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Re: political Zera

From:BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 12, 2000, 18:30
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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~__ Anant' avanaute quettalmar! \ \ __ ____ ____ _____________ ___ __ __ __ / / \ \/___ \\__ \ /___ _____/\ \\__ \\ \ \ \\ \ / / / / / / / \ / /Melroch\ \_/ // / / // / / / / /___/ /_ / /\ \ / /Melarocco\_ // /__/ // /__/ / /_________//_/ \_\/ /Eowine__ / / \___/\_\\___/\_\ I neer Pityancalimeo\ \_____/ /ar/ /_atar Mercasso naan ~~~~~~~~~Cuinondil~~~\_______/~~~\__/~~~Noolendur~~~~~~ || Lenda lenda pellalenda pellatellenda cuivie aiya! || "A coincidence, as we say in Middle-Earth" (JRR Tolkien)