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On 18 Oct 2011, at 14:27 , thomasruhm wrote: > > I heard about Latin could be reconstructed from romance languages. I only knew about reconstructed late Vulgar Latin, which already had a very reduced case system. > Would a reconstruction come close to documented Latin? Are you thinking about Hall's reconstructed Proto-Romance? It comes "reassuringly close" to Latin -- though perhaps a late, Vulgar Latin. For example, Hall was able to determine Latin had contrasting vowel sets, though could not determine that the contrasting feature was length (though, of course, we know that from records of classical Latin). I think reconstructing something exactly like written classical Latin as it is preserved would be quite unlikely; after all, written classical Latin as it is preserved represents only part of what was a more complicated linguistic environment. Likewise, a reconstruction from later Romance can only represent a portion of what was originally a more complicated linguistic environment. In the case of Latin, we are lucky to be able to do both (i.e. see preserved written Latin, and reconstruct from a range of daughter languages), but in any event we are of necessity approximating. We can postulate with some confidence that there were features of "Roman Latin" that were neither recorded at the time nor reflected in later Romance. Likewise, our records of later Romance are necessarily partial, and we cannot know what what features might have been preserved (or innovated) in some variety of Romance that disappeared without trace. So how could we hope to construct a doppelgänger for written classical Latin as it is preserved? That's an "unrealistic" or partial thing in any case … Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/