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

At 4:24:28 AM on Monday, March 31, 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.

No, it wouldn't. I presume that you can figure out on your
own why the relationship of AAVE to formal spoken English is
not particularly similar to the relationship between early
Old French and Latin, now that the existence of a difference
has been pointed out.

> That doesn't mean that language didn't exist before that
> occasion. But still it's a creole.

It's possible that AAVE derives from a creole; it's now
simply a dialect of English.

> 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").

No. Icelandic borrowed from Danish and Low German (and
subsequently got rid of most of the borrowings). That does
not a creole make. No pidgin, no creole. (And this has to
be the silliest example of a 'creole' yet.)

Brian