European Genetics/IE

[Rick Mc Callister]

	Dialect creolism? It's an interesting concept.
	Spanish literary language was interesting: Galaico-Portuguese was
used for lyric verse during most of the Reconquista, local varieties of
Castillian were used for humorous verse and prose at that time, and during
the short Renaissance period Salmantine was used for drama.
	In terms of western Romance pidgin or creole language --if such a
thing ever existed, I was thinking of a Celtic-Latin contact language used
in the market place between Celtic-speaking peasants and Latin-speaing city
people. Something that may never have been committed to writing and that
would have been relatively rapidly assimilated into Vulgar Latin.
	I'm curious whether there are studies of the pecentage of
Latin-Celtic cognates in French, Spanish and/or Portuguese vocabulary; i.e.
whether Celtic speakers tended to use words similar to their native
language as opposed to non-cognate synonyms. I see this phenomenon all the
time among Americans learning Spanish and Latin Americans learning English.


>[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.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701