Re: Latin and Oscan

Marco Pagliero wrote:
Christopher Culver schrieb:

A different accent and some local vocabulary mixed in does not equal a
pidgin. For one, you don't understand the meaning of "pidgin", it's a
barely-functional hack that has no native speakers; if the language
were handed down to another generation, it would be a creole, and
French most certainly did not arise out of a creole.

What do you mean then how I understand "pidgin"? Exactly so as you
explain it.

In my context it is not so important to specify that what the not
native speakers speak, some linguists call a pidgin and what the not
native speakers' children speak, some linguists call a creole and that
therefore all the languages normal people call pidgins for some
linguists are creoles.

I said just "pidgin" meaning what arises from mixing two languages and
not just modifying one: a more or less mixed vocabulary but no
significant grammar left, because speakers cannot use structures that
are not common to both languages.

I put the borderline between a merely modified language and a real
pidgin there, where the original language not only got some mixed
vocabulary and another pronunciation, but lost also some important
structure. Here it is at least the case structure. For a language with
cases you cannot lose the case-structure and maintain it is still the
same language.

Perhaps not. Then that means it has changed. That doesn't mean it a pidgin is involved.

(Well, you can of course, but then I don't like you any more.)

That is why we call modern Greek "modern Greek" but we don't call
Italian "modern Latin".

I thought it was more for the same reason that one of the modern Slavic languages hasn't been arbitrarily selected to have the name "modern Slavic", and likewise why one of the modern Celtic languages doesn't sport the name "modern Celtic". Ancient Greek, on the other hand, has only one modern descendant.

Anyway, soon in the Gauls the native Latin speakers stopped using
dative and genitive and ablative not because they were just tired of
using cases, but because their counterpart could not do anything with
them.

When you speak to Chinese people, do you find feeling an urge to stop pluralizing nouns and distinguishing between "he" and "she"?

Maybe they kept on using cases when speaking with other native
Romans, but in my opinion French didn't arise form a case language but
instead from a caseless language.

That's funny, since Old French had two cases.

So I say that French arose from (and is the modern form of) some
gallo-roman creole and not from Latin directly, you state that this
most certainly didn't happen.

It seems to me that in order to be sure that French most certainly did
not arise out of a creole I had to believe that such a gallo-roman
creole never existed from where French could arise, or I had to believe
that primitive French had cases.

Bingo.
.

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