Q: the 'only six' argument

[Michel DeGraff]

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Holding humbly and tightly on my creolist-cum-syntactician hat, I would
like to inquisitively and constructively piggy-back on Hans-Werner
Hatting's observations and questions regarding (alleged) criteria for
genetic relatedness.

> 1.) No quantity of matches can ever prove genetic relationship. One can
> probably find thousands of matches between, e.g., French and English or
> Latin and Albanian, without Albanian or English being Romance languages.

In a similar vein, note that the etymology of Haitian Creole---a (so
called) "non-genetic" language---is overwhelmingly French while the lexicon
of Modern English---a (so called) "genetic" language---is mostly
non-Germanic etymologically.  Besides, virtually all Haitian Creole affixes
have cognates in French affixes whereas English has many affixes of
non-Germanic origins.

By the way, the latter observation about Haitian Creole suffices to
falsify all these `classic' Creole-genesis scenarios that posit a
affixless-pidgin phase a la Jespersen, Bickerton, McWhorter, Seuren, etc.

> 2.) There is, as far as I knoe, some sort of communis opinio on that certain
> matches (from basic vocabulary, grammatical morphemes) are more important
> for proving genetical relationship than others.

Virtually all of Haitian Creole's grammatical morphemes are etymologically
French.

> 3.) I would recommend that if one has collected one's matches, one should
> try a reconstruction. If the results are a decent basic vocabulary, and a
> basic common grammar, the languages examined are most probably genetically
> interrelated. There's of course the question how to define "decent basic
> vocabulary" and "basic common grammar", and that's (besides the
> questionableness of many matches) the main problem for wide-range
> reconstructions like Nostratic, Proto-World etc. Anyone interested in
> formulating some minimalist criteria?

Given what I've noted above vis-a-vis lexicon and morphology, it then seems
that *absence* of "basic common grammar" would be *the* structural
criterion for claiming that Creole languages such as Haitian Creole are
"non-genetic" languages that arose via "abnormal transmission" whereas
French, say, is a "genetic" language that arose via "normal transmission".

Let me try and be more precise as to what I think are the implications of
an hypothetic "basic common grammar" with respect to the
genetic-vs-non-genetic hypothesis as it applies to, say, Haitian Creole
vs. French. Whatever features define this "basic common grammar", these
features must diverge when comparing the grammars of (colloquial) 17th-18th
century French dialects to that of Haitian Creole, and such divergences
must be *qualitatively* different than their counterparts in the
("genetic") course of French diachrony.

So far, I have not be able to isolate such features. Whatever divergences
exist between colloquial 17th-18th century French dialects and Haitian
Creole (e.g., `loss' of verbal inflection, verb-placement differences, etc.)
seem to have counterparts in the diachronic course of `genetic' languages.
And what I find most intriguing is that such divergences in `genetic'
diachrony also seem to coincide with the history of contact within these
`genetic' diachronies.  This was, of course, noted by Meillet, although he
would most likely not agree with the conclusions I seem drawn to.

In any case, if the "basic common grammar" remains elusive, then perhaps
it's time to seriously (re-)challenge the alleged (non-)genetic dichotomy
between Creole and non-Creole languages and/or the very concept of "genetic
relatedness" as a linguistically (i.e., *structurally*) definable concept.

Then again, I still need to learn more about the structural basis of
genetic linguistics.  This, I look forward to.

                                 -michel.
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