Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

"Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Pidgination-creolization could probably be more common than previously
believed. <snip>

Examples:

2. Dari-Farsi-Tadzik (Modern Persian)
Borrowings from Arabic, analytical grammar, article -i, loss of cases,
number in nouns (unlike Old Persian).

Fully functional synthetic personal endings in the verb, opaque relationship between present and past stems. Non-learned plurals pretty regular. (I suppose you will say that the Arabic broken plurals are post-creolisation.) Of course, the definite article has a Turkic feel to it in being absent in the subject. Is this what you mean by the article substituting for the cases?

3. Chinese
Either experienced a major transition at an early stage, or was
isolating ever since the proto-state.

Any Sino-Tibetan inflections will have been hammered pretty hard by the phonetic changes.

Just 4 tones, of which only 3
have any special features (cf. 6-8 tones in Mao-Yao).

Mandarin has 4 tones, but Cantonese has a more typical 6. The Common Chinese system, like most early tone-systems in the region, had three tones on words ending in a continuant and no tone contrast on those ending in an occlusive. For example, Tai dialects typically have 6 tones on words ending in continuants, but Phu Thai (Vietnam, Laos, Thailand) and Korat (Thailand) have only four. Sometimes tones on words ending in occlusives are difficult to identify with tones on words ending in a continuant, whence for instance the argument that Siamese has six tones.

4. Tagalog
Little morphological difference between word classes. The number
category in verbs hardly reflected, and expressed analytically in
nouns.

And is Tagalog exceptional amongst the languages of the Philippines?

Isn't focus marking on the verb rather synthetic?

8. Swahili
Loss of pitch accent, reduction of word classes, 40% of Arabic
borrowings.

Here you may well be on to something. What do we know of the claim that one dialect retains the pitch accent?

Richard.

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