Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

From:    jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM
> Mark P. Line scripsit:
> > I therefore believe that anybody who wants to claim that Cham has never
> > undergone creolization should be prepared to show evidence, and that the
> > rest of us have no particular reason to believe it until she does.
>
>In that case, I don't see that Thurgood's remark:
>
>        Although it is
>        quite evident that the language was heavily influenced by
>        intense contact with the Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam,
>        there is no historical data to suggest Cham ever underwent a
>        pidginization stage; thus, there is no basis for attributing
>        Cham's transparency to development from an earlier pidgin.
>
> constitutes a *claim* that Cham is not a creole.
The whole issue of "creolization" is frought with misconceptions.  It's
not clear that such a process even exists; many of Bickerton's claims
about creoles being evidence of the emergence of a language "bioprogram"
are based on tenuous evidence.  The so-called creoles that arose from
contact are not clearly different in kind from western languages that
arose from contact which are nonetheless not ever called creoles (some
German varieties in Pennsylvania are reportedly like this). I would
refer everyone to the works of Michel DeGraff and Salikoko Mufwene
for further reference.

With respect to this debate, the implication is that it's a nonquestion:
creoles and pidgins are simply extreme forms of language contact phenomena,
and there is a spectrum of contact-induced changes in between this
and "real" languages.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637