(off-list) Re: Creole languages (was Who is Eddy Peters?)

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 05:54 PM 2/25/2001 -0600, Mark Odegard wrote:

>Creoles are almost 'new' languages, as with Hatian Creole, or Tok Pisin,
>relying on a donor language mainly for vocabulary. This certainly was not
>the case when English was overrun by Norman French. Rather, the result was
>our immense French superstratum.
I am not sure I am ready to enter the debate on the putative creolization
of English, but I could not resist reacting to your invocation of "new" as
a criterion for identifying a language variety as a creole. Here's my view:
every current language variety is new.

Sali.


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Salikoko S. Mufwene                   s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago        773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
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