The word 'creole' is often misused. A creole is like Haitian, where
you have a lexicical base of French, plus a number of West African
languages coming together to create something considerably more than a
pidgen. Creoles occur when very different languages encounter each
other.
Another definition of 'creole' is what's happening with Tok Pisin. Tok
Pisin is an official pidgen, an official language of Papua New Guinea.
It has actually developed native speakers, which means it's a creole.
Since it's lexical base is English, the history of this 'new language'
is likely to be convergence into English.
Then there is what happened with English. A West Saxon dialect met a
Scandic dialect in the North of England. The Icelandic skalds say they
understood each other (more or less). The magic word here is
'convergence'. We are speaking of common grammatical understandings,
and once you figure out the phonology, a very high level of lexical
agreement (the resultant pronouns are weird; no one can adequately
explain 'she'), and a rather strange phonological regime, one that got
stranger once we got raped by French (and, O France, that monstrous
child you bore ... ).
Creoles are grammatically simple. The are short of inflections.
Back then, Germanic and Celtic were not *that* far apart. There were
common grammatical understandings (many cases, three numbers, three
voices, etc.), as well as lexical understandings.
--- In cybalist@..., "Joseph S Crary" <pva@...> wrote:
> From Glen
>
> >Exactly. And further, Germanic's sound shift might not have even
> been so large as is traditionally seen.<
>
> Is that why someone might say nordic-german was creole or creo-lish
>
>
> In unaggregated prestige driven Heroic societies, were status and
> authority were derived from the raid and war, the outward display of
> rank and affiliation were all important yet often limited, and every
> one had a linguistic axe, in on form or another, to grind
>
> Didn't the Romans comment about that, over and over and over?
>
>
> JS Crary