Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM said:
> Mark P. Line scripsit:
>
>> Without historical records of intermediate varieties, how do we
>> distinguish between a process involving only koineization and one that
>> involves pidginization, creolization and decreolization to arrive at the
>> same result?
>
> See www.csuchico.edu/~gt18/Papers/Cham_WECOL.pdf for an interesting
> view of Cham's simplicity and regularity as a result of repeated cycles
> of L2 learning and language shift.
I think he fails to show that Modern Cham cannot be considered a creole
(or former creole) with Austronesian lexifier and Mon-Khmer substrates.

(He also seems to be making some assumptions that I find difficult to
swallow in any event: that "transparent" implies "early"; that
"periphrastic" implies "analytic"; that "periphrastic" implies
"transparent"; etc. Also, the paper is carelessly written -- but it's
probably a prepublication draft. Both of these facts may be related to my
claim above.)

Part of the problem here and in the other examples, of course, is the lack
of a coherent ontology that helps us to draw the line between creoles and
other contact varieties. This problem probably arises from the unfortunate
tendency of many creolists to define *pidgin* and *creole* in terms of the
Bickerton "universals" (thus making those "universals" seem more universal
than they are) rather than defining *pidginization* and *creolization* as
sociolinguistic processes.

I'm hoping that simulation studies of language change can lead to the
discovery of patterns that might allow us to narrow down the plausible
evolutionary trajectories of any language for which we only have a single
synchronic data set. (I've started a web forum on the subject, but it
hasn't hit the search engines and nobody's there yet but me.)


-- Mark

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