Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

Roger Mills said:
> Mark P. Line wrote:
>> I think the most likely answer is that the Swahili spoken today is a
>> koine.
>>
> (Snip pidgin/creole hypothesis)
>
>  I like the koine hypothesis because it only requires us to believe
>> that pre-Swahili evolving into Swahili was in constant contact with
>> (probably a wide variety of) other languages, that pre-Swahili evolving
>> into Swahili was an economically useful and widespread variety, and that
>> the evolution of Swahili involved a process of major simplification of
>> the
>> language. From what we know of the history and prehistory of East Africa
>> and of the nature of Bantu, I find it pretty easy to believe all those
>> things.
>>
> Although I'm not up to speed on current "Origins of Malay" hypotheses,
> what
> you describe would certainly be a possibility--
>
> --constant contact with wide variety of other languages (in Malay's case,
> mostly relatives)
> --economically useful and widespread-- certainly by the early Xn era,
> possibly even already in pre-Xn times
> --major simplification (of the grammar)

Yep. The relationship between Malay and, say, Javanese is reminiscent of
the relationship between Swahili and, say, Kikuyu.

We still can't exclude the decreolization hypothesis for either Malay or
Swahili -- it's just very hard to imagine how the hypothesis might be
tested. 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?

The markers you would expect in a language that had been creolized are
pretty much all present in both Swahili and Malay -- except the presence
of more morphology than any creole, which would have presumably arisen
through decreolization under the pidgin/creole hypothesis. But none of
these markers would be unusual in a koine, either.

Quite a bit is known about "universals" of pidgins and creoles (which I
don't believe are actually as universal as some creolists claim -- we can
call them "tendencies" for this discussion) but I don't think we have a
comparable grasp of tendencies in the process of koineization. I might be
wrong, so that could be a fun little area to get myself caught up on.

-- Mark

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