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

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 06:27 PM 2/25/2001 -0600, Mark Odegard wrote:

>Every last member of the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic ... family of
>languages each decends from their own common ancestor, which in turn descend
>from more distant (and essentially unrecoverable) ancestral languages.
>
>Creoles and pidgins are the exceptions.

I find it implausible to account for language speciation in IE or any other
large family for that matter without invoking language contact. I actually
think that the most plausible account of the evolution of English, starting
with the mysterious emergence of Old English, cannot do without language
contact as a factor... (I can see why some have been tempted to account for
the development of Middle English or the Romance languages by
"creolization"--but they could also have considered asking what's to be
gained by invoking "creolization" in the first place.) Perhaps eventually
every language will qualify as a creole. Fortunately, we will then agree to
dispense with the disfranchising label as a genetic linguistic or
typological category.

Sali.

*********************************************************************
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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