23-06-03 11:45, tgpedersen wrote:
> I think I will be advocatus Alexi here: There are two types of events
> in the history of any Romance language:
>
> 1) a pidginisation and creolisation phase, in which an adult
> population learns the new language Latin
>
> 2) a phase of continuous and regular development after that (mostly)
>
> Most accounts of Romance languages stress only type 2 developments.
And with good reason. The hallmark of pidginisation is the erasure (I
repeat: erasure, not partial reduction) of the grammatical structure of
the language being pidginised, which did not happen anywhere in Romance.
Parts of the Latin system collapsed, but definitely too much of it
survived (especially in the area of conjugation) for pidginisation to be
plausibly entertainable. This point has been made on Cybalist several
times, though you persist in ignoring it. It seems new populations
learnt passable colloquial Latin in the process of being Romanised -- or
do you think it's impossible for people to learn a second lanuage in
this way?
Piotr