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, bûter, en griene tsiis / Is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. (That û is u-circumflex, in case of encoding problems.) -- Long-short-short, long-short-short / Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs / (Masculine rhyme): [EMAIL PROTECTED] One sentence (two stanzas) / Hexasyllabically http://www.reutershealth.com Challenges poets who / Don't have the time. --robison who's at texas dot net