On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 20:36:12 -0400, you wrote: >I'm talking about French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, >Sardinian, Romanian, Italian,...: the Romance languages. That's what >Latin has changed into, in the normal development of a living language. >The Latin of the Vatican is a dead language, preserved for cultural >purposes and nobody's native language for millennia. I've long been under the impression that Spanish is much more stable than English. For example, El Cid was written hundreds of years ago, but doesn't need translating for modern readers, as opposed to the works of Chaucer.