Alan Fox
Posts: 1556
Joined: Aug. 2005
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| Quote (Arden Chatfield @ May 22 2006,05:55) | | Quote (Faid @ May 22 2006,10:42) | | And certainly not responsible for the creation of the language from Spanish... |
Correct. Spanish and Portuguese apparently started to diverge noticeably around the 12th century. The Portuguese didn't colonize Brazil til around 600 years after that, I think, by which time Portuguese was definitely a well defined language.
It's also a big mistake to think of Portuguese just diverging from Spanish and Spanish staying the same all that time. The whole time Portuguese was becoming Portuguese, Spanish was also undergoing its own important changes as well. From what I gather, Portuguese is actually MORE conservative than Spanish in terms of grammar and morphology. To say that Portuguese is descended from Spanish is exactly the same as saying humans are descended from chimpanzees. In fact, Portuguese and Spanish are both descended from Proto-Iberian Romance, which was not the same as any language spoken now. |
All the lurkers (well, me, at least) are laughing. Dave's ability to call black white over the language issue highlights his complete lack of credibility.
The analogies between language spread and development as memic, as a metaphor for evolutionary processes, as hinted at here, could be developed, thus combining the issues of language and evolution, reducing the amount of verbiage required to address? (refute, demolish, bury?) AFDave's assertions.
Personally, I think the point that he has nothing of value to offer has been made, not least by his own posts, and I don't see any need to waste more time on him.
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