[Article] Solved again...

[Koen G]

I sent a mail to the editor in which I addressed this issue (among others):

Thus far, Cheshire has defended his strange linguistic claims by proposing that the whole thing took place on an island, where such wondrous events are known to happen. But then on p32 he writes:

“So, we have proto-Romance words surviving in the Mediterranean from Portugal, in the west, to Turkey, in the east. Clearly, it was a cosmopolitan lingua franca until the late Medieval period”.

 To paraphrase, Cheshire claims that the manuscript was written in proto-Romance, one cosmopolitan language which coexisted with Middle French and Dante’s Italian, but despite its cosmopolitan status it is only attested in one book written by a nun on an island. I will not withhold the following gem: “manuscript MS408 is immensely important, because it is the only documentation of a language that was once ubiquitous over the Mediterranean and subsequently became the foundation for southern European linguistics in the present day.”

Cheshire’s ubiquitous yet unattested language became the foundation for southern European linguistics.