From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2730
Date: 2000-06-22
----- Original Message -----From: John CroftSent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 11:53 AMSubject: [TIED] Re: Tok bilong JohnGermanic has preserved too much IE grammatical structure for a language that might have started as a pidgin. A pidgin grammar develops from scratch -- no declensions, no conjugations to begin with. Germanic may have been slightly "creolised" at a certain point, just like Middle English. An IE language that started as a pidgin would be a contradiction in terms, since we define IE languages as those which have developed from PIE in the ordinary way -- through separation and differentiation. If a pidgin develops into a fully fledged language (and Tok Pisin is already establishing itself as such) the result is a linguistic hybrid that stands outside the genetic classification. But of course there are dozens of pidgins and creoles based lexically on various IE colonial languages -- usually English (Pitcairnese, Australian Kriol, Krio, West African Pidgin, Sranan, ...), Portuguese (Papia-Kristang, Goan, Macanese, ...), Spanish (Papiamentu, Pachuco, ...), French (Réunionnais, Cajun, Haitian Creole, ...) and Dutch (Berbice, Taal Dutch, ...).Piotr
John wrote:I have heard it suggested that Germanic started as a pigin spoken
along the Amber Coast, and wonder if there are other examples when
Pigins stop easily accepting words from outside their linguistic
horizons. Are there any other Indo-European languages that started would
as a pigin?