2012/7/10 Michael Everson <ever...@evertype.com>: > No, the inheritors of the Roman heritage are Aragonese, Aromanian, Arpitan, > Asturian, Catalan Corsican, Emiliano-Romagnolo, French, Friulan, Galician, > Italian, Jèrriais, Ladino, Leonese, Lombard, Mirandese, Neapolitan, Occitan, > Picard, Piedmontese, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, > Spanish, Venetian, and Walloon. And various French-, Portuguese-, and > Spanish-based creoles.
You coudl as well add English to the list (it includes more French words now, than what French is integrating from English). The two languages are converging, no longer diverging, with many new terms and syntaxic structures adopted jointly from various cultures of the world. There's also a convergence between most European languages (at least those written with the Latin script in the Romance, Germanic and Nordic groups, except possibly Slavic languages which converge together even when they are romanized in their script, and Finnish or Basque that are very different but are still borrowing a lot from their infliuent neighbors). There are more languages to add, at least in France : Norman/Normand, Guernesiais, Picard, Angevin, Gallo... Though some standards still consider them as dialect of French, even though French is a modern creation from an aggregate of northern Oil languages that have had their own history before borrowing lexical and gramatical inputs from Latin (vernacuar, church and classical), Germanic languages (the common difference between Oil and Oc languages of France and nearby areas), some of these "French" languages are in fact nearer from other Romance languages like Spanish. Occitan is also a collection of languages whose standardisation is far from being effective, from Northern current Spain to Northenrn current Italy: see Niçard vs. Provençal vs. Auvergnat. Modern languages are arbitrary creations from a lot of languages, pressured by a form of standardization caused by the legislator in power and the administration, or the official school programs (notably in France where regional languages were banned and called "dialects", and their orthography was severely modified, notably in people names and in toponyms). Now the French language is much more permissive and allows integrating regional forms and it evolves more freely according to actual usage. It is no longer regulared by France alone. Even if the language usage is mandatory, it allows lots of variations and a perfect gluing to the standard is no longer necessary. But this also means that regional languages are now much moire easily integrated as part of the language, and tend to disappear more easily as there's no longer a strong division line between them (the phonological differences are now no longer visible, the phonolgy is largely simplified, and this now impacts the orthorgraphy of combining accents, many of them are disappearing at the same time as the differentiation of regional vocal accents and better acceptation of foreign accents (English, German, Arabic, Vietnamese...). French will probably evolve like modern English now : with an orthography that will survice partly (by tradition) but that will no longer match the actual phonology which is extremely variable across regions, and many simplifications (grammatical structures and rules are no longer observed, conjugations are disappearing like the subjonctive mode, in favor of the use of fixed adverbs or expressions and only 3 times : indicative present and compound past, simple future and compound future which could override the conditional mode as well, mute letters, including for plurals which not heard, unlike Englush, tend now to be no longer written ; yes the language will become more ambiguous, but this will be compensated by use of additional disambiguating words, and by borrowing more words from other languages and by a very productive system of popular abbreviations and progressive shifts in semantics).
