Re: Creole/mixed language question

Staving Thomas Leigh:
>Greetings,
>
>I'm envisioning a scenario for a conlang project where
>essentially new language arises out of two or more different
>languages mixing -- this is essentially a creole, right? So my
>question is, if the source languages are all highly inflected,
>will that influence the new language to remain highly inflected
>too? Or is this an situation where the new language would likely
>end up being simplified as the source languages mixed and the
>speakers of those languages, the ancestors of the speakers of
>the new language, had to try to cross linguistic boundaries to
>communicate with each other? I know next to nothing about
>creoles and such language development, so any information or
>advice from those more knowledgeable than I will be welcome!
Creoles emerge from pidgins, ad-hoc intermediate languages used to
communicate between populations who don't speak each other's languages. At
the pidgin stage, grammatical complexity tends to be lost. A creole
develops when the two populations settle down, intermarry, and the children
grow up speaking the new language as the first language.

What I think would happen in the situation you propose is that similar
sounding forms would merge, regardless of disparities in meaning, while
forms that sounded nothing like anything in the other language would be
lost entirely. For example, in language A, the genitive ends in [r=],
whereas in language B the ablative ends in [u4]. The creole has a case that
combines the meanings of genitive and ablative. The accusative of language
A ends in [aK], while that of language B ends in [?]. Lateral fricatives
are unknown in Language B, and glottal stops are never phonemic in language
A, and so the accusative case disappears in the creole.

PS This post may be of interest to Garry Shannon, as it illustrates how
useful phonology can be in diachronic conlanging

Pete.