Re: Hobbits, Austronesians, and Creoles

John Cowan wrote:
<<
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001984.html

If this is even a vague approximation to the truth, it's going to
set the cat among the pigeons for sure.   What do Austronesianists
think?
 >>

Ha, ha, ha!  John McDubya is up to his old tricks again.  I should
e-mail him: The last sentence of the paragraph which begins "This
got me thinking" is missing a comma!  He certainly wouldn't want
to be confused with the "rabble" he speaks so lovingly of that can
no longer speak what he calls English.

I agree with one thing John says: we need a lot more data.  Not
skeletal data, though: Language data.  Being in a class right this
very moment that's documenting a virtually undocumented
language, I can tell you that each person has his own idea about
what that language is like.  For example, based on the "grammar"
we have, Moro is said to have no case, rather than 7 (which it
does have).  So when I see "no affixes", I don't think, "Gee, why
is that?", I think, "Prove it."

Second, John glossed over the weakest part of his argument.
That is, if little people were there speaking their own language,
and if they managed never to learn the Austronesian language
fluently after years of cohabitation (which strikes me as highly
unlikely--a creole doesn't *always* have to develop), why is
that version of the language the one children would imitate?
It seems like he's suggesting that that's the one children would
learn because the little people are closer to children in size (!).

Also, I want to see some data from all these languages.  You
can spot evidence of a creole by just looking at some data.
This is why Chinese doesn't look like a creole, but Tok Pisin
does.

Finally, John mentions that affixes usually leave a trace of their
existence.  But didn't someone on this very list quote a point of
his in The Power of Babel about language change?  I'm not going
to remember the form correctly, but he mentions two directly
related Amerind languages that derived their word for "summer"
from the same proto-form.  In one language, the existing word
was something like "papuxatol"--something long that had two
"p"'s and multiple consonants.  The cognate in the other language
was "aa".  If that can happen, as far as I'm concerned, *anything*
can happen.

Anyway, this is classic John McWhorter.  Treat it about as
seriously as you would an opinion of mine on English soccer
(there's a team called "the United", isn't there...?).

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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