Re: Creole/mixed language question

Thomas Leigh scripsit:

> 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...
Neither English nor Maltese is anything but a marginal example of a
creole, however.  The other Germanic languages (with the exception of
Standard German -- but not the dialects -- have undergone very similar
kinds of changes).  As for Maltese, it's only treated as a separate
language for sociolinguistic reasons: otherwise, it's basically an
Arabic colloquial, not even as deviant from modern standard Arabic as
Chad Arabic is. (Neither one has a diglossic relationship with MSA.)
Both English and Maltese have grabbed a great deal of vocabulary, of
course, but that doesn't make them creoles in any real sense.

--
Barry gules and argent of seven and six,        John Cowan
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