Re: [tied] Re: Japanese as a creole language?

At 4:25:00 AM on Saturday, March 29, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:

>> >> However, we may also note French entirely losing
>> >> Indo-European declension yet it's not a "creole" and
>> >> fully IE.

>> > I don't get it. Do you understand 'creole' and 'IE' as
>> > mutually exclusive? And BTW French is full of Germanic
>> > loanwords. The Frankish upper class spoke a Germanic
>> > dialect, so French has passed through the requisite
>> > sociological conditions for being creolized.

>> No, because there is no break in transmission. A creole
>> sensu stricto requires such a break.

> Is too. The first written record of French sensu strictu
> are the Strassburg oaths, pledged by the Frankish kings,
> which are also the one of the first records of OHG, I
> believe. Before that time, no French records, only bad
> Latin.

Accepting for the moment your 'bad Latin', so what? Ogam
Irish used a very conservative orthography. When the Irish
started using the Latin alphabet, they rather abruptly
brought their orthography more or less up to date to reflect
the Old Irish language. If one judged only by the written
language, one would imagine a more abrupt change than
actually occurred. Late Old English orthography was
conservative compared with the spoken language; many of the
changes seen in early Middle English are simply orthographic
recognition of changes that had occurred earlier in the
spoken language. In Carolingian times the stimulus was
increasing recognition that the vernaculars were no longer
just 'bad Latin'. (And even then, the earliest examples of
Old French were clearly intended for oral presentation; the
Strassburg Oaths in particular had to be in the vernacular
in order to serve their purpose.)

Brian