In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" wrote:
>> When you speak about the "creolisation of Vulgar Latin", you misuse
>> the term. Vulgar Latin was not a pidgin.
>
> True. I should have referred to a non-documented contact language,
> perhaps related to Lingua Franca.
Vulgar Latin was actually nothing else but the vernacular aspect of
Latin language, spoken in Italy as well as in Iberia, Gaul, Balkans
and other Roman provinces. Labeling it as "contact language" can be
accepted if one agrees that any spoken language is used to contact
other speakers, which is far from being taxonomically interesting.
>> Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But what's that to do with the actual
>> situation of the Romance languages?
>
> Perhaps is the stuff that theories are made of. And that is the
> actual situation of the Romance languages. [...]
>
>> It has been pointed to you that they lack the diagnostic traits
>> of creole languages.
>
> Oh?
>
>> Since it was Peter who had made the points you objected to, I'll
>> leave the refutation of your objections to him, but it won't be a
>> difficult task. Your brief rejoinders miss the point in most cases.
>
> I see. I'm looking forward to that.
In fact, he pointed out some general features you dismissed too easy:
>> Either claim is bizarre. Both the structures and vocabulary of
>> Proto-Romance are thoroughly and clearly Latin. Even the phonology
>> develops through expected and normal channels.
>
> Channels? Which are?
I think Peter wanted to point out that Romance phonetics exhibits
many features which are realizations of tendencies already present
in VL or which can be understood by simple common evolution (such as
articulation changes), while this is not the case with pidgins.
>> A pidgin should show
>> (a) lack of surface grammatical complexity
>
> relative to the original language, which is what the romance
> languages do
It's about some orders of magnitude in difference between cases.
>> (b) lack of morphological complexity
>
> do.
See above.
>> (c) semantic transparency (i.e. words built up by compounding
>> simpler elements)
>
> PIE would fulfill that criterion
We speak about derivation of (Proto-)Romance from a synthetic
language such as Latin, with several conserved features (see also
below).
>> (d) Vocabulary reduction. None of these appear in proto-Romance.
>
> So there are no words in Latin which have no descendants in Romance?
Again, the order of magnitude is dramatically greater in pidgin and
creole languages.
In fact, these features are all deriving from the main difference
between VL and pidgin/creole, that is their genesis and evolution
timeline. While linguists agree there is no discontinuity between VL
and modern Romance languages, pidgins appear as result of a "break":
the pidgin is never identified or confused with its "mother", nor it
is aimed to. Speakers of Proto-Romance realized very gradually that
their tongue could no longer be called "Latin" and did no longer
belong to Latin sistem; this idea got into their consciences only at
some very late moment, after many changes occured over the centuries
and was officialized at Tours in 813 a.D. ("rustica romana lingua").
Pidgins have no "story" and are not the result of a diachronical
evolution of the mother tongue. They are the conscious result of
mother language adaptation for basical practical purposes in zero-
like time and with "universal" simplified morphemic system. Creoles
have in common the isolant type, specially when dealing with verbal
morphology. While you have for instance in French Creole from Haiti:
mwen pale `I speak` (mwen < "moi"; pale < "parle(r)")
men te pale `I spoke` (te < "était" / "été")
mwen va pale `I will speak` (va < "va")
m ap pale `I am speaking` (ap < "après")
mwen fin pale `I have spoken` (fin < "fini(r)")
_only_ analytical derivations, in all Romance you have for instance
conservation of Latin "perfectum" and "imperfectum", conservation in
Romanian of subjunctive perfectum as plusquamperfectum, etc. It is to
be noted that if Haitian creole has "va" corresponding to usual French
way of expressing near future, the formation with "te" is somehow
strange for using the auxiliary verb `to be` (instead of "ai/avoir"),
and the last two ones have no correspondence with French.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Marius Iacomi