Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
> 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.
Anoine Meillet:
a)les mots français ne se groupent guère en familles
b)L'isolement est l'etat normal du mot français
Gaston Tuaillon "Un texte juridique du XIII-e siecle en langage
dauphinois ."la Burtifele" 1/1982:
"the french language was imposed with force, with the sword being
impossed the language of the king."
Albert Dauzat, Les patois, Paris, 1938 p. 27 about the time of
XVII-XVIII century
"Dans le Midi presque personne, même dans les classes cultivées, ne
parte français; passe Montmorillon, rapporte La Fontaine, "on ne parle
quasi plus français". Et Racine, affirme qu'á Uzès il "autant besoin
d'interprète qu'un Moscovite en auraint dans Paris".
For some more data see Rapport lu á la Convention , séance du 16
prairial, an II) since in 1790 Grègoire could see that over 6 Mio
"french" do not speak french, another 6 mio are not able to have a
discussion in this language, the number of them who speak the language
being around 3 Mio people.
Alex