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

23-06-03 15:47, tgpedersen wrote:

> 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.

They "recycle" some elements of those grammars (morphemes, syntactic
rules) for a new purpose, but they don't just copy those grammars into
the new system. Crucially, however, there's no continuity between the
grammar of English and that of an English-based creole. Note,
incidentally, that French inflectional morphology is of Latin origin,
and none of it is Gaulish.

>
> 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.

OK, but do't call that "pidginisation", i.e. don't use a term reserved
for something else to describe all sorts of contact phenomena.

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,

"Related" does not mean gramatically similar. Celtic and Germanic
grammars were rather different from Latin, and the intelligibility
barrier between Latin and those languages precluded any "bending". In
such situations a pidgin may arise (of which we have no linguistic
evidence) or people become bilingual, then gradually abandoning the use
of the lower-status language.

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.

You might just as well argue that cats and dogs should crossbreed more
easily than cats and frogs, since cats and dogs are more closely related
and generally more similar to each other.

>>Creole languages construct morphology from scratch,
>
> Exactly what is "scratch" here?

Pidging morphology, i.e. something virtually non-existent.

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

I don't follow. Is there a non-linguistic definition of the term "pidgin"?

Piotr