Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

"Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1188031206.509925.222610@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Aug 25, 5:21 am, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

(I've raised the language headings above the level of quotes to improve clarity.)

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?)

Well, there is an animate/inanimate contrast, but so far as I am aware that is purely semantic.

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. <snip>

(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.

I was talking about Arabic broken plurals in Persian.

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?

They were the sort of features I was thinking about. I believe they're now mostly just tone shifts in modern Tibetan dialects.

> 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.

That's because Mandarin has long been a local lingua franca, <snip>

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.

My point is that while only 4 tones is unusual, it is not unheard of in that linguistic area.

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.

Or these are the original tones. The dialect is claimed to be that of the original speakers.

Richard.

.

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