Re: [tied] Creole Romance? [was: Thracian , summing up]

23-06-03 13:17, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>> ... 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.

> Erh, a grammarless language??

Torsten, don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about -- not
after so many repetitions (in case you really don't know -- pidgins are
characterised by _minimal and fixed syntax_, and _no morphology_ to
speak of). Creole languages construct morphology from scratch, so the
historical discontinuity between Language X and an X-based creole is
visible also in the languages that descend from the latter. Look at any
modern pidgin or creole language (Tok Pisin, Sranan, whatever). Lingua
Franca was a typical pidgin; French and Romanian are not and have never
been.

>> No TV, no textbooks, no teachers. A passable colloquial Latin should
>> be poossible, yes. Take the tourist traps today. Do the natives there
>> speak a passable colloquial English? Do they speak pidgin English?
>> Depends on the person. (And the observer).

The question is not what might have happened but whether the Romance
languages show traces of passing through a pidgin/creole phase. They don't.

Piotr