--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
>
>
> > Lingua Franca never had any native speakers, right?
>
> Right. That's why it remained a pidgin unto its demise. Perhaps it
would have become creolised in Northern Africa if it had been given
a chance, but the colonial spread of French did for it in the 19th
century.
>
> > Perhaps the whole pidgin -> creole theory needs a revision;
>
> It's being revised all the time, but the revisions are better left
to the researchers who study actual pidgins and creoles. At any
rate, there doesn't seem to be any need at present to redefine the
well-established terminology of creole studies.
I didn't know you were one of those researchers?
As used by modern linguists, the term "creolisation" means the
conversion of a pidgin (a conventionalised but simple code, used in
resticted settings) into a creole (a fully fledged language).
That would make me a modern linguist.
It does not mean "changes that could be attributed to imperfect
learning in contact conditions".
I don't think I said that.
When you speak about the "creolisation of Vulgar Latin", you misuse
the term. Vulgar Latin was not a pidgin.
True. I should have referred to a non-documented contact language,
perhaps related to Lingua Franca.
>
> > perhaps the creoles are spoken by those who were participating
in, but not actively travelling in the trade network. That would
mean that when the trade network breaks down, you have a number of
independent but similar creoles in the nodes of the former network;
typically coasts, since many early networks were sea-borne (and that
ensures that they are afterwards contiguous).
>
> Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But what's that to do with the actual
situation of the Romance languages?
Perhaps is the stuff that theories are made of. And that is the
actual situation of the Romance languages. There is a similar
situation wrt the Germanic languages around the North Sea: Several
similar creole-like (and I call them that, since whether they are
creoles was the point of the debate) languages in contact with the
sea and a trade network (the Hanse) operating at the time of
their "creolisation". Similarly, at the time of its greatest power,
Dutch was going further in the direction of simplification that it
is today, eg. the generalisation of the s-plural. My point is that
with the breakdown of the trade network,
conservative, "hierarchically thinking" political forces take over,
and some of the lost irregularity is reinstated.
It has been pointed to you that they lack the diagnostic traits of
creole languages.
Oh?
Since it was Peter who had made the points you objected to, I'll
leave the refutation of your objections to him, but it won't be a
difficult task. Your brief rejoinders miss the point in most cases.
I see. I'm looking forward to that.
Torsten