Re: [tied] Re: Japanese as a creole language?

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 20461
Date: 2003-03-28

Torsten:
>I don't get it. Do you understand 'creole' and 'IE' as mutually
>exclusive?

That's right, you don't get it. French is mostly attributable to IE and
can be firmly traced back to Latin. There _are_ creoles languages based
partly on IE languages so, no, it's not mutually exclusive. But standard
French and "creole" _is_ mutually exclusive.


>And BTW French is full of Germanic loanwords.

Every language has loans. The fact that a language has loans doesn't make
it a creole. Since French underwent a long evolutionary process that can
be traced right back to Latin, we know that it's not some suddenly created
language that popped out of nowhere because of contact between some
Language X (and perhaps also Language Y, Z, etc) and Frankish.

So French is not a creole at all.

English is also not a creole for the same reasons. We can trace its slow
evolution back to Germanic and French loans don't hinder us from doing
this.

As for Japanese, I have to admit that creolisation isn't entirely
impossible when I think on it. The problem is that we don't know enough
about its long, unwritten prehistory to be absolutely certain.


- gLeN


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