At 8:47 AM -0500 3/27/02, Alain LaBontÈÝ wrote:
[Alain] French (with a totally different spelling [and many more
differences] compared to now: you have to pronounce letters like when
you read Latin to *begin* to understand even if you're
French-speaking) and "modern" German (well a form of it, perhaps with
a remark very similar for reading the text as for French) were
*officially* born the same day, on the 14th of February, 842 A.D. (is
it one of the origins of Valentine Day?), in a bilingual peace
treaty(*) between two grandsons of Charlemagne...
Of course, this assumes that the year 842 and Charlemagne actually
existed, which turns out to be not nearly as self-evident a
proposition as it seems at first glance. See, for example,
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf or at Google
in HTML:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:8VRf94MWzUgC:www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf+did+Charlemagne+exist&hl=en
--+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java news: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML news: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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