You Don't Have to Agree with a Book
You Don't Have to Agree with a Book
To learn from it
Last year, I read a book (French Doesn’t Come from Latin) in which the author (Yves Cortez) argued that the modern Romance languages descended from a lost, and entirely unwritten, tongue that he calls Old Italian.1
Though he marshaled his evidence with skill, style, and aplomb, Monsieur Cortez failed to convince me of his thesis. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, so much so that thinking about it evokes the sort of nostalgia I usually reserve for things I read when I was a child, a teenager, or a lieutenant. Thus, I was reminded that there is a lot more to a good book than the opinions expressed, and that I can often learn a great deal from authors with whom I disagree.
Unfortunately, there are people in the world who disagree with this approach disagreement. Thus, an internet search on French Doesn’t Come from Latin (or its sequel, Spanish Doesn’t Come from Latin) will turn up a number of small-minded reviewers who dismiss Cortez as a “pseudolinguist” and (marvelous to say) “conspiracy theorist.” (These rarely fail to mention that Cortez, who worked as a town planner, learned linguistics extra muros.)
Readers of this blog will not be surprised to discover that the authors of the poison-pen evaluations were, to a man, academics.
Yves Cortez Le français ne vient pas du latin: Essai sur une aberration linguistique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007) (The book has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, but not into English.)