Re: Hardest to learn between Russian and Irish

From: Miguel Carrasquer (mcv_at_wxs.nl)
Date: 01/16/05 

Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 06:00:41 +0100

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:13:36 +1000, Jacques Guy
<jguy@alphalink.com.au> wrote:

>> Indonesian is really really simple (well, comparatively simple)
>
>We won't be far off the mark if we say that it is a creolized pidgin.
>Only it became creolized a long time ago (not sure when). It is
>not so very different in that respect from Romance languages
>(yes, I am aware of what I am writing).

Perhaps, but I would consider that abuse of the term
"creol(iz)e(d) (pidgin)". Pidgin Malay along the trade
routes in Indonesia and pidgin Latin along the edges of the
Roman empire must have been common enough, as common as
pidgin English is nowadays at international airports or
tourist centers all over the world. But for a pidgin to
become creolized (i.e. become the mother language of a
society) takes some pretty extreme circumstances, which I
don't think prevailed over long periods of time either in
Indonesia or in the Roman Empire. In the Romance case, at
any rate, I'm confident that nothing of the sort happened.
Gauls of Vercingetorix's generation spoke either no Latin or
only pidgin Latin, but later generations were directly
exposed to the Latin language sufficiently to come to speak
it quite fluently at first, to become bilingual in Gaulish
and Latin later, and finally to become Latin / Early French
speaking altogether. The process was gradual, and the
initial pidgin Latin of the first generation played no
further role in it. Of course the Latin of Gaul (Iberia,
Illyria, etc.) differed from the Latin of Rome. And of
course the Latin of the Empire differed from the local
dialect of Rome as it had been when Rome was just a small
city in Latium. Apart from the normal effects of time and
space, those are also the normal phenomena that happen when
a whole population switches languages [phonological and
other habits of the "substrate" language are carried over
into the new language], or when a language becomes widely
spoken (a "lingua franca") instead of the particular
("emblematic") language of a small community
[simplistically: the language becomes less complex when more
people have to speak it, and more complex when it is felt
less desirable that people outside the in-group should be
able to understand it].

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@wxs.nl

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