Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

Darkstar wrote:
On Aug 31, 1:22 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Darkstar wrote:
Well, I've translated movies from Italian without ever learning the
language. (I still hardly speak Italian) Just using my knowledge of
Spanish. They're _that_ close. Same for Catalan that's even closer.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't follow 2 minutes of catalan conversation
just using your spanish even if you lived for years in a
spanish-speaking country.
Italian (which belongs to yet another branch) and spanish actually have
some (important to intelligibility) things in common which are absent
from catalan. Though in fact catalan is closer to spanish if one takes
mere phylogeny into account; but then again so is french.
I'm pretty sure you don't really understand the point. You're just
trying to prove that you're smart, and I'm an idiot. Right? So it
doesn't really matter how I answer.
Just *what* is the point? In case you didn't notice, my point above was
that spoken italian *may* be easier to understand than spoken catalan to
a spanish speaker, even if catalan can be argued to be closer to spanish
than italian.

That's very sospechoso, cuz it reminds me how some eastern Ukranian
Surzhik speakers or Belorussians react to a similar debate. "What kind
of language is that if any Russian can understand it? We gotta do
something about it and use more secret words". So a language is not
seen as a naturally developing phenomenon but something that can be
deliberately made arcane. I wonder if a similar trend lead to the
codification of Catalan (somewhere in the past).

I'm not even certain of what you're trying to say, but in order to try to explain it to you, here goes:

- By virtue of history, economy and communication routes, the western roman empire comprised several linguistic areas.

- The two that are of interest are centre-west northern Iberia on one side and Gaul plus Catalonia plus northern Italy on the other.

+ Gaul plus Catalonia plus northern Italy were further divided into northern Gaul, southern Gaul plus Catalonia, the Alps and northern Italy:

. Northern Gaul is where french developed
. In the Alps, Francoprovencal and Rheto-romance developed
. Northern Italy is the home of the northern italian dialects, within whch Venetian is sometimes set apart (I should probably point out to you that northern italian dialects are far away from southern ones; 'Italian' is mostly southern)
. Southern Gaul plus Catalonia is where occitan/catalan developed. You apparently don't even know what occitan is. Catalan can be considered an occitan dialect, but nowadays for practical purposes they are codified separately.

+ Centre-west northern Iberia was a smaller area:

. Galicia and northern Portugal are where portuguese/galician developed
. Asturies and Leon are the home of Leonese
. Aragon is where Aragonese developed
. Northernmost Castille is where spanish, the most divergent of the 4 languages, developed

- In Iberia a further development occurred: the moors conquered everything but the northernmost territories. In the north, several polities formed which slowly retook the south during a period of 5-7 centuries. As the south was being retaken, the local romance dialects (mozarabic, which probably aligned closer with Sardinian than with anything to the north) were replaced by those of the northern conquerors and settlers. So galician spread to the Algarve, under the name of portuguese; leonese spread as south as the Tagus; spanish spread to fill the rest of the centre-south; aragonese spread south also, maybe as far as Murcia, while catalan (the one which originally has no contact with the other four and belongs to the family of french, remember?) got south to Valencia.

- Later on, spanish engulfed almost all of Aragonese and a great deal of Leonese. Though spanish is the oddball with its h- and -j-, it was still close enough that it could absorb the two. It didn't manage to wipe out galician as the distance was a bit greater (loss of -l-/-n-, simplification of -ll-/-nn-, which had a wild impact on basic vocabulary and the article...), and it didn't manage to wipe out catalan because here it was not a matter of having some differences - as within iberian romance - but of having only some similarities.

The idea that there was a 'codification' of catalan which consisted of an attempt to create a language different from spanish is so stupid as to not even being ridiculous.

And since I doubt it has entered your thick skull here it goes again:

- Spanish and catalan only have a degree of mutual intelligibility in formal written form.
- Spanish is the most divergent of the northern iberian romance languages, which are 4: galician-portuguese, asturian-leonese, spanish and aragonese.
- Catalan is a gallo-romance language, closely related to occitan and more distantly to french - word-for-word translations between the two are not that hard -, rheto-romance and piedmontese and venetian. Catalan also has some interesting features, like the weaking of unstressed particles (lo -> el, se -> es, ne -> en, nos -> ens...), the use in some dialects of an article derived from ipse - like in Sardinian -, the unique treatment of latin e/e:, etc.

NB the el of catalan is a reduction of lo, and its e- is just a graphical device. Nothing to do with the spanish el, which sounds completely different and whose e- is from a latin i-.

Of course, if you take *all* of the romance languages, correct their orthographies where they deviate from being etymological, and normalise some of the phonetic notations, you'll end up with nothing more than a series of dialects. So what?

[u'bri ls fin@s'trOnz i @sp@'ra un naw 'di.@ i tru'ba ltr@ kOp @nt@'latz @lz 'vidr@s]

If you are able to make out anything of the above it's because I've kindly separated the words for you. As is known, the major obstacle in learning a language is to know how to divide speech, so almost all the work is done...

French can also be argue to be closer to spanish than
italian,

Unlikely. Maybe just in some wrongful old-fashioned classification.

?? Why didn't you explain offhand that you knew nothing about the subject at all?

but that doesn't mean it's readily intelligible.
In written form, a spanish speaker may be able to understand catalan
after a while (then again, also french...) - by the way, only one of our
translations comes to the intended meaning -, but the spoken language is
quite another matter.

Okay, but if it exists as a real thing (actual means of
communication), not just as a mysterious code to impress Castillians.

A what?

--
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.

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