> If you know the established definition of "pidgin", please don't
use
> your private terminology instead. Otherwise you drag me, and other
> people, into purely terminological disputes, producing unnecessary
> annoyance.
>
Since you admonished me off list to post an elaboration of my point
of view instead of snappy comebacks, here goes:
Creole grammars don't start from scratch (unless you are a follower
of Chomsky or Psammetik). They start from the grammar of the native
language of the new speaker.
As time goes, creoles are superseded by still more credible
imitations of the donor. But at any time, there is a range
of "creoles" in use, from near-perfect mastery to what some would
call a pidgin.
"The opposite view" of those who disagreed with me was
1) There is no variation by region in the type of vulgar Latin that
is found in the Roman provinces.
2) We can follow step by step the progression from Latin to the
modern Romance languages.
I find it difficult to reconcile the two statements.
Any encyclopedia article on a Romance language will tell you: "the
first text in Romance language X is ... in the year ...". It seems to
me there is assumed to be a break here.
To give an example: French is supposed to have begun with the
Strasbourg oaths. It is interesting to learn from one of the latest
postings that Charlemagne insisted on a "correct" pronunciation of
Latin. He might thus be credited with inventing the French language
as a political act, by distinguishing between French as a secular
language along with German and Latin as a religious language. Or
rather by causing some version of the multiple dialects and
sociolects in what is now France to be written down he split the two
and created a starting point for the French language.
Next question: why, as I think Brian Scott is saying, when you try
look past the invective, fix it when it ain't broke? The reason is
that although much of Latin grammar survives, much is also lost, plus
a whole new type of past forms are introduced, those based
on 'habeo', strangely a similar construction exists in Germanic. This
looks like going half the way down the path of creoles, but why don't
we have a word for that phenomenon? Extending the definition
of 'creole' seems the natural way to go.
As for the fact that no pidgin or creole Latin has been found: what
about those semi-intelligible inscriptions that make experts give up?
Who is to say that they are not written by people who mastered Latin
incompletely? Don't forget that we know from Jerome that they still
spoke Celtic around Trier long after the empire collapsed.
Torsten