From: tgpedersen
Message: 52041
Date: 2008-01-29
> > A-hm. Do you recognize this quote:I refer you to Wikipedia's page on Afrikaans grammar
> > "TP grammar is too obviously non-IE"
> > ?
>
> What I mean is, its syntax and morphology are non-inherited.
> Crucially, it preserves no archaisms, no "junk DNA", so to speak.
> It's _all_ new structure, not just _some_ of it.
>
> >> 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?
>
> No. Creoles typically have analytic tenses only and no allomorphy
> whatsoever, at least initially. The <sing/sang/sung> alternation
> evidently goes back all the way to PIE and is a typical case of a
> structure that would have been erased in the process of
> creolisation.
> Its functionality in Mod.E is questionable. The pattern is just a
> cultural replicator which has managed to survive because of its
> frequent occurrence. New speakers of English would probably be
> happier with <sing-ed>, but <sang> is too frequent to be ousted
> easily.
>
> > Semitic-speakers present near the
> > Germanic Urheimat may have perceived the adaptation of that IE
> > dialect to the Semitic system of vowel alternation as a
> simplification?
>
> What we see in contact languages is not "let's use their allomorphic
> variation to express some familiar function" but rather "damn all
> those tricky complications, let's begin from scratch".
>
> >> their derivational morphology is still complex;
> >
> > ?? Example?
>
> Eng. leng-th, ring-ed, wood-en, ston-y, care-less, care-less-ly,
> care-less-ness, un-know-n -- you get the idea. The morphological
> complexity of Middle English alowed it to absorb a Latinate
> detrivational layer, but the foundation is still recognisably
> Germanic and in some cases IE.
>
> >> there are no signs of a radical simplification of their phonology
> >> (another hallmark of pidginisation).
> >