#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. Make that nearly a thousand years, actually: "The learned Amador de los Rios, whose opinion carries great weight, thinks that the famous poem must have been written prior to 1157." [quoting The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03769a.htm] How readable is it for modern Spanish readers? I see what you've said, but how do you know this? -- "It is written with Homeric simplicity and in the language of the day, the language the Cid himself used, which was slowly divorcing itself from the Latin, but was still only half developed." (loc. cit.) I'm at home, just back from Pittsburgh, where I spent the weekend at the Confluence SF convention, and am up way too late and without some of the linguistic references I would prefer to use, which are at the office. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel