Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages
Tides of History
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Why the Written Language Wasn't Changing All the Time
No matter how much the spoken language changed, the written language was still recognizably latin. A really sharp french scholar named michel baniard wrote a great book called viva voce on this topic back in the nineties. Baniard proved that there was no conceptual distinction between romance and latin. When some one read latin aloud, they simply pronounced the word the way they normally would in speech. We do this every time we read english aloud. This kind of creative pronunciation would go a long way toward keeping written latin as the same language.
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