern example of this type of grammar would be Russian.

Old French preserved the SOV order in some situations, such as subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. The word order patterns observed in Old French remind us of those in today's German or Dutch. Also, the Oaths of Strasbourg , the oldest Romance document, are far more similar to Romance than they are to Latin:. In addition, Latin itself was conservative; the Latin of Plautus, writing in B.

Languages' basic vocabulary and grammar never change rapidly. There are many examples of languages changing in relatively short time frames, one of which Cortez has himself mentioned: Cortez cherry-picks an intelligible text in Middle English, but Old English, which predates it by just a few centuries, was completely different. No modern English speaker could make heads or tails out of a text like: As mentioned previously, Old English lost its cases, genders, and was radically transformed in general, over a period of just a few hundred years — about the same as the posited development of Latin into Romance.

Since then, however, English has remained more or less stable especially in its written form if one disregards major pronunciation changes like the Tudor vowel shift , remaining essentially the same. In other words, English changed completely in a relatively short period of time, then stabilized and remained mostly unchanged for centuries — exactly the scenario hypothesized for Latin and Romance. There are other examples of radical language change. Bulgarian developed articles and lost its 7 cases and infinitive over a period of approximately years.

It might seem reasonable to take the attested conservatism of Romance and extrapolate a thousand years earlier to antiquity, but there are very good reasons to believe that, like English, Romance underwent a period of rapid transformation before settling down and becoming more conservative, in a manner reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould 's punctuated equilibrium. Furthermore, time is only one factor in language change. American English is much more similar to British English than Brazilian Portuguese is to European Portuguese, despite the fact that both separated from each other roughly the same time ago.

Contact with other languages — all Romance languages encountered previous non-Latin speaking populations as well as later non-Romance immigrants and conquerors — also tends to speed up language change through loanwords and influence on pronunciation. This is thought to be the reason for the simplification of Afrikaans.

Teach English to a hundred non-English speakers and watch how they speak a generation later — it will differ from a hundred children of native speakers. And, of course, Romance itself and Cortez's proposed caseless Old Italian contradict the idea that all languages evolve at roughly the same rate, since they are both more different from Proto-Indo-European than any of the other Indo-European languages Cortez mentions. In addition, there are two significant problems with Cortez's reference to and interpretation of the Oaths of Strasbourg. First, the quoted extract contradicts one of the points he made in the previous section.

Cortez claimed that pre-noun complements do not exist in Romance, but the cited passage from the Oaths of Strasbourg which he does claim to be Romance does indeed exhibit this feature in the phrase Pro Deo amur for the love of God. There are very good reasons to believe travail is derived from tripalium. For one thing, the semantic evolution from "torture" to that of "work" is well documented.

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In Old French, travail could mean "torture," "pain," "labor" as in pain of childbirth , "fatigue," and "effort. For another thing, the phonetic development is an expected outcome of Latin-Romance sound changes. Consider the Latin word and its equivalents in Romance: As it happens, there is a similarly pronounced word in Latin, alium , which means "garlic. A similar phonetic shift can be found in ali enus, aj eno, alh eio. Cortez describes several examples which he believes demonstrates linguists' unflinching and irrational impulse to find a Latin origin for French words.

He considers pice to be based on the root PS; PS is a modified form of PT, which in all Indo-European languages is used to describe food, such as in the words pizza , pie , and the Russian pit' to drink. Similarly, the word "trivial" is not derived from trivium three ways , but from T-RB, meaning something that is excluded from noble work.

This method of taking consonants and inventing roots, of course, is Cortez's invention. It fails on several grounds. And what about words like "rabble", "rabid", "rabbit", "ribbit", "rob", "rub", "rib", or "arbitrary"? Furthermore, following Cortez's methodology, one could make any word be related to pretty much any other word. In reality, phonetic and semantic shift mean that a word may change radically in sound and meaning.

This objection is irrelevant, since words that share no sounds can be related. In addition, it ignores the historical evolution of the word. The Old French form of the word was egua , [] so Cortez's whole structure collapses. Cambire is attested in Apuleius' Apology: Some of the words listed do exist in Latin, and those that don't are not uniformly present in all Romance languages. It is also not unusual for words to be borrowed across a very large area by many different languages. For instance, the word "interesting" is very widespread, and is found in Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, and even Turkic languages.

Borrowing tends to occur more frequently with languages that have "contact", i. The attested history of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire makes language contact a very plausible scenario and we should expect words to be borrowed frequently through most of Europe as there were intensive trade, scientific and military contacts across language and political borders. In addition, Romanian does have a neuter gender, and cases exist in both Romanian and Old French. First of all, the noun aide help is derived from aider , which is in turn from the Latin adiutare. Furthermore, Old French is not only closer to Italian, but, as mentioned previously, it preserves a number of Latin features that do not exist in other Romance languages, including Italian.

This supposed "universal law" was made up by Cortez on the basis of a very small number of cherry-picked examples. As explained earlier, linguistic evolution can be both slow and gradual and in fits and starts. Earlier, Cortez objected that "whoever heard of people using some words for speaking and others for writing?

Le français ne vient pas du latin - RationalWiki

Great and terrible Books On our shelf: Immortales mortales si foret fas flere, flerent diuae Camenae Naeuium poetam. Primus dicitur Latine ex tempore disputasse primusque Vergilium et alios poetas novos praelegere coepisse[. The only Ciceronian speech known to have been delivered from a written script is his Oratio Post Reditum in Senatu, which was his first after his return from exile and thus required special care Planc.

From what we can gather, it was extremely rare for senators to bring with them a prepared text, and then only on important occasions: What can be more offensive than this, that no woman believes in her own beauty unless she has converted herself from a Tuscan into a Greekling, or from a maid of Sulmo into a true maid of Athens? They talk nothing but Greek, though it is a greater shame for our people to be ignorant of Latin.

Their fears and their wrath, their joys and their troubles—all the secrets of their souls—are poured forth in Greek; their very loves are carried on in Greek fashion. All this might be pardoned in a girl; but will you, who are hard on your eighty-sixth year, still talk in Greek? That tongue is not decent in an old woman's mouth. When you come out with the wanton words [Greek], you are using in public the language of the bed-chamber.

Carressing and naughty words like these incite to love; but though you say them more tenderly than a Haemus or a Carpophorus, they will cause no fluttering of the heart—your years are counted upon your face! Edidit spectacula varii generis: How long will you deprive yourself of the chorus of praise that awaits you, and us of the pleasure of reading them? Do let them be borne on the lips of men and circulate through all the wide regions where the Roman tongue is spoken.

People have long been eagerly looking forward to your publishing them, and you really ought not to cheat and disappoint them any longer. Hominem te patientem vel potius durum ac paene crudelem, qui tam insignes libros tam diu teneas! Quousque et tibi et nobis invidebis, tibi maxima laude, nobis voluptate? Sine per ora nominum ferantur isdemque quibus lingua Romana spatiis pervagentur. Magna et iam longa exspectatio est, quam frustrari adhuc et differre non debes.

Zephyrus vero, quem Romana lingua favonium novit[. But this little ufan was not considered nearly sturdy enough, so it was reinforced by another preposition, be 'by', to give a beefier be-ufan 'by on up'. But before long, be-ufan was assaulted by the forces of erosion, and ended up as a mere bufan. Naturally, the syllabically-challenged bufan had to be pumped up again, this time by the preposition an 'on', to give an-bufan 'on by on up'.

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Later on, anbufan was ground down by erosion, and — to cut a long story short — ended up as the modest above. But it seems that a mere above doesn't soar nearly high enough nowadays, so we sometimes feel the need to reinforce it with 'up', to give up above — literally 'up on by on up'. So perhaps the easiest way of understanding these cycles of piling up, fusion and erosion is to imagine the forces that work on language as a kind of tireless compressing machine. Erosion keeps pounding at words, making them shorter and shorter.

But shortened words are piled up into longer expressions, and the same forces of erosion then hack away at the pile, fuse the words and condense them into a more compact word once more. And so a new cycle begins all over again. It is clear that spoken Latin could function perfectly well without paradigms devoted to the expression of future time. Et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui meon uol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit. Ego adeo seruosne tu habeas ad agrum colendum an ipse mutuarias operas cum uicinis tuis cambies, neque scio neque laboro.

The two were originally quite similar, but between the classical period and the Middle Ages, the written standard remained frozen, while the spoken register underwent significant grammatical and lexical changes, such as the loss of its case system and the postpositive conjunction -que , among other things, transforming from a synthetic language into a vastly different analytic one "synthetic" here does not mean "artificial"; see Synthetic language and Analytic language.

Cortez, on the other hand, claims that Latin and Romance are separate branches of Italic. He believes that Romance specifically, its ancestor, which he calls Old Italian underwent the synthetic-to-analytic transformation during a millennia-long period prior to the classical period, with Latin being a separate, synthetic, Italic language that coexisted with Romance for a time, but died out before ever becoming analytic. Essentially, historical linguists hold that Romance changed dramatically in less than a millennium, while Cortez claims that this process took place much more slowly over many thousands of years.

For instance, as a result of Portuguese merchants traveling far and wide to sell oranges, many languages call not only the fruit, but also the color orange some form of the word "Portugal"! How do you know the ancient works mentioning Caesar refer to an actual person and not a myth? Are there any surviving manuscripts of these works dating to Caesar's time?

If so, how do you know they're not forgeries? If not, how do you know they weren't really works of fiction written centuries later? Odds are, you can't answer any of these questions. That does not, however, mean there do not exist people who can. The xkcd comic "Period Speech" is also relevant. Could you tell the difference between, or produce, non-anachronistic English sentences with features characteristic of the 15 th and 17 th centuries?

The literary languages were as a rule Arabic or Persian; Turkish was used more rarely and chiefly for poetry. From Old Norse to Zoque , page Mladenova, pages 4, A Linguistic Introduction , Antonio Loprieno, pages 7, 56, 68, An Introduction, pages Cary Davis, Hispania, Vol.

An Introduction, Lyle Campbell, page Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit Fossil record. Community Saloon bar To do list What is going on? External links Twitter Facebook Discord. This page was last modified on 12 October , at Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all content licensed as indicated by RationalWiki: For concerns on copyright infringement please see: Great and terrible Books.

La Foret DES Manes (French, Paperback)

Cortez argues that Latin died out as a spoken language around the 1st century B. In support of this claim, he cites a quote by Naevius from approximately B. These lines are quote mining. They are part of Naevius' epitaph, which in full read: D, which said that: Cortez cites statements by various modern authors to the effect that the works of certain Roman authors contain "barbarisms" errors due to imperfect knowledge of a foreign language or "are full of archaisms" and "imitate Virgil".

Cortez says, "None of this could be explained if Latin was not a dead language that writers knew imperfectly. Cortez consistently ignores the profound conservatism of written language. English limps by with a ghastly orthography systematized in William Caxton's day, and mostly carven in stone by Samuel Johnson. Instruction in Latin grammar was always conducted according to the rules set down by grammarians like Priscian and Donatus, and concentrated on the intensive study of Roman authors of the first centuries BCE and CE.

No wonder written Latin was conservative, while the spoken language underwent large changes. Its written norm marks grammatical distinctions that once figured in the spoken language and got into its official spelling, but which are seldom or never observed in the current spoken language. From the 2nd century B. Various quotes are cited to the effect that educated Romans were expected to know both Greek and Latin. This implies that Latin, just like Greek, was a foreign language that Romans did not speak natively. The fact that Romans had Latin as part of their education does not mean it was not their native language.

Anglophone schools and universities offer courses and degrees in English, in addition to other languages, but this is not because English is a dead or foreign language. When an Australian say is studying to receive a degree in English, they are not learning a language they do not know, but rather are taught the literature of, and composition and writing in, their native language.

One could just as well argue that the availability of both English and Spanish majors at Harvard University shows that both are foreign to Americans. In one of his Satires, Juvenal notes that, "it is a greater shame for our people to be ignorant of Latin. The fact that the non-Roman language of Greek was so influential and widespread in the Roman Empire must indicate that it, like Latin, was a foreign language to Romans. In the latter case, the Romans' use of Greek instead of Latin would simply mean switching one foreign language for another.

Greek was widely used by Romans, despite being a foreign and conquered language, because of its prior prestige. There are many other examples of conquering peoples making wide use of the languages of the conquered. For example, when the Goths conquered Italy and Iberia, they, despite their dominance, assimilated into the culture of their subjects and did not impose Gothic, because Latin was more prestigious.

The Visigothic Code , for instance, was written in Latin. The Franks and Bulgars assimilated into the cultures of those they ruled.

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The Turkic Timurid dynasty generally wrote in the prestigious languages of Arabic and Persian, and only rarely in Turkish. Cortez says, "So then was Oscan still around during the time of Caesar, and did the people attend theater in Oscan? Is there a single mention in Latin literature of Oscan being spoken in Rome at that time? In reality, it is probable that only the educated Roman elite could understand Greek and Latin, and the people spoke a different language. The Council of Tours of use the term lingua romana rustica to refer to Romance.

The only explanation for the fact that the noun is in the singular and that the language is referred to as "Roman" rather than "Latin" is that Romance was fairly homogenous and not descended from Latin. In Algeria people speak dialectal Arabic, but if future archaeologists were to excavate Algeria, they would find only inscriptions in Classical Arabic and French.

They would then conclude that 21th-century Algerians spoke Classical Arabic and French, when in reality they spoke neither. In Algeria, Classical Arabic and French are written, but almost nonexistent as vernaculars. Similarly, if future archaeologists excavated in Latin America, they would find no trace of the widely used indigenous languages of Quechua and Guarani.

Furthermore, we do have a wealth of graffiti and other written sources of the language the lower classes actually spoke and they — including their misspellings — tell us a great deal about the pronunciation and vocabulary then in common use. Cortez notes that the apparent similarity of Romance to Latin does not necessarily prove descent, since lexical similarity can be due to borrowing.

He gives examples of English sentences which are almost identical to their equivalents in French: He notes that due to borrowing, "The Romance languages have thousands of Latin words, but these are almost never words used in everyday life. Old Italian and Latin were very similar, but this is due to their common Indo-European origin, just as English and German are similar because they are both Germanic. Of course, Proto-Indo-European itself had many cases. Later in the book, Cortez acknowledges that his proposed Old Italian must have undergone enormous changes in the transition from Proto-Indo-European to Old Italian, but, in accordance with his idea that languages evolve slowly, suggests that this period lasted approximately 20, years rather than just a few centuries.

Loanwords have two main characteristics: He notes that these words are almost identical generally the last syllables of these words are different and almost all of them have literary, technical, or educated connotations. Cortez does not give any indication that he has ever even heard of the comparative method, which is extremely strange, given the fact that it is linguists' basic tool for establishing genetic relationships and the foundation upon which the field of historical linguistics is based. Similar words in Latin and Italian may be due to their having a common Indo-European origin, and do not prove that Italian is descended from Latin.

The base vocabularies of English and German are much more similar than those of Romance and Latin; "How is it possible for German and English, which are 'sister languages', to be closer to each other than Latin and Italian, which have a relationship of direct descent? In any case, if it were true that German and English were lexically more similar than Romance and Latin, this this is irrelevant to questions of linguistic descent.

German and Dutch are "sister" languages and are extremely similar; Old English is the "mother" of English, but the difference between the two is enormous. Whether two languages are related by direct descent or familial ties so to speak does not necessarily have any hard-and-fast implications as to their similarities or differences. Cortez describes a threefold classification of Romance words: Indo-European words words that are essentially the same in all Indo-European languages ; borrowings from Latin words that are the same in Romance and Latin, but appear in no other Indo-European groups ; and inherited words from Old Italian words that are found in Romance but not Latin.

In order to explain the existence of Romance words not found in Latin, Cortez assumes there must be some non-Latin mother language from which these words—and languages—sprang. In other words, because Romance and Latin do not coincide exactly as far as their lexicons are concerned, they must therefore not have a relationship of descent. But one could apply this reasoning to any and all languages. For instance, the words boy, girl, and hike are all of unknown origin, and are not attested in Old English.

New words pop up all the time, and it would be ludicrous to discard established genetic relationships based on demonstrated sound laws simply because these words are often of unclear provenance. Cortez lists a number of words that he claims exist only in Latin and not Romance, some of which are as follows: Since the Romance languages use other words to indicate these concepts, this must mean they are not derived from Latin. Cortez now demonstrates his own homegrown method of linguistic reconstruction, according to which "if a word is almost identical in three different languages of the same family then it must be present in the languages' ancestor.

The errors will be negligible, since the Romance languages are very similar to each other. Cortez's methodology appears very subjective and unsystematic. He seems to compare similar words and then arbitrarily pick one of them as being closest to the "original" word sometimes he changes his reconstruction slightly for some unknown reason never clearly explained. Furthermore, it does not take borrowing into account. For example, the Romanian word plaja is a loanword from French; [] there was a significant influx of French words into Romanian in the 19th century. His idea that a word must have existed in Old Italian if at least three Romance languages have it is also very arbitrary.

Cortez gives a table consisting of similar Romance words, Cortez's reconstructed Old Italian forms, and the equivalent terms in Latin which are invariably completely different. For one thing, sinus, litus, and saxum do indeed exist in Romance as noted earlier , so this entire train of thought is nonsensical. For another, Cortez is yet again using the fact that Romance and Latin are not exactly identical as an argument against the idea of Latin descent.

Yes, some words appear to come out of the blue, with no apparent relationship to anything preceding before. But this does not mean that the genetic nature of the language as a whole must therefore be completely different. It would be absurd to completely overhaul the genealogy of English every single time a new word like "job", "OK", or "dude" popped up out of nowhere. Cortez lists cardinal numbers in Romance, reconstructed Old Italian, and Latin, and states: This is Cortez's rather odd way of saying, not that Latin isn't Indo-European, but that he believes the Romance languages are of non-Latin Indo-European descent.

Of course, the fact that the Romance numerals have non-Italic cognates does not prove that they are not derived from their Latin equivalents. The numbers from one to ten are fairly similar in Romance and Latin, but from eleven onwards, they are very different. Actually, Romance has indeed preserved the suffix - decim. The ending also exists in Romanian; the numerals from 11 to 13, for instance, are unsprezece, doisprezece , and treisprezece literally, one-over-ten, two-over-ten, etc.

Cortez lists various Latin conjunctions and prepositions that do not exist in Romance. He asks if such drastic differences can be found in other languages and answers, "Of course not. In addition, English has also replaced many of its conjunctions and prepositions. One could just as well cherry-pick words that emphasize the similarities between Latin and Romance, and the differences between Modern and Ancient Greek. Cortez lists many similar words in English and German along with their French equivalents , to demonstrate that related languages must have similar vocabularies, and drive home the point that this is not true of Romance and Latin.

He concludes, "It is abundantly clear that the conservation of words across the centuries is true for all language families. One could just as well selectively list words that are the same in Latin and Romance, and extremely different in English and German, and conclude that therefore there is a universal tendency for languages to change and that Romance and Latin are unusually similar, as in the following two lists: By cherry-picking words this way, one can "prove" absolutely anything.