Re: [TIED] Re: Tok bilong John

we define IE languages as those which have developed from PIE in the ordinary way -- through separation and differentiation.

 

Yes. Most languages develop in the ordinary way. Through descent from a parent. Pidgins are a special case. Remembering what I've read, the documented pidgins may all actually descend from a trade language in effect in the western Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, being spread by Portuguese sailors.

 

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.

 

Tok Pisin seems to be the absolute favorite of all historical linguists. They are looking to see it become the first fully-documented parent-less language . Realistically, however, Tok Pisin is more likely to become English, rather like Hatian is moving towards Standard French (and B.E.V. is becoming Standard English).

 

 

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, ...).

 

There is that sign-language of the deaf that seems to have arisen spontaneously in Peru. Here, we have to speak of the language's originators as having been raised in a Spanish/Quecha linguistic environment -- deaf, but assimilating the concept of language in earliest childhood. Their families did the usual natural signs, but somehow, someway, the deaf-ones invented full-fledged language anew -- and taught their families to translate it.

 

I've been looking for the right word to describe what happened in Northern England when Common-Old-Low-German met Common-Old-Norse and begat proto-English. In as much as the Icelandic sagas tell us these people understood each other's language, 'creolization' is the wrong word.