IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 9:11 PM

[snip]

> Yes, I've even heard it suggested that IE was a creole, but I
> don't think that such theories have many adherents (doesn't mean
> that they are wrong, just unlikely).  But creoles are a different
> animal and one that is not yet well understood despite intensive
> study.  I think that the mainstream view is something like the
> following:

>      Creoles develop from pidgins; pidgins are not natural
>      languages (have no native speakers), but auxillary languages
>      used for communication between speakers of different
>      (usually typologically widely divergent) languages, intended
>      for limited purposes such as trade; pidgins have limited
>      lexicons and minimal morphology and syntax (essentially they
>      are mini isolating, bare-bones, no-frills languages);
>      pidgins are often (but not necessarily) based on one
>      language (usually the socially dominant one) but with some
>      elements taken from other language(s); pidgins often die out
>      when the need for communication between the groups ceases or
>      with the development of bilingualism or the assimilation of
>      one of the language groups into the other.

>      Creoles arise when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a
>      group of speakers (presumably the children of a group that
>      communicates primarily in pidgin hear only the pidgin and
>      begin expanding it to provide some of the syntactic features
>      that have been stripped from the original language(s) to
>      create the pidgin); this expanded pidgin becomes the native
>      language of the next generation and continues to expand to
>      provide all the syntactic features that are necessary to
>      normal communication; the creole is once again a natural
>      language.

> Pidgins and creoles are thus two stages of a single process.
> Many pidgins never become creoles, either dying out when no
> longer needed or simply continuing in use as pidgins.  But I
> don't know that creoles arise other than out of pidgins (it
> wouldn't bother me to learn otherwise, however).

[Ed Selleslagh]

I think your idea about 'contraction and expansion' (of syntactic and other
features) is indeed the core of what pidgins and creoles are all about. But in
contrast to what you seem to suggest (correct me if I am wrong), this can
happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a typical
example of that. The original 17th century Dutch suffered a very major
reduction of syntactic (and other) features under the influence of indigenous
(and to a much lesser degree: other European) peoples who had to collaborate
with the Dutch colonizers (in earlier times mostly as farm hands etc.). Even
today, there is a major group of indigenous, Asian and mixed-race people among
the Afrikaans speaking population. But it seems unlikely that there ever was a
pidgin; if it existed among the non-Europeans, it must have died out without
leaving much of a trace. Anyway, the Boers never spoke a pidgin. Nonetheless,
modern Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole, like a seriously
altered syntax and (much less altered) lexicon.

Maybe Papiamento (Curaçao etc.) could be a similar case, based upon Spanish
and some Portuguese.  And Haïtian French Creole, maybe (i.e. if there was
uninterrupted presence of a French speaking fraction of the population, which I
don't know).

English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an intermediate
pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be ruled out
entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern English): not only
the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't mean it's a creole),
but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack word order inversion after
an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French speakers who learn Dutch or
German) and in some other cases, and the simplifications of the verbal system,
including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in Old
English.

All this is of course a very personal view of mine.

Ed. Selleslagh