what I mean is that are there people today who learnt the language personally from people who learnt the language personally etc all the way back to whenever we first detect latin in history?
the rest of this post is to contextualise and disambiguate the question in many ways.
by pronunciation lineage I mean the way a child learns from the parents, or with migrants where the parents may speak a language incorrectly, but the child can learn correct usage from immersion from the native speaking children at school.
Things excluded:
but to exclude learning from say a book at the outermost level of exclusion, and learning from say audio CDs and books at an inner level of exclusion. To even exclude electronic communication at an even more inner level. learning at school also is EXCLUDED, as there are too many teachers who totally mispronounce and are unaware of subtleties. learning at uni also excluded, native german speakers dont learn german by going to a british university german department!
but where the lineage is that of being regularly physically immersed in the language, especially when younger, and not necessarily just now. Because language isnt just about some image and sound on a video, but will encompass all kinds of other things, eg a lot of things are learnt interactively where you run into a problem and someone makes a comment, but of course electronic media can augment immersion.
disclaimer: students do need to learn from books, CDs, school lessons, uni courses, and I evidently endorse electronic communication by using this forum! forums and emails are immersive at the textual level.
Examples of immersive things not taught in classroom for german:
example 1. with german, one thing I noticed not taught at school in England, is in Berlin the people informally will drop the first vowel of diphthongs, eg to say lufen instead of laufen, kiser instead of kaiser. I first discovered this when I asked about getting somewhere via the metro. And the person said "kannst du lufen", and I had no idea what he meant, and eventually established he meant I could walk there, which would be the verb laufen. I then started to notice this phenomenon everywhere even in adverts. Its equivalent to saying huse instead of house, which does happen in the north of Britain. Furthermore at school we were taught to always say Sie instead of du, but with this and other examples I found you needed in fact to say du. Messaging on german ebay once, one german in fact told me I should say du and not Sie.
example 2. something we were never taught at school in England, is that germans have their own form of handwriting, which is incomprehensible to someone from Britain. I thought it was just really atrocious handwriting, until a german explained it, and I taught myself the system from written info they gave me, where it looks like some incoherent script from the 1700s. If I write things in the system, and show it to an english person they will have no idea at all what I have written! What I usually do is write their name, and they dont know its their name! This is an example of something I learnt from some limited immersion in german society and which isnt in german courses in Britain. Everywhere in Germany you will see handwritten notes on buildings using this system.
example 3. Something else I learnt from immersion in Germany is that say 1.000 euros means 1000 euros, whereas 1,000 euros means 1 euro! Which means you can get into jeopardy doing money transfers from Germany to the UK! Also not taught at our school!
migration included
someone might have emigrated aged 15, where although no longer immersed, they carry the pronunciation lineage in their brain. You could also have a partial immersion, but that would be a constricted lineage. I am asking here about an unconstricted lineage.
so its not a birth lineage, but a lineage of prolonged social immersion amongst native speakers, where also the prolonged immersion might have occurred in the past.
also learning from native speaking parents isnt necessarily best, as they might speak a degenerated dialect but it would count as proper pronunciation lineage. Once you have the prolonged direct immersion, you can then refine further eg from electronic communication, eg watching television, reading books.
Excluding languages overrunning another country
when a country is overrun by another language, I would regard that as a disjuncture, but the elite overrun people might learn via immersion from the overrunning nation. When the way the country talks is blatantly different from the overrunning country, eg applying their own pronunciation and grammar variously, I would regard that as a disjuncture. proper lineage needs to have a core where the usage was seamless when the core was formed. eg russian was imposed on the soviet union, and most of that I would regard as a disjuncture. But the child of someone posted in Moscow, attending a russian school could count as pronunciation lineage. A russian teaching russian in another country will not be immersion for the students. immersion isnt something taught, but is to genuinely interact.
Artificial reforms included if a tampering
languages can get artificially reformed eg where people say are forced to say things a particular way. But I regard that as valid lineage provided the artificial reforms were done by people of the lineage. rather than by some academics in a university department seminar room outside the lineage, even if they are the world's leading experts.
I think with all languages debate arises as to which way to say something is correct eg with grammar, and thus some changes occur as a conscious "artificial" decision rather than "natural" change where people dont realise the change is happening.
with such lineage, a language will gradually change with time, to eg lead to people not knowing how latin was pronounced say in 100BC.
apparently we dont know for sure how latin was pronounced in 100BC, but this doesnt necessarily mean there isnt a pronounciation lineage.
Purpose of the question
my question really is whether with latin there was a lineage disjuncture at some point from the earlier eras with today's eras, where people resurrected the language entirely from writings at some point in history.
church and science and judicial latin mostly have non immersed users, so in most cases would be a disjuncture.
fake immersion excluded
fake immersion also doesnt count, eg Russia probably had towns where everyone spoke english in order to cultivate expertise. But there is a disjuncture at the start. I think they had schools where everything was done in english, in order to train spies, journalists, diplomats, linguists etc. This is immersion, but it is fake immersion. The people will speak good english, but it will be different eg they will have to guess variously, where the guess wont be as efficient as the correct form. I read an english mag produced by Russia, and they had a cartoon referring to an "eye doctor", when the correct word is an optician. I also bought a russian book on learning english, as that would have flawless russian for basics!
disclaimer: fake immersion is a good idea. I just exclude it from the question.
my own learning excluded
my own learning of 1st century latin has a total lineage disjuncture, as I did the first 13 lessons of a course without any audio at all, just guessing the pronunciation. I did have some audio, but am not using it as its for ecclesiastical latin. Before I started learning, I could get Vatican TV on satellite, but when I tried it just now, there was a guy speaking russian, and when I rescanned stations, I could no longer find Vatican TV. That would anyway be ecclesiastical latin.
