--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> 28-06-03 12:14, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Exactly. Why? As usual you hit the nail on the head. 'Why?' is
what I
> > asked myself, 'have Romance and Germanic lost so much inflection,
so
> > many paradigms?'. Not that I'm ungrateful for all the lectures on
> > what a creole should be, that people have dumped on me, but why
are
> > those language families so, comparatively ... (deep breath)
creole-
> > like?
>
> So much for your thought processes. Now, perhaps you could answer
my
> question in a straightforward manner. Why do you think Slavic
escaped
> "creolisation"? (Here again I'm using the word in the strictly
> Pedersenian sense.)
>
Obviously to defend my terminology I must contend that the Romance
and Germanic languages were more trade oriented: Romance had the
Mediterranean, the "creolised" Germanic languages had the North Sea.
Cf.
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
see Loyalty and trade languages
Therefore I would have to insist that Lingua Franca was part of the
original registers of Romance and that the present Romance languages
are 'partially reconstituted'.
My favorite example is Dutch -n. You can pronounce it or you can skip
it. Take the weak inflection of German adjectives
xxx ms. fm. nt. pl.
nom --e --e --e -en
acc -en --e --e -en
gen -en -en -en -en
dat -en -en -en -en
Now if you make the pronunciation of -n optional, what happens? The
whole system collapses. And now you have a 'creole-like' inflection,
just because you chose to mumble (which is my strategem also when I
speak German. Mumble. It beats using 'der' for everything.) And if
you mumble it's because you don't know the language properly. You
speak it as a foreign speaker, presumably in a trade situation (why
else bother with those foreigners?).
Wendish might have been 'creole-like'. Polish certainly isn't.
Torsten