European Genetics/IE

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 11:05 AM

[snip]
> None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
> off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
> Latin, to be precise.

> There may well have been forms of pidgin Latin spoken in the course of Roman
> expansion, and among the masses of slaves from varoius areas in Italy and
> adjacent parts of the Roman domains.  In fact, there probably would have
> been.

> But they never became creolized, as far as I know.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I would like to add something to this:

It could possibly be argued that early Castilian had some kind of a pidgin
phase during the Reconquista, when it became the communication device for the
different regional groups (who all spoke different Romance languages, some even
non-IE Basque) taking part in it and settling in its wake, in the place of
fleeing Arabs. If it actually was a pidgin at one time, it quickly became a
creole, but with a relatively low social status (as most creoles): high level
poetry (troubadours) continued in Catalan for some time, but folksy comedy was
in Castilian.

In fact, Castilian has some, but not much, grammatical simplification compared
to other Romance languages like French or Italian (e.g. wholly or partly
'regularized' verbs) and inconsistency in phonetic evolution stages of
different words, indicating different Romance origins; and there are a number
of peculiarities that have been attributed to 'substrate', often Basque (e.g.
Lapesa)- although this is far from a consensus opinion. (Note that Castilian
was 'born' in the southern fringe of the Basque speaking region of the time; so
those wouldn't qualify as pidgin efects or creolization).

If Castilian is not so clearly a creole, this would be explainable by the fact
that its speakers originally spoke pretty closely resembling languages (except
the Basques: see above), but in different stages of phonetic evolution (e.g.
initial f>h, but not in all older words).

Another case of someone's two cents, I guess.

Ed.