Re: political Zera

At 16:26 12.4.2000 +0200, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

>On the other hand, I would assume that a trade language/pidgin would
>arise, allowing the settlers to trade with the Inuit and Indian
>peoples around them. And if something --- war, disaster --- then
>happened to displace and mix up large number of natives, the trade
>language might end up forming the basis for a creole.
That's what happened in North Vinlandia (Norðrvínland) -- corresponding to
Canada east of the Plains in my conhistory --, where the Norse settlement
of Vinland wasn't short-circuited as it was in This World.  A trade-pidgin,
called _Tanisiq_ (< _Dansk tunga_, the usual Old Norse term for all
Scandinavian dialects as a whole, for those who don't know that...) is the
de_facto national language, though formally that position is still held by
pure Old Norse*.  I've decided that there exists a creole-continuum from
basic pidgin over creolized varieties to a speech not very unlike modern
Icelandic, since contact was never broken, and Iceland is politically part
of North Vinlandia, while the Orkneys and Faroes are independent earldoms
in cultural dependence on North Vinlandia (Iceland still enjoys cultural
hegemony!)  What I can't decide is if _Tanisiq_ resembles such
European-Algonquian mixed languages as Michif or is a more pedestrian
Norse-based pidgin -- of course often creolized, since it is so old, but
the situation is that no ethnic language of non-insular NV has achieved
hegemony, and the persistence of _Tanisiq_ is both a cause and a result of
that.

*Since Modern Norse (_Norrœn tunga_) in That World is more dialectally
diversified (with a couple of dialects in Canada, Greenland and the
Orkneys, plus that Faroese is considered a MNorse dialect in That World)
than Icelandic in This World the Rasmus Rask and his pupils of That World
did not introduce the modernizations they did in This World.  Two things
they did introduce in That unlike This world: the graphemes _àèìòù`yö_ in
old short syllables, and old ø and ö are merged, written ö in old short
syllables and ø in non-short syllables.




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto:bpj@...>bpj@netg.se
<mailto:melroch@...>melroch@my-deja.com
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