Re: Existence of PIE

> > However, are there not some genuinely doubtful members of the
> > family? (You may fairly regard this as nit-picking.) Are Tok
> > Pisin and Sranan Germanic languages?

> > I presume Afrikaans is a pukka Germanic language.

What do you mean by that?

> True creole languages are chimaeras. This is another case when the
> family-tree model is inadequate to describe the relationship of,
> say, Tok Pisin to Germanic. TP does contain a significant Germanic
> component, and if in the distant future TP happens to expand and
> break up into daughter languages, the resulting family will inherit
> that component. I doubt, however, if the historical linguists of the
> future will reconstruct the grammar of Proto-Germanic differently
> from us because TP will be taken into account. TP grammar is too
> obviously non-IE, the etymology of function words (bilong, long,
> stap) and suffixes (-pela, -im) is pretty transparent and betrays
> their pidgin origins.

One could imagine a hypothetical situation, of course, where Tok
poisin was abundantly, and English and German scantily represented in
the sources, and with no older stages preserved, in which case Tok
Pisin would become the main source for material, based on similarity
in material to the documented material from the 'true' descendants.

Which reminds me: Are the Germanic languages apart from High German
and Icelandic not IE then, with their obviously non-IE case systems
(one/zero cases in the extreme case of spoken Dutch), verb inflections
(no inflection for person or number in the extreme case of Continental
Scandinavian) and gender systems (none in the extreme case of English
and Vestjysk)?


Torsten