Re: English as a creole.

On Jul 4, 11:49 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1183476982.418303.161250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Jul 3, 5:54 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote...

[...] The matter seems

to be sort of obscure... How about the triple Korean-Austronesian-
Chinese nature of Japanese, btw? Just another possible instance of
a
strange language merger.

Eh? It's generally (?) accepted that proto-Japanese came to Japan
from
Korea with the Yayoi culture around 2400 BC,

Whoops! That should be BP, not BC.

so the connection with
Korean is reasonable enough. However there's no real evidence of the
influence of any substrate corresponding to the languages spoken by
the
people who lived there during the preceding Jomon period -- which
languages could, no doubt, have been related to Austronesian, and/or
Ainu, though it's much more likely, IMO, that they belonged to
language
families which are now extinct.

At least, "me" (eye) and "miru" (to look) in the basic vocabularly is
from the SEA languages.

What's SEA?

By that vague designation I meant all those many and various languages
that have *mat for eye (Malay "mata", Vietnamese "mat", Thai
"taa" (?), Chinese "mu"), etc. Don't ask me why they do. Korean has
"nun", Proto-Mongolic *niden. Korean "nun" seems to be preserved in
Japanese "namida" (eyewater=tear, Korean "nunmul"). On the contrary,
in "matuge" (brow) we seem to have *mat. So Japanese seems to have
both. But we're wandering off topic.

There're supposed to be others, too.

Indeed, lots of people Shinmura (1908), Polivanov (1924), Izui (1953),
O:no (1957), Murayama (1973)have pushed a Japanese/Austronesian
relationship (AN substratum or AN/Altaic "mixed language") -- they've
suggested lots of putitive cognates, though they also use typological
arguments.

I've mentioned a risky topic. In fact, I know very little about
Austronesian or Austro-Asiatic influence over Proto-Japanese. As to
Korean, indeed there are both regular correspondences as well as a
good amount of typological similarities, which I know from my own
studies. The correspondences might be too good to proclaim Japanese a
mixed language.

Then there's those who say Japanese is Tibeto-Burman (Nishida),
Austro-Asiatic, and of course proto-Tamil.

Why "of course"? Who's saying that?




The "merger" with Chinese, of course, happened thousands of years
later -- just as in your discussion of English (only more so) you're
conflating things that happened at very different times.

Chinese might not have to do anything with creolization, I'll have to
agree to that one.

What about your favourite Armenian? Rather extreme sound changes
(much
greater than English), extensive lexical borrowing (much more than in
English), considerable grammatical reorganisation (much of it
associated
with loss of final syllables), and development of more fixed word
order
(SOV). Guess it must have been a creole too.

Except that, just as with English, the timing of these various
changes
doesn't stack up.

Armenian is the worst example possible. I'm trying to prove that
Armenian is possibly closely associated with proto-Turkic, and you say
it's a highly divergent variaty of PIE. Armenian doesn't look a like a
normal IE language. Give me some other example.

OK, let's suppose Armenian is genetically a Turkic language. Then in
its passage from proto-Turkic to Classical Armenian, it must have
undergone rather extreme sound changes, extensive lexical borrowing
(from IE, mostly Iranian), and a hell of a lot of grammatical
reorganisation. Guess it must have been a creole, eh?

No, the difference between proto-Turkic and proto-Armenian is not
extreme. To my horror, I found about 50% of regular cognates in the
standard 100-word Swadesh list. [Of course, no one here would trust
me, even I don't trust myself anymore, but I'm saying the way I see it
now...] So roughly, they may be as close as Baltic and Slavic. The
relation of Armenian to PIE is more remote, although Greek seems to be
slightly closer than others (I confirm that theory). So Armenian seems
to be divergent from PIE simply because it might be only a distant
relative of PIE, not because it has undergone any drastic changes...
And, of course, proto-Turkic is supposed to be related to PIE at a
deeper level (Nostratic theory).
There seem to be relatively few Iranian borrowings in the basic
Armenian vocabulary, and some words can just be seen as regional
isoglosses (found in Proto-Turkic as well). So this is a complicated
issue which requires a careful, separate consideration...
Of course, as too "creolization" of Armenian, the matter is even more
obscure at this point.

.

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