>> 1. For relatedness, the most important thing is the grammatical >> system, not words. Words jump between languages all the time, >> grammatical rules almost never do.
> The problem with that statement is that it means that unrelated pidgin
> dialects, and their creole descendant languages, are all related to
> each other, and not to the tongues of the speakers who invented them,
> since all pidgins have roughly the same grammar.
A very good point. For the benefit of folks who don't know what pidgins and creoles are, a pidgin is something short of a fully-fledged language that is invented by adults as a sort of middle ground for a community of would-be speakers who share no common language. They commonly arise in trading communties, and it is often reasonable to think of them as trade talk. Another kind of pidgin is what slave-owners force their slaves to speak: typically it is dangerous for slaves to become too good at the languages of their masters. They tend to have very depleted grammar systems, losing complexities of spoken languages like case, gender and inflected form generally. Creoles are the fully-fledged languages that children invent when they adopt pidgins as their native languages.
I hardly know anything more than the above about pidgins, but I think it's not true that pidgins are *unrelated* grammatically to the languages of their creators: they do need to have word order, rules for relating prepositions to verbs, determiners, quantifiers, pronouns and the like, and they get these from one of their parent languages, and differnt pidgins can have different rules for these. So I don't think creoles are unrelated to existing languages according to what I said, rather they are mongrels, and perhaps, like dogs, all the healthier for it.
> English grammar also changed rather sharply between Anglo-Saxon and
> Middle English, yet the two languages would probably be considered as
> fairly closely related.
Not gross enough changes by my criteria to be considered not closely related. Also, there is an amusing subversive suggestion to the effect that English is in fact a creole language: it has the kind of massively simplified inflection that tends to go with creoles.
>> 2. Sign languages are fully fledged languages that generally are >> unrelated to spoken languages, and don't share the same distribution >> patterns as spoken languages (eg. American sign language has some >> relatedness to French sign language, and both are unrelated to >> British Sign Language)
> Not to mention Plains Indian sign language, which covered numerous
> different tribal groups with very different languages. This is more
> relevant to this discussion, as _widespread_ deafness-related sign
> languages are a recent innovation, only a couple centuries old.
I don't know anything about Plains Indian. Is it really a fully-fledged language?
>> but it isn't too >> difficult to imagine situations in which hearing children fail to >> learn their parents language and improvise a spoken language between >> themselves. Has this happened? Most linguists think it probably has >> not.
> The Brithini say otherwise.
Ah, I think the linguistics corpus has overlooked the Brithini :oD
>> Gloranthan relevance: surely Glorantha has sign languages? And as >> surely glorantha has myths for them too. Are there any deaf/ sign >> language using folk there who could write one up?
> Supposedly, modern spoken Brithini is descended from its written form,
> not its Logical spoken form, as Zzabur had a nasty problem with a
> magical curse of silence at the "time" of the Unity Battle. The curse
> was broken during this event. Thereafter, a spoken form was re-created
> from the written form (much like Modern Hebrew was from the liturgical
> Hebrew, yielding a language with a severe lack of expletives to delete,
> or more importantly use after blowing a serve on the tennis court).
Nice.
> Also, I expect that Humakti Sword Speech includes a large signing
> component, both for military use and to accommodate those with geases
> against speaking during various periods.
I doubt it should be considered a fully-fledged language: who learns it as a child as their main mode of communication?
Jane's suggestion of siging for trolls is a serious possibility: a dumb troll-child (ie. with deformed sound producing anatomy) might find signing the easiest mode of communication.
> I would be surprised if Pamaltela wasn't loaded with signers, as the
> low population density is ideal for generating new languages. These
> people would still need a way to communicate without having to try to
> re-establish their ancestral tongues whenever they meet.
Again, not a fully-fledged language, and why would they prefer a true language over some kind of trade-talk.
> Finally, I would think that Vulture Country has a lot of signing. Not
> only between different bands of Waha people (hard to call them Praxians
> in the far regions of their migration) or between them and Oasis folk,
> but also for those occasions that "Praxians" and Pentans meet without
> immediately killing each other.
Again, why?
Charles
--__--__--
Powered by hypermail