Sum: `crystallization'

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Last week I posted a query asking where Uriel Weinreich first used
the term `crystallization' to denote the appearance of a more or less
unified language out of a welter of linguistic activity.  Several
people have informed me that this term occurs in the most obvious
place of all, Weinreich's famous book _Languages in Contact_ (1953,
1968), on pp. 69-70 and again on pp. 104-106.  Guess I should have
checked that book first, but I don't have a copy of it, and I
couldn't remember encountering the term in it when I read it, back in
my student days.
 
The point of the query was that I am compiling a dictionary of
historical and comparative linguistics, and I have recently been
working on the terminology associated with the increasingly important
topic of convergence phenomena.  It cannot be said that terminology in
this area has yet settled down, and I'm trying to work out just who
has used which terms to denote what phenomena.  Apart from
`convergence' itself, I have found `crystallization', `lingua franca
model', `rhizotic model', `social-network model', `contact language',
`non-genetic language', `abrupt creole', `abnormal transmission',
`mixed language', `punctuated equilibrium', `portmanteau language',
`reification', `totemization', `endohybridization', and various other
terms used to denote some aspect, attested or posited, of convergence,
and I'm trying to assemble these various usages into some sort of
order.
 
My thanks to Sheri Pargman, Benji Wald, Sally Thomason, Richard Coates
and Geoffrey Nathan for bringing the correct reference to my
attention, and to Ernst Kotze, Roger Wright, Sharon Lorinskas and Max
Wheeler for further comments and assistance.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk