Le français ne vient pas du latin

Le français ne vient pas du latin (, in English: French does not come from Latin) is a 2007 pseudolinguistics book by engineer and town planner Yves Cortez which argues that the Romance languages are derived not from Latin, but from a form of Old Italian. Unfortunately, the book fails to prove anything of the sort.
==Contents==
The book consists of a preface; an introduction; seven arguments against the idea that the Romance languages are descended from Latin; an analysis of why, given that Latin isn't the ancestor of the Romance languages, linguists continue to believe it is; a section dedicated to the consequences of the theory of Latinity being disproven; a conclusion; and a glossary of linguistic terms. Curiously, there is no bibliography or list of references.
===Introduction===
Cortez outlines his theory of the origin of the Romance languages. According to him, there were originally two languages of Rome: Latin and Italian. Spoken Latin eventually died out, and only remained in use as a written language; the Roman vernacular was Italian.Mainstream linguistics holds that Classical Latin is the literary register of the unattested spoken ancestor of Romance, termed Vulgar Latin. The two were originally quite similar, but between the classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the written standard remained frozen, while the spoken register underwent significant grammatical and lexical changes, such as the loss of its case system and the postpositive conjunction -que, among other things, transforming from a synthetic language into a vastly different analytic one ("synthetic" here does not mean "artificial"; see and ). Cortez, on the other hand, claims that Classical Latin is not a formal written register of a spoken vernacular (think of the difference between written academic English and colloquial English), but rather a separate branch of Italic. He believes that Romance (specifically, its ancestor, which he calls Old Italian) underwent the synthetic-to-analytic transformation gradually during a millennia-long period prior to the classical period, with Latin being a separate, synthetic, Italic language that coexisted with Romance for a time, but died out in the classical era before ever becoming analytic. Essentially, historical linguists hold that Romance changed dramatically in less than a millennium, while Cortez claims that this process took place much more slowly over many thousands of years. When the Roman Empire expanded, the various native populations abandoned their own languages and adopted the spoken language of the Romans, Italian. Cortez claims that linguists have attempted but failed to explain the disappearance of declensions, the neuter gender, the appearance of articles, and other characteristics of the Romance languages. He notes that Greek, German, and Russian have all retained their neuter genders, implying that therefore this should have happened to Latin as well (this is cherry picking, as will be examined in more detail below). Cortez lists a number of objections to the theory of Latin descent:
*"How is it that the same grammatical forms have disappeared in all the Romance languages?"
*"How is it that the same grammatical forms developed in all the Romance languages?"
*"How is it that the same Latin words disappeared, and the same non-Latin words appeared, in all the Romance languages?"
*"How is it that the most frequent Latin adjectives, adverbs, and verbs disappeared in all the Romance languages?
*"How is it that Latin underwent such a dramatic change in only slightly under 400 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 until the first appearance of the Roman language at the Council of Tours in 813, when linguistic stability appears to be a general law?"
Cortez notes various statements by linguist Antoine Meillet to the effect that Turkish and Arabic have remained essentially unchanged for millennia, and claims that this conservatism is also true of Greek. He attributes the similarities between the Romance languages and Latin to their common Indo-European descent and to borrowing due to the almost 2,000 years of coexistence of the spoken Romance languages and written Latin.
===Seven Irrefutable Arguments You Won't Believe Revolutionize Linguistics (Linguists Hate Them!)===
====Humans cannot be descended from Homo sapiens, because Homo sapiens is extinct (AKA Latin has been dead since the 1st century B.C.)====
====If humans are descended from monkeys, then why don't humans have fur? (AKA Romance's basic vocabulary is not Latin)====
Latin 	Italian 	English
dare 	dare 	to give
quasi 	quasi 	almost
esse 	essere 	to be
filius 	figlio 	son
cantare 	cantare 	to sing
iocari 	giocare 	to play
iam 	già 	now/already
aqua 	acqua 	water
arcus 	arco 	bow
tarde 	tardi 	late
astrum 	astro 	star
altus 	alto 	high
piscis 	pesce 	fish
sapere 	sapere 	to know
tu 	tu 	you/thou
videre 	vedere 	to see
amare 	amare 	to love
quando 	quando 	when
solum 	solo 	only
regina 	regina 	queen
mori 	morire 	to die
occidere	uccidere	to kill
dormire 	dormire 	to sleep
venire 	venire 	to come
credere 	credere 	to believe
English 	German
but 	aber
how 	wie
where 	wo
now 	jetzt
only 	nur
bad 	schlecht
already 	schon
until 	bis
soon 	bald
early 	früh
late 	spät
girl 	Mädchen
bird 	Vogel
to kill 	töten
to die 	sterben
woman 	Frau
queen 	Königin
to be 	sein
am 	bin
are 	sind/seid
you 	Sie/ihr/du
they 	sie
to work 	arbeiten
to run 	laufen
to know 	wissen
to believe	glauben
====If humans are descended from monkeys, then why don't humans have tails? (AKA Romance's grammar inherited nothing from Latin)====
 
 
====Horseshoe crabs have barely evolved, so why would other animals be any different? (AKA Languages change very slowly)====
====Biology textbooks are full of lies (AKA The entirety of mainstream French etymology is made up)====
====If humans are descended from cells, then why are humans more similar to animals than cells? (AKA The Romance languages are practically identical)====
====If humans are descended from cells, then why are early humans more similar to neanderthals than cells? (AKA Old French is more similar to Italian than to Latin)====
===Why do scientists continue to believe in the dogma of Evolutionism? (AKA Why do linguists continue to believe in the dogma of Latinism?)===
===The extraordinary consequences of the refutation of the theory of Evolutionism (AKA The extraordinary consequences of the refutation of the theory of Latinism)===
===Conclusion===
==See also==
*Protochronism
==External links==
*Le Français ne vient pas du latin! by Yves Cortez, a book review by Patrick Redeinbaugh (in English)
*Sobre el Origen de las Lenguas Romances, a refutation of some of Cortez's claims by Alex Gahr (in Spanish)
*A forum thread (in French)
*CORTEZ, Ives. Le français ne vient pas du latin! Essai sur une aberration linguistique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007, a book review by Brian Franklin Head (in Portuguese)
*„Nu venim din latină”, a refutation of the book No venimos del latín, which is inspired by, and uses many of the same arguments as, Cortez's book (in Romanian) although its author Jimenez Huerta makes them about Spanish. 
*Erreseina-No venimos del latín, Ander Ros Cubas, another refutation of No venimos del latín (in Spanish)
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Books
Category:Engineer woo
Category:Pseudolinguistics
Category:Refutations
Category:Side-by-side articles