--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Howey <andyandmae_howey@...>
wrote:
>
> Hello, all:
> Is this message not appropriate for this list? I had thought that,
since Altaic is one of the language families that is supposed to be
related to Indo-European, and since Japanese, according to some
scholars, is a member of the Altaic family, that someone on this list
would have been interested in the claims presented on the web-site
that I listed. Could someone, please, at least tell me whether it's
a viable theory or whether the person who wrote it is smoking a
really low-grade brand of crack.
> Thanks a lot:
> Andy Howey
> Andrew Howey <andyandmae_howey@...> wrote:
> Hello, all:
> A couple of months ago, while trying to do some basic research on
the Altaic language family, I found this link, which I found to be
quite intriguing:
> http://www-lib.icu.ac.jp/LibShuppan/lecture/6-2-1.html
> The author, John C. Maher, proposes the theory that Japanese is
actually originally a creole language, in which speakers of an
Austronesian language merge with speakers of an Altaic language, both
of which apparently were invaders to the Japanese archipelago.
According to this and other sites, the now Japanese islands were
apparently first settled by hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age,
while there was a land bridge between present-day north-east
China/Korea and Japan, and those early settlers, who's linguistic
affiliations can only be guessed at, could well have provided a
linguistic substrate to what would follow.
> According to my understanding of what this author has presented,
there were two follow-on migrations, the Jomon, who were apparently
Austronesian; and the Yayoi, who apparently were Altaic.
> Whatever the case may be, I was hoping that other list members
might read this web site and comment on whether or not this author is
on the mark.
> Any comments welcome:
> Andy Howey
>
Great article. Reminds me of a title of a book (but almost all the
rest escapes me) "English as Creole Language". Which is my point of
view too. English has all the features of creolisation (so do, to a
lesser degree all the other North Sea Germanic Languages: Dutch, Low
German, the Continental Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian)). The conservative languages are at the periphery: High
German and Icelandic (eg. the only ones to keep four cases).
Torsten