Re: Celtic/Germanic

--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:

> 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

I'm not quite certain what you're actually saying here. But if it is
that English is a creole (along with the other North Sea Germanic
languages (ie. all minus Icelandic and High German) I agree. One
shouldn't forget that the place where people of AngloSaxon-speaking
or Norse-speaking would meet would be the market and nowhere else,
where they sold their wool to Plattdeutsch (Low German) speaking
agents of the Hanse. That and the contact with Norman French
creolized the English language.

Torsten