By negative do you mean pejorative?

a staunch defender of language

I have a book called Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity. Latin (and Ancient) Greek are no longer spoken languages, except if you count the all Romance languages and Modern Greek. Is French merely a degraded Latin? Everything that happened to Latin as it become French is something the guardians decry. The change in pronunciation, the semantic drift of large parts of the vocabulary, the decline of declensions, and the transmogrification of of conjugations. O, the enormity of it all? Is French less efficient than Latin or more? Which language is better? About the only thing linguists can agree upon is that language changes. It is as inevitable as the tide lapping around King Canute's feet, no matter his fiats or diktats. My follow-on question is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Ceci n'est pas un seing.