>
> > Which reminds me: Are the Germanic languages apart from High
> > German and Icelandic not IE then, with their obviously non-IE case
> > systems (one/zero cases in the extreme case of spoken Dutch), verb
> > inflections (no inflection for person or number in the extreme
> > case of Continental Scandinavian) and gender systems (none in the
> > extreme case of English and Vestjysk)?
>
> They remain IE, because their continuous development from PGmc. is
> demonstrable,
So is the development of Afrikaans from Dutch. That can't be relevant.
Demonstrability of development is a property of the documentation, not
of the languages involved. It's like saying that if you watch paint
dry or potatoes boil, it/they won't. I don't think Heisenberg applies
in this particular case.
> and IE is not a typological grouping.
A-hm. Do you recognize this quote:
"TP grammar is too obviously non-IE"
?
> Then, they all have preserved things a true contact language is
> likely to lose (e.g. a simple preterite
I thought 'simple' (ie. unitary) was a characteristic of creoles?
> with fancy features like vowel alternations for many common verbs);
As you know, Vennemann argues that since only Germanic incorporates
Ablaut in the fundamental verbal machinery, unlike other IE languages,
where it appears more like a by-product, there must have been a
Semitic (Phoenician?) adstrate to Germanic. To which I'd like to add,
as I've done before, that /ew/, the e-grade of /u/, and /oy/, the
o-grade of /i/, look as if they've been created on analogy, since the
development is impossible phonetically, unlike (/u:/ >) /ow/, the
o-grade of /u/, and (/i:/ >) /ey/, the e-grade of /i/; in other words
I think the original (proto-)PIE Ablaut was
( {a:, a:, a }, {u:, u:, u}, {i:, i:, i} >)
{e, o, zero}, {ow, ow, u}, {ey, ey, i}
( > {e, o, zero}, {ew, ow, u}, {ey, oy, i} ),
and the rest is analogy (in Germanic). In short, the Ablaut
alternations of Germanic verbs would testify to a Semitic ('Atlantic')
adstrate, not IE continuity. Semitic-speakers presentv near the
Germanic Urheimat may have perceived the adaptation of that IE dialect
to the Semitic system of vowel alternation as a simplification?
> their derivational morphology is still complex;
?? Example?
> there are no signs of a radical simplification of their phonology
> (another hallmark of pidginisation).
Not simplification; adjustment to the phonetic inventory of the substrate.
> But for various disambiguation tactics, scores of English minimal
> pairs would have fallen together.
>
> Compare Tok Pisin:
>
> sip 'ship'
> sipsip 'sheep'
>
> pulap 'full'
> pulim 'pull'
>
English has a three-way distinction in stops/continuants: b/p/f etc.
Many languages only have two. Compare with Indian English, which has
managed to accommodate the English system within its own by means of
substitutions. I don't think Tok Pisin qualifies as a master pattern
of what a creole necessarily must look like in this respect.
Torsten