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>> Raven Silverwings wrote: >>> . . . Romani is originally a sankrit-derived language . . . > Anton Sherwood wrote: >> It belongs to the same branch as Sanskrit, yes - but how many >> languages are in fact descended from Sanskrit (or Vedic)? Muke Tever wrote: > About the same as are descended from Classical Latin, > and for much the same reasons. Oh? Leaving aside the distinction between Classical and Vulgar Latin, I wasn't aware that Sanskrit was ever an imperial language.Sanskrit is among the oldest written languages, but that does not mean it is an ancestor of all its near kin, any more than the Gothic of Wulfila is ancestral to all the Germanic languages.
Raven Silverwings wrote: > . . . . Like Latin, Sanskrit was a language of the educated, > and it broke down into dialects, like the Romance ones.Romance is descended from the Latin of the soldiers and other commoners. Latin in its role as inter-language of the literate did not diverge much - that function depended on its fixity.
... see also http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=629 -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/