Reddit reviews The Romance Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys)

I respectfully disagree with the statement that
>the increased use of auxiliary verbal tenses, especially passé composé, is probably due to Germanic influence.

First, according to the language histories I've consulted (by Romance scholars Ralph Penny and Rebecca Posner), the compound past tense (with habere) was already present in spoken Latin.

Second, in contrast to the "not universal" claim in Wikipedia, Posner states that "nearly all the Romance languages make some use of a compound perfect".

Third, Posner (former Chair of Romance Linguistics at Oxford, and a great writer!) specifically disparages the Germanic hypothesis:
>Some commentators have implausibly attributed the use of the ESSE auxiliary with some intransitive verbs to the influence of German, where the distribution of haben and sein auxiliaries is similar, but others have linked it to stative and passive uses of the ESSE auxiliary.

Finally, according to Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva's World Lexicon of Grammaticalization the evolution from a possessive to a perfective is "mostly confined to European languages," meaning that it's also found elsewhere. I wish they were more specific on this point; the only other language they give as an example is Cantonese. I also wish they discussed the être-based passive.

I'm reading the volume on Romance languages from The Cambridge Language Surveys and the author consistently uses the term "dialect", despite recognizing their mutual unintelligibility, the indisputable language status of Sardinian and Friulian, and the fact that:

> The diverse dialects are 'Italian' only in the sense that they are spoken in Italy: their linguistic relationship to the standard arises from interaction rather than deed-seated and ancient affinity.

So I guess the usage is hesitant on whether to talk about "Italian languages" or "Italian dialects", despite consensus on stuff like mutual intelligibility.