I’ve been thinking about how, at least within the western region of the indo european languages, it seems like anciently people had a much more relaxed conception of what speech communities spoke the same language; I’ve heard that ancient latin speakers believed that greek was just a bizarre and difficult dialect of latin (which is surely also due to ideological motivations, but still) or how you mentioned that french interpreters were considered “latiners” in English courts…
clearly we are thousands of years of language change removed from those circumstances, and our various communities have diverged even further in that time…but there’s something kind of romantic in that way of reckoning
These borrowings of constructs, is that like what you (Colin) mentioned before about Present Day English’s borrowing of “do-support” from Welsh in Middle English?
I’ve been thinking about how, at least within the western region of the indo european languages, it seems like anciently people had a much more relaxed conception of what speech communities spoke the same language; I’ve heard that ancient latin speakers believed that greek was just a bizarre and difficult dialect of latin (which is surely also due to ideological motivations, but still) or how you mentioned that french interpreters were considered “latiners” in English courts…
clearly we are thousands of years of language change removed from those circumstances, and our various communities have diverged even further in that time…but there’s something kind of romantic in that way of reckoning
Yes! Modern political borders have given us a false sense that the boundaries between languages are more rigid than they are.
These borrowings of constructs, is that like what you (Colin) mentioned before about Present Day English’s borrowing of “do-support” from Welsh in Middle English?
If that’s indeed what happened in that case (still controversial), that would be a perfect example!