When I was in the Netherlands, I kept thinking I was hearing Old English spoken-- the language sounded like recordings I’d heard of Beowulf. Which I guess makes a certain amount of sense. It would be interesting to see how mutually intelligible English and Dutch would have been without the Norman Invasion.
Schnitte writes:
> 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 . . .
I said nothing of the sort. I was disagreeing with your statement:
> . . . modern standard Italian is very close to ancient Latin.
No, it isn’t. The Italian of 2013 A.D. is not close to the Latin of 50 B.C. I said that a statement of the form “Italian is very close to Latin” is only true if you are referring to a very late form of Latin and a very early form of Italian.