Clive D.W. Feather scripsit:
> Why not? Greek and Latin, to name two, were spoken that long ago and are
> recognisable today.
Indeed, and they passed through a far tighter bottleneck than anything
likely today.
Not even the most diligently destructive barbarian can
extirpate the written word from a culture wherein the
*minimum* edition of most books is fifteen hundred
copies. There are simply too many books.
--L. Sprague de Camp, _Lest Darkness Fall_
> And the English of 1000 years ago is still an official language of the
> Netherlands (under the name "Frisian").
Bread, butter, and green cheese / Is good English and good Friese.
Brea, būter, en griene tsiis / Is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
(That ū is u-circumflex, in case of encoding problems.)
--
Long-short-short, long-short-short / Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs / (Masculine rhyme): cowan_at_ccil.org
One sentence (two stanzas) / Hexasyllabically http://www.reutershealth.com
Challenges poets who / Don't have the time. --robison who's at texas dot net
Received on Mon Jan 23 2006 - 08:04:42 PST