sirdanilot wrote:Occam's razor is all fine and dandy but you cannot just say 'because the notion that all romance language derive from Classical Latin, one single language, is the simplest one, it is proven that this notion is true.'
Funny, I thought about using Romance as an example in that other discussion and didn't do it as I thought I was already writing too much.
Now, Occam's razor is often misunderstood. Its main point is - do not posit entities for which there is no evidence. Of course, one could posit that there was a colony of (say) Olmec speakers in 1st century BC Rome, they just unfortunately didn't leave any traces behind. Disprove this.
The same is true for the Argument you make about Vulgar Latin and the existence of multiple, unattested, perhaps even mutually unintelligible dialects that of Vulgar Latin that in your opinion are the ancestors of the modern Romance languages. Yes, Classical Latin is a literary dialect, but people tend to exaggerate how far it was from the spoken language. Look at the language of the comedies of Plautus (3rd century BC) - it was modelled on spoken Latin and the difference to what Cicero would write 150 years later are not big. Now, by the 1st centuries AD, the gap between the language of the literature and what was spoken had become wider, but the languages were still mutually intelligible. And, what is more important, I don't know of any feature of Vulgar Latin / Proto-Romance that cannot be derived from the attested written Latin. All developments can be easily explained as elimination of features (the declensions, the synthetic passive, the old synthetic future tense, etc.), semantic shifts of words, semantic renewals (e.g. the replacement of
ignis "fire" by
focus (originally "hearth, fireplace"), and some loans and adstrate influences. It may well be that there were quarters in Rome where they said
focus meaning "fire" and
laudare habeo instead of
laudabo "I will praise" already when Cicero was writing, and maybe even at the time of Plautus (maybe those were not the 'hoods where he hung out), but we don't have evidence for that, and, looking at the overall development, Classical Latin compared to Vulgar Latin / Proto-Romance normally represents an older stage, so the simplest assumption is that a variety close to Classical was the basis of Proto-Romance. And the funny thing is that you can derive the existing Romance languages from a fairly uniform Proto-Romance, with only some lexical variation, so there is no evidence for your "various forms of Vulgar Latins (that) weren't even mutually intelligible". You have a few regionalisms like Iberian
fabulare vs. Gallo-Italian
parabolare replacing
loqui "speak", or the "Western" vs. the "Eastern" vs. the Sardinian development of the vowel System (which, by the way, all presuppose the Classical Latin vowel system as original base), but nothing that supposes widely diverging Vulgar Latin dialects.
The national standard language is usually just one dialect that happens to be spoken by economically/politically superior people. For example in Holland, the dialect of northern Holland (with influences of Antwerp, Brabant and other dialects) has become Standard Dutch. Dialects don't derive from standard Dutch, they are sister languages to it.
Well, that's exactly what happend with Latin. We have the Latino-Faliscan family, but the Latino-Faliscan dialect that was the dialect of the City of Rome crowded out and replaced all others. It also replaced the other Italic languages, Etruscan, Celtic, Iberian, and a host of other languages. Both Classical Latin and Proto-Romance are based on this city dialect, with Classical Latin being much more conservative (basically, because it was frozen as a written standard, while the spoken variety, which was not very different from the written standard when it was codified, continued to develop independent from the written standard. The other Latino-Faliscan dialects and the replaced Italian languages had only a very small influence on Vulgar Latin separate from the influence they had on Classical Latin, if at all (whether they had is a debated issue; the loss of /h/ may be one of them, although that's a trivial development that happened in many languages). And we can say that, because there are inscriptions and sources recording these other languages and dialects. So we
know that there were related languages and dialects, but they had only minimal influence on Proto-Romance. So it is conceivable that there were several Proto-Indo-European varieties, but despite that the existing IE languages may still be based on one single variety that became especially prestigious and successful. So, again, lots of things may be possible, but where is your evidence? As long as yours is only an assertion based on general principles (“All languages have varieties and dialects, so PIE must have had them, too”) and as long as you cannot point out what the features of these dialects are that one can reconstruct from the attested IE languages, what you say is just an unprovable (and unfalsifiable) assertion.
