[tied] Re: Japanese as a creole language?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
wrote:

> At 4:25:00 AM on Saturday, March 29, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >> >> However, we may also note French entirely losing
> >> >> Indo-European declension yet it's not a "creole" and
> >> >> fully IE.
>
> >> > I don't get it. Do you understand 'creole' and 'IE' as
> >> > mutually exclusive? And BTW French is full of Germanic
> >> > loanwords. The Frankish upper class spoke a Germanic
> >> > dialect, so French has passed through the requisite
> >> > sociological conditions for being creolized.
>
> >> No, because there is no break in transmission. A creole
> >> sensu stricto requires such a break.
>
> > Is too. The first written record of French sensu strictu
> > are the Strassburg oaths, pledged by the Frankish kings,
> > which are also the one of the first records of OHG, I
> > believe. Before that time, no French records, only bad
> > Latin.
>
> Accepting for the moment your 'bad Latin', so what? Ogam
> Irish used a very conservative orthography. When the Irish
> started using the Latin alphabet, they rather abruptly
> brought their orthography more or less up to date to reflect
> the Old Irish language. If one judged only by the written
> language, one would imagine a more abrupt change than
> actually occurred. Late Old English orthography was
> conservative compared with the spoken language; many of the
> changes seen in early Middle English are simply orthographic
> recognition of changes that had occurred earlier in the
> spoken language. In Carolingian times the stimulus was
> increasing recognition that the vernaculars were no longer
> just 'bad Latin'. (And even then, the earliest examples of
> Old French were clearly intended for oral presentation; the
> Strassburg Oaths in particular had to be in the vernacular
> in order to serve their purpose.)
>

Exactly. Until they needed the Strasbourg oaths, in German and French
for exactly that purpose, to recognize that the emperor ruled two
communities, those two languages existed as lower registers of an
official tongue. It would be as if after a black take-over, Black
English would be used to inaugurate a president. That doesn't mean
that language didn't exist before that occasion. But still it's a
creole. Even Icelandic developped a Danish and Low German mixed
creole in the middle ages, before that was stamped out (but they stil
say 'tak "thank you").


Torsten