Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

On Aug 25, 5:21 am, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@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.

Still some degree of simplification is obvious (no gender, cases) as
compared to Old Persian and nearby lesser important languages such as
Kurdish, Baluchi, Pashto, which preserve more synthetism. Personal
endings in verbs (as in Romance languages) are probably not hard to
learn (for some reason). Full isolation in verbs is rather rare
(Mandarin, English, just remind me where else?)

Again, note that it's not just the simplification per se, it's rather
_the interference_ from other nearby languages. Only that part that is
not common to both the substrate and superstrate (the learner and the
learned) gets discarded. If verbal personal endings were pretty much
common (say) in Median and its speakers switched to Parthian later on,
these endings would survive no matter how complicated they look. In
some cases some degree of "complification" would also be possible. For
instance, the Russian speakers of English tend to use complicated
constructions such as the "whom"-clause (as in "with whoM I spoke"
from "s kotoryM I govoril") or long, formal verbs such as "continue"
instead of "go on" or "approach" instead of "come up to" because they
reflect the complex Slavic synthetism and the 3-syllabic root
structure.

(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?

I know very little about Arabic. The article seems to be a purely
analytical feature, though. It seems to pop up every time the noun
loses declension markers. An example from the Caucasus: Abkhaz has
the article a- before every noun (as in "atractor" < "tractor"), but
it also lost ergativity and case markers.

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.

But Tibetan does have some agglutinating morphology, doesn't it?

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.

That's because Mandarin has long been a local lingua franca, while
Cantonese became popular mostly because of the recent Hong Kong
emmigration to the west.

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?

Dunno. The languages of the Phillippines are known to have a complex
agglutinating verbal morphology with many affixes. The loss of verbal
number seems to be a Tagalog feature. More research is needed...

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?

If it does, it would predictably coincide with the accent in a nearby
language it was borrowed from because of the considerable amount of L2
Swahili speakers in that region.

.

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