The term “vulgar”, as used in a post previous to yours, does not mean that the words are dirty or obscene. Vulgar in that case means “common” as opposed to “classic”.
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Now you’re confusing things even more. The Italian of 1200 A.D. is not the same as the Italian of 2013 A.D. They are as far apart as Chaucer’s English and the English of 2013 A.D. You can’t (to create an example) divide a language X up into the language X of 1400 A.D. to the present, the language X of 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D., the language X of 200 A.D. to 800 A.D., and the language X of 600 B.C. to 200 A.D. and then say that language X was the same during each of these four periods and only changed at the breaks between periods. Yes, we talk about Old English and Middle English and Early Modern English and Late Modern English, but those are arbitrary divisions. English has always been changing. Latin/Italian has always been changing. All languages are always changing. Sometimes they change a little faster and sometimes a little slower, but they are always changing.
[/QUOTE]
I fully agree, but it doesn’t contradict my previous statements about the relationship between Italian and Latin. There is a continuous development from vulgar Latin in late antiquity through various intermediate stages to the modern Italian of today. Sure, a lot of grammatical structures present in Latin were lost along the way, but it’s a continuous development, very much the same as there was a continuous development from previous variants of English to today’s modern standard English. A time-travelling native speaker of vulgar Latin beamed from late antiquity to today’s Italy would be able to make himself understood by a present-day Italian.
A continuous development doesn’t mean that any one stage along that development can understand any other stage along the development. Someone from time A will have trouble understanding someone from time A minus 500 years. Someone from time A will have extreme difficulty understanding someone from time A minus 1000 years. Someone from time A will be unable to understand someone from time A minus 1500 years. That’s what continuous change means. The fact that it’s easy for any one along the entire timeline to understand someone from 50 years before doesn’t contradict the fact that it will be impossible to understand someone from 1500 years before.
Well, a present-day speaker of English can read English texts from Chaucer’s day. He may have some trouble at some passages and not get every word, but the general idea of the text can be grasped reliably. Same for many other languages -many Germans, for instance, can recite the beginning of the Nibelungs from memory and understand the meaning of it. All I am saying is that a similar relation exists between Italian and Latin.
Chaucer’s writings are from less than 700 years ago. It’s rather hard to read them. It would be very hard to hear the language of that time spoken. It’s not possible to understand anyone from 2000 years ago, even if they are part of a continuously developing language.
What you are saying about Italian is also true of all the Romance languages.
I would, however, characterize the development of English to be a bit more complicate than just “continuous development”. There was a rather abrupt change after the Norman invasion and English took on a quite different character than it had previously.
Thread title edited to better indicate subject.
But not the typo? 
The days when Latin was a living language are not 2000 years in the past. It was used well into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages as a vernacular in many regions, and much longer as a language of commerce and administration(and even longer than that, up until the 18th century, as a pan-European language of science and academia, even though by that time the Romance languages had already evolved). It would be wrong to equate Latin with the standard classical Latin from the first centuries BC and AD and conclude from that that we are separated from spoken Latin by a full two millennia.
Once again, you’re confusing the issue by talking about a language at two different stages as if they were the same. By Latin, we’re talking about, say, the language of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War (circa 50 B.C.) That’s 2063 years removed from the Italian of 2013. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that an Italian (of 2013 A.C.) couldn’t understand a Roman (of 50 B.C.). The fact that there are people who spoke what they called Italian and other people who spoke what they called Latin who are much closer in time and would have much less problems understanding each other is not relevant to what I’m talking about. Incidentally, Latin has been a more or less dead language since some point in the Early Middle Ages. The common people then were speaking languages that were the ancestors of modern Romance languages. The languages they were speaking were already considerably changed from the Latin of, say, Julius Caesar. Yes, priests and many educated people learned classical Latin as adults (or in late childhood) after that time, but nobody learned it as an infant, so it was no longer a native language for anyone. They deliberately kept it from changing as normal languages learned as an infant do.
This is not even close to true. For one thing, Latin nouns have cases. Italian nouns don’t.
Randomly selected Latin: Est hoc in more positum, Quirites, institutoque maiorum, ut ei qui beneficio vestro imagines familiae suae consecuti sunt eam primam habeant contionem, qua gratiam benefici vestri cum suorum laude coniungant.
I challenge any modern Romance speaker to be able to read that. Some words are easy, and I bet an Italian speaker would understand the last clause, but things like “institutoque maiorum” are simply not comprehensible.
I seem to remember seeing mention recently that some Brazilians are pushing to have “Brazilian” recognized as a language separate from Portuguese. Is there any truth to this?
No, Chaucer is unintelligible to a modern-day English speaker without special training, whereas 1200 AD Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese (and I’m guessing French) are intelligible to modern speakers. The biggest difficulties have to do with thematic: most people nowadays can’t name more than a handful of agricultural implements, tell you how to measure a horse or identify armor parts (most people don’t know that a quijote was an actual word before becoming a madman’s chosen nickname).
The first written samples of Spanish date from the 10th or 11th century and they’re perfectly understandable once you get past the handwriting (that monk wasn’t just impolite to books, he had a lousy hand).
No it isn’t.
With Chaucer, I’ve found that looking at it with an eye to updating the spelling goes a very long way to make it understandable. Take the words and try to find modern English words that look similar. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get a sentence that makes sense, even though it might sound a little awkward. Occasionally you’ll find a word that you might need to look up - e.g. the Canterbury Tales assume you know a lot about how the medieval Catholic Church was organized and what all the different roles were. Go look them up!
Let’s try some.
[QUOTE=Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 14th century]
118: Ther was also a nonne, a prioresse,
119: That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy;
120: Hire gretteste ooth was but by seinte loy;
121: And she was cleped madame eglentyne.
122: Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne,
123: Entuned in hir nose ful semely,
124: And frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,
125: After the scole of stratford atte bowe,
126: For frenssh of parys was to hire unknowe.
[/QUOTE]
There was also a nun, a prioress,
That of her smiling was full simple and coy;
Her greatest oath was by “By Saint Loy”;
And she was cleped “Madam Eglentyne”.
Full well she sang the service divine,
Entuned in her nose full seemly,
And French she spoke full fair and feistily,
After the school of “Stratford-At-Bow”,
For French of Paris was to her unknown.
There’s only one or two words that are difficult. It’s clear that “cleped” in this context refers to her name.
So, we have a nun whose name was “Madam Eglentyne”. She sang well in church and wasn’t known for swearing especially rudely, and overall could be described as a sweet spirit or very friendly person. She fluently spoke a dialect of French that was taught at a specific school in Stratford, but she couldn’t understand Parisian French.
Not that hard.
I don’t agree with this. Maybe you’re thinking of Old English like Beowulf. This is not to say Chaucer doesn’t require the occasional trip to a Middle English reference work, but it’s intelligible. We read the whole of Canterbury Tales in college (and bits of it in high school ) with no special training except following a footnote here and there. It was t as fluid as reading contemporary English, but it was understandable without having to take a class on Middle English. I would compare the difficulty to reading a book written in dialect (like, say, Trainspotting) to reading Chaucer. Not effortless, but not requiring special training.
Now think about 1/20 that much respelling; very little need to “find modern Spanish words that look similar”, more to figure out that “heeeey, some of those ancient sentences I know are really ancient! This uses archaic words that I’d previously encountered in joke usages” (such as vuesa merced instead of its modern contraction usted). And like I said, often the words an average student wouldn’t know by 6th grade are words which (like those medieval CC roles) used to be commonplace and have now become specialized jargon; my brother’s almost-illiterate mother in law can provide definitions for many of the agricultural ones, as she’s the daughter of agricultural day laborers vs of an accountant and a teacher.
Again: Latin is not just the classical Latin from the first centuries AD and BC simply because you try to define it that way or simply presuppose that; the history of the language extends many centuries both ways along the timeline from Caesar’s days. But frankly, I’m growing tired of this discussion; the arguments have been exchanged. We both agree that Italian developed from vulgar Latin in a continuous development, and the disagreement was about whether the relationship was sufficiently close to be ccalled “very close”. You say no, I say yes, and I don’t see much sense in discussing the issue further.
The problem modern English speakers have with Chaucer is understanding the spoken version. The written version is highly intelligible. It’s very hard to listen to and get a full sense of what is going on without special training. But that’s really just getting used to an accent, and I’m sure it wouldn’t take long for a modern speaker, if emerged in Middle English to catch on.
Which, btw, is a lot like Spanish and Portuguese. Most Spanish speakers can read Portuguese fairly well, but have trouble with the spoken version without a lot of exposure.
That’s a bit like what Dutch sounds like to my ears.