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

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

> 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).

Yes, I know what your position is: there is a qualitative
difference between classical colonial pidgins and creoles vs.
the "colonial languages" of the Romans etc. But those English and
French-based creoles are not built "from scratch" in some Chomskyan
sense. They are built on the grammars of the native languages of the
new speakers.

In every encounter between Scandinavians you have a pidgin
situation: speakers of languages that are not easily mutually
comprehensible. The result is that each speaker (based on his
inclination do so) bends his native language a little towards that of
the other speaker; but in this case the grammar are so similar that
most of the forms survive this transformation. With progressively
dissimilar languages you have to bend your language more. But the
situation within the Latin-speaking part of the empire was that the
subdued peoples spoke related IE languages, thus the "loss of
grammar" was relatively small. In other words: you see a qualitativ
difference, I see a quantitative one, based on the similarities of
the grammars involved.

>Creole languages construct morphology from scratch,

Exactly what is "scratch" here?

>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.

>

No, I was making a historical observation, not a linguistic one, and
commenting that the view of those two disciplines don't match.

Torsten