Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (afdave @ May 21 2006,06:59) | Arden said ... | Quote | | Another point: the only way Portuguese could be a mixture of Spanish and French would be if French had the opportunity to influence Portuguese in a big way. |
Uh ... er ... a big influence, huh ... like maybe thousands of French knights coming over to help Alfonso VI, maybe? Did you even read my post? Here's the part you might have missed ...
| Quote | Of course if you get a good Medieval History Encyclopedia, you can get all kinds of details about this period in history when Portuguese and Spanish diverged. What you will see is massive Burgundian influence beginning with the influx of thousands of Burgundian knights in response to Alfonso VI who had a Burgundian wife, then the Burgundian Henry, grandson of Robert I of Burgundy then to Afonso Henriques, son of Henry. [Oh ... by the way ... I guess I'd better fill you in that Burgundy is in France ... small detail]. Anyway, Afonso Henriques captures Lisbon and sets up his capital. Then if you do some further reading, you find out that standard Portuguese is based on the dialect of Lisbon, according to Rilke's other favorite source, Encyclopedia Brittanica. Can you guess that Lisbon probably had greater French influence than anywhere else in Portugal? I hope I'm not moving too fast for anyone.
Hmmm ... let's think now ... a whole bunch of French knights come into western Spain to help out the king who has a French wife. Another French guy comes into Spain and marries a Spanish wife. They take over Lisbon and set up the Kingdom of Portugal. Do you see what's happening? This is not rocket science folks. This is kind of like 1+2=3. See? Spanish + French = Portuguese.
Now if you have all three of these languages in your own family (my mother speaks fluent Portuguese and Spanish and my cousin speaks fluent French), you tend to have a little better overview of these languages than the average Joe (or Rilke). I can tell you that if you have heard all three languages like I have, the mix is quite obvious. |
It doesn't take a PhD in linguistics to see this, Arden.
If you want to argue something new, go start a new thread on Martin Luther, or the Catholic church, or Hitler or something else fun. |
'The mix is quite obvious'. The same way as a 6,000-year-old earth is 'obvious', eh, Dave?
Perhaps it takes the LACK of a PhD to see it.
Okay, Dave, it's like this. No linguistics article I've read by anyone who actually knows anything about linguistics says ANYTHING about Portuguese being a 'mix' of French and Spanish. No one.
But to you, with your lack of training think it's 'obvious'.
Okay, Dave. Prove it. So far all the evidence you've offered is 'if you've heard all three languages it's obvious'. That might be exactly what one needs to argue for Creationism, but linguistics holds itself to a higher standard than that, fortunately. Give us the evidence. You can do one of two things: you can either refer us to published linguistic articles by specialists in Romance languages where they explain how Portuguese is a mix of French and Spanish, or two, you can give us your own evidence. What would that be? Give us characteristics that Portuguese has it shares with French and not Spanish. And your impressionistic hunches about phonetics don't count. You have to produce lexicon and grammar -- a lot of it -- to prove this. Words and grammatical features French and Portuguese have but not Spanish. Cuz if your, uh, 'theory' is true, there should be plenty such examples.
Can you do that? Either references or raw data?
The burden of proof is on you, Dave. Cuz here's how it stacks up:
ONE SIDE: Dave
OTHER SIDE: Everyone else, including all linguists.
This isn't religious apologetics, Dave. You can't just make shit up and have it become true.
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"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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