IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:03 PM

>> edsel at glo.be writes:

>> this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a
>> typical example of that.

> -- Afrikaans is not a creole; it's transparently a Germanic language and
> transparently descended from 17th-century Netherlandish.  Certainly there's
> been a morphological simplification, but only slightly more so than in
> English.

[Ed]

And Haïtian Creole is transparently (heavily 'mutilated') French - which does
not mean it's easy to understand (when spoken) for a French speaker, quite the
contrary. But in written form, let's say it's not hopeless once you learn some
tricks, I was told by a French speaking friend who has been there.

On the other hand, Surinam Srinatong is another piece of cake: it's very, very
mixed and transformed.

> In fact, Afrikaans is to Dutch very much as English is to Old English -- many
> of the same developments.

>> including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in
>> Old English.

> -- however, Frisian shares many features with English, and never had the sort
> of Romance superstrate experience that English did.

[Ed]

This is strictly a matter of definition - or rather of how strict/fuzzy your
definitions are.

Actually I was referring in my mail to what Robert Whiting
<whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> was saying about 'contraction and expansion' of
(mainly) syntactic features, and that's what happened in Afrikaans, but it is
not entirely the same as what happened to English. I clearly said that "modern
Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole" which is not the same as
saying it IS a creole. Just one random example: there was a very major
simplification of the verbal system, virtually down to the level of child talk
(no offense intended) - to the ears of Dutch speakers, but also some new
features were created like the ever present double negation, and modern
Afrikaans is a full-flung language comparable to any European language. BTW,
don't get confused by the many puristic neologisms (built upon Dutch words,
retained or re-introduced) that make it look more (pseudo) Dutch than it
actually is.

Today you wrote:
">petegray at btinternet.com writes:

>Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor?
>Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other?

-- in point of fact, the Creoles I'm familiar with all do owe more to one.
Krio, for example, or Gullah, or Haitian creole."

[Ed]

This is clearly the case of Afrikaans (and Haïtian Creole, Papiamento etc.).

"Creoles also tend to have highly distinctive grammatical features which are
common to all creoles as such".

[Ed]

Could you elaborate on that? What do you consider to be grammatical features
which are common to all creoles (Apart from the process of destruction and
later reconstruction of a number of basic features)?

I believe most of this apparent disagreement is about how much residue of the
major component's features (of Dutch in Afrikaans, of French in Haïtian
Creole, of Spanish/Portuguese in Papiamento...) you accept in order to still
call it a creole - or not. To me it's a matter of degree.

About Frisian : I haven't seen any of the changed syntactic features of English
in Frisian; the parallelism is rather with Old English. It certainly didn't
change its syntax as English did (e.g. word order inversion). I wonder (but
don't know) if some Western Germanic (e.g. Dutch Saxon) dialects ever had a ge-
prefix. English lost it in historical times. (As a non-specialist of OE, I am
not so sure about its participial use, but it certainly existed in its other
uses, e.g. "ge-thenc"). I am a native speaker of Dutch, with French as my
second language and an inhabitant of a country where French speakers often make
the same mistakes when speaking Dutch, and I can easily see that English word
order has been seriously affected by French (partially copied on it). In fact,
if you used English word order in Dutch (or any continental West-Germanic for
that matter), or vice-versa, it would sound very weird and foreign indeed,
except in very simple sentences like 'I have a car' (SVO). E.g. What would you
think of a sentence like *"I said clearly that "modern Afrikaans many of the
characteristics has of a creole"* (cf. above)?

Of course all these are considerations of a non-specialist.

Ed. Selleslagh