Re: Latin and Oscan

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.
(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".

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. 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.

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.

Even the theory
that Middle English, a much more radical case of language mixture than
the coexistance-but-not-fusion of Latin and Celtic, was a creole is
not taken seriously.

This is possibly a matter, to first defining how you can recognise a
creole if you meet one.

Anyway you can call primitive English "a real and genuine saxon having
regrettably but incidentally completely lost both the whole case
structure and the whole article structure but having gained 60% of
French vocabulary" but I call it a french-saxon creole and life is
easier.

Marco P

By the way, did really somebody pretend before me, French to have
arisen from a creole, so that really somebody could prove that French
_most certainly_ did not?

.

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