On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 01:13:50 -0400, you wrote: >#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. Honestly, I can't remember where I read this. It could be some useless "factoid" from a paper, or something I picked up back when I was a trivia hound.