Creole languages (May I question the authority?)

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 04:53 PM 2/26/2001 -0600, Lesa Dill wrote:

Mark Odegard: >>>And, yes. While every languages has its internal changes,
most
language
>>>changes seem to be driven by stressful contact with another language.
>>>
Mufwene: >>     So?
>>>
>>Sali.

Lesa Dill: >I'd argue that a language like litters of kittens may have
multiple
fathers.
>The better metaphor is the polyploidy of plants.  They aren't just diploid
>with two genetic progenitors.  The genetics metaphor is really a problem!
>Language changes seem to be driven by stressful contact?? I'd argue that one.
>We are seeing drastic changes going on in many languages right now (driven my
>technology and the Internet).  And from what I can see, they are not the
least
>bit stressful.  The notion of "stress" is also a holdover from biology.  How
>does one stress a language?  Maybe a speaker.  I'm not even sure of that.
>Language change produces no toll on the "species" because there is no
species.
>Sali, do you want to comment on how much stress the first generation creole
>speakers are under with their great language task?
>Lesa
>>
I've resisted selling my own approach here, because it involves much more work
than disputing the traditional view. I summarize it in the first chapter of my
book The Ecology of language evolution, now in press. The chapter is posted
(minus the illustrations of "feature pool") at my website. What you say is
very
sound and the polyploidic model on the plant or viral model is the closest
thing, although a linguistic species remains a linguistic species, with
transmission characteristics specific to itself (despite sharing evolutionary
properties with plant and parasitic species in biology). For instance,
imperfect replication is the default characteristic of its features, contrary
to the biological gene transmission in which the default is perfect
replication
(otherwise mutation is invoked). Variation in the way the population acquires
and replicates features has a lot to do with basic change at the population
level--but one must learn to deal with the relation of group selection to
individual selection, as they are not necessarily convergent. Group selection
calls for ecology, and that when language and dialect contact too have
important roles to play, etc.

      You are probably also right in placing stress on speakers rather than on
language. I suppose one of the problems lies in assuming that languages have
independent lives of their own. So a history of a language that ignores how
its
speakers have interacted over the relevant period is terribly flawed. The
other
dimension I am very reluctant to get into here is whether brutality exerted on
speakers affects their minds' ability to acquire language--please IGNORE
language acquisition through the school system, which has created more
confusion in the literature than was really necessary. I'd better stop here.

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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