Re: Creole/mixed language question

Thomas Leigh <thomas@...> nevesht:
>
>Silence, knave! The Czhangman speaks!
>
> > Pidgins and creoles overwhelming tend towards
> > non-inflected forms and simplicity, hence quite
> > often pidgins are called perjoratives like "broken
> > language" or "baby talk." Pidgins and creoles are
> > mutant offspring of both the lexifier-language and
> > substrate languages, thus are totally new languages:
> > 1 lexifier-language (i.e. the colonial language) + 1
> > substrate language (the native language) = a 3rd
> > language
>
>Well, this is the situation I have: 1 base/substrate language +
>2 lexifier languages. All three languages are morphologically
>complex -- several noun genders and cases, person/tense/number
>marking on verbs, etc. So my big question is, speaking as
>"realistically" as possible, how morphologically complex is the
>bastard offspring language likely to be?
>
>For example, we have English, whose base language (Anglo-Saxon)
>had three genders, 4 cases, a full-fledged subjunctive mood, and
>so on, but which lost most of that when it got hammered with
>Norse, French, etc. But on the other hand, we have, say,
>Maltese, which retains a lot of the morphological complexity of
>its base language, Arabic -- such as two genders,
>person/number/tense marking on verbs + pro drop -- despite the
>centuries of phonological change and heavy lexification from
>Italian and related languages...
>
The mixed languge can be quite complex, e.g Michif or Copper Island Aleut.
Both were created by bilingual communities, Michif Cree/French and CIA
Russian/Aleut.
Michif has French grammar and phonology for nouns and Cree for verbs,
agreement based on animacy(Cree) _and_ gender(French)  and other
complexities.  Interstingly, the French noun is the more complex, and  so is
the Cree verb.



-Wayne Chevrier

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