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

[lesa.dill]

Yes, I agree with Sali.  Maybe "creolization" is the only term we have to
account for what happens in the drastic sorts of hbyridization situations that
occur between two languages.  But it's certainly not accurate or precise in
the case of English.  Pidgins and creoles are different, obviously.  But what
happened in English (several times) is far from uncommon.  We need to
concentration more on hybridization phenomena and find ways of classifying
degrees of language change pre- and post-contact (if we can put an arbitrary
date to it). Then there's problem of the two contact types--outlier and
familial (if there turns out to really be such a thing--our language may have
messed us up again)--not to mention contact and later recontact.  If we figure
out how to assess all this, our Indo-European tree model is strained--because
of all the "incest," so to speak.  Linnaeus and his followers indirectly did
us more harm than we may ever want to admit.
>===== Original Message From American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
=====
>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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