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Saxon and Scythian

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  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Saxon and Scythian
    Posted: 30-May-2008 at 16:55

 


He also does not say Middle English actually was brought by Martians in UFOs. 
 He writes a history of the English language(s), and he presents creole languages too and Old English and Middle English are not presented as such. Nor their formation does not match his definition.
He never considers historical creoles at all. Does that mean they never existed? Or that such languages were brought by Martians in UFOs? Are you really denying that creole languages existed in the past, simply because a modern author writing about modern creoles doesn't mention them?
I find this disingenous considering I provided you earlier with a link on David Crystal's definition. At the same page 346 which I directed you above you can find a map with the following description:
"The map shows the distribution of the chief English-based pidgin and creole languages. They cluster in three main areas: the Caribbean, West Africa and the West Pacific. Most of the Atlantic varieties developed along with the growth in British colonial exploration and the trade in the 16th and the 17th centuries, the Pacific varieties emerged some time later." (emphasis mine). So Crystal considers historical creoles, only that you chose to ignore that, your rhetoric is thus flawed from the start.
Also you didn't actually objected to my point. Since in Crystal's definition a creole is born from a pidgin, it means that if Middle English would have been a creole (as some suggest) then before it was another language which was the pidgin from which this creole Middle English developed. This language couldn't be Old English (because it was complex in grammar and vocabulary, whereas pidgins are not), so it means the history of English as he presented is fatally incomplete having a missing link and his book is not covering well the topic. In case you're not suggesting that, it means that is reasonable to conclude that if David Crystal does not mention Old English or Middle English as creoles it means they are not, otherwise he'd have written a different history of English.

Moreover, both scholars I invoked show that Middle English is no creole based on Crystal's definition. I already quoted Anne Curzan, but it seems you ignored it, so here it goes again (p. 49):
"none of the Middle English creole theories adheres to traditional definition of creole. A creole is typically described as an elaborated pidgin [...] No theory has seriously proposed that Middle English has its roots in a pidgin". And Manfred Görlach (p. 337, against French-English pidgins): "I am not aware of any texts that could justify the assumption that there was a stable pidgin or creole English in use in 13th century French households".
 
 
Also this exchange of replies suggests surprisingly the unsteady position you're defending. It's not only David Crystal, you provided so far NO scholar to argue that Old English was a creole. If no scholar suggets that (I do not count misundestandings, I expect crystal clear quotes), I think we can safely consider this theory unlikely. However I'm willing to intelectually entertain myself in a discussion as long as I learn something out of it.

Give me an example of a historic creole that no longer exists.

http://rapidshare.com/files/118833903/Germanic_creoles_p_572_573.zip.html
Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=rp0hYcAjlIoC

She basically uses the same definitions (or even less rigid) as David Crystal and all the other authors. What definition would you expect her to use? Have you found any definition (conceptualization) worth considering but these authors ignore?
And where did you read that she believes "creoles are [...] a little childish or elementary" in those pages?
It's implicit in her tone.

No, it is not. Are you sure you actually read those pages?
Let me quote for you what she says of creoles which I believe you could interpret in such a way: "employing the term creole to describe English is an effective method of provocation because creole is often a stigmatized term, connotaing for many "not full language" status" (p. 48). If it's anything else I'm sure you will find a quote. Or concede that you misjudged this author.

But if the so-called creolisation happened before the linguistic contacts which allegedly caused it, what creolisation are we talking about?
You miss the point.
 
She points out (or claims: it's not a claim I want to dispute particularly) that the loss of gender may have occurred because of contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes before 1066. That just means that that particular creolisation occurred before 1066.
 
Incidentally, if we're talking about gender loss, Brython only had two genders, and indeed it had no declensions, nouns being the same in all cases. Sound somewhat 'English'?
If anyone is missing the point is you. She said about gender loss being "incipient in the language and accelerated by language contact", which means it is not because of contact, but stimulated by contact. Actually this justification was in my initial paragraph, don't split my text in little pieces before reading it first.

Why would it be 'incipient' in one language and not in another? There used to be a theory that all synthetic languages eventually evolved into isolating ones, but I don't think it's that widely held any more. 'Accelerated by language contact' is exactly what I'm talking about. it doesn't matter to what I'm arguing whether the language contact involved is Norman-Old English or Anglo-Saxon-Old Norse.
But this is not the point. Curzan claimed that the simplification which was argued to be the result of contact, started on its own, before the contact. In other words this simplification is not merely a result of creolisation, it is an evolution of its own of English language which was just accelerated by linguistic contact.

A creole does not have to be simple.
No one said that. I (and other scholars) have said pidgins have to be simple. I guess you misaddressed this comment.

 
Pidgins become creoles when the speakers of the language start to feel it as their native language, rather than as an alternative to it. What Crystal meant was only that a pidgin is not solely the simplified native language of one group, which is how it is sometimes presented, as in 'Me Tarzan, you Jane'.
You misunderstood Crystal or me. "Me Tarzan, you Jane" is, jokingly, the look of a pidgin. Little vocabulary, little grammar, limited purpose. My other example "Me like. Me buy" is rather the form of a pidgin, I'm not sure if a stable, well-attested one, but certainly in some cosmopolitan trade centers in this world you'll hear that pidgin-like language, which eventually will form a pidgin or a creole given there will be stability and circumstances for it.
 
How long is a long period? I doubt that it took more than 3-4 generations for Old English to develop (but not to standardise, if it ever did) and Middle English was well in bloom 200 years after the Conquest.
I've seen an example (forgot where, I am still looking for it) of pidgin created in something like a generation. By contrast, Görlach uses a four centuries span (10th-13th centuries) to analyse the transition from Old English to Middle English.
In fact pidgin is talked and written at the European Union, partly because of the need for so many translators that they have to use non-English ones to translate into English. So for instance there is now an 'English' in which it is permissible to say 'I have been here since five years' since a similar construct exists in most European languages EXCEPT English. And 'eventually' is now used to mean 'possibly', as it does in French and German and elsewhere, instead of to mean 'in the end' as it does in English. And there is 'hopefully' used to mean 'it is to be hoped' rather than 'full of hope'. And 'possibility' used to mean French 'possibilité' instead of using the correct 'opportunity'. And so on.
 
I've no doubt at all that there will eventually (hah!) be a Europe-wide English creole, and that we are already seeing its birth.
You're wrong, this is not a pidgin. This is a case of bilingualism, more precisely of code-switching. I will use this example below to prove you're misusing Crystal's definitions.
But it is possible that in future in Europe to be created first an English-based pidgin, and then a creole out of it.
 
 
Actually I agree with the definition Crystal gives, or I wouldn't have brought him up in the first place. I believe you misread it.
I doubt its my misreading, I will prove that on the contrary is yours. For no language which you claimed to be a creole you didn't or couldn't evidentiate a pidgin. In most of the cases you suggest creolisation only based on mixture (e.g. "That history of successive mergers (which I call creolisations and see no need not to)"). Actually all along this discussion you have alternated terms like hybrid, mixed, fusion, mingled, creole, pidgin, merger, a fact which suggests you don't actually follow Crystal's definition but rather rephrase the same idea in other terms, but without attempting any way of validating them.
For instance, in the paragraph above you claimed the badly spoken English in EU is a pidgin. But it arguably fails on all three criteria:
- limited vocabulary - no
- reduced grammatical structure - no
- much narrower range of functions than the languages that gave rise to them - arguably no
For the sake of discussion find me a pidgin where you can express something like "I have been here since five years". Or drop this whole pidgin-creole issue.
Otherwise it's just dodging the question - bring scholars to argue for the creoleness of Old English, Middle English (on that you can find some in the bibliography of the materials I linked) and Standard English.
I dropped saying modern standard English was a creole and substituted 'descended from a creole'. Your own sources gave trhe evidence for Middle English being one, and I've alsi given you papers about Old English being one (though I accept you probably haven't had tme to read them.
My own sources refuted that Middle English is a creole (but as I said I brought this question myself) but you have provided no papers about Old English being a creole (yes, I've read those two papers about Celtic interactions).
 

What's wrong with that? Most Romance languages are creoles in origin, resulting from the contact between Latins, Celts, and various Germanic tribes. (Slavic in the case of Rumanian.)

 
Yiddish certainly is a creole. So is Ladino. Bulgarian I don't know, but isn't it supposed to be a fusion of Turkic and Slav features, like Bulgarians themselves? Like I said, I don't know but that's what I've heard.
All your claims are false according to the scholarly definitions exposed on the thread so far. 
Where have you posted that Yiddish, Ladino, and the Romance languages aren't descended from creoles? The history of the Roman occupation of Gaul and the subsequent incursion of Franks and other Germanics parallels that of England very closely. The same is true of Spain and Portugal, complicated by the later Moorish occupation. Italy's somewhat different but not that much.
I posted the definition of a creole (which you said you agree on and use it) and none of these languages match it. If Yiddish is certainly a creole, then it means you have strong evidence on the pidgin which created it, but I see none. If Bulgarian is a fusion it doesn't mean it is a creole, nor the mixture the Bulgarians are has anything to do with the question of creolesness (are you sure you understood that definition)? In histories of most languages there's no bottle-neck which would be the pidgin-stage. The evolution of the langauge is continuous, thus the languages are not creolised.
Manfred Görlach actually refutes succesfully all your claims, and particular the other one you have on this thread, that Old English was a creole (he shows how it was unlikely to have existed any stable Latin-English or Celtic-English pidgins - p. 336)



Edited by Chilbudios - 30-May-2008 at 17:51
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  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 17:43
This is a straw man, no offense.
If you're not saying that you shouldn't call a language a creole under my definition because any language waould then have been a creole at some point in its past, then what are you saying?
But I am creating distinctiveness. 
You're raising straw men again, it is not about your definitions (see my previous post for my reply on them), but about Görlach's material which you commented on.

It wasn't a biological analogy but a linguistic one. Over time the linguistic classification of something may change.
Are you kidding? Emphases are mine:

That's like saying every dog can claim to be a cross, so therefore the concept of cross breeds is invalid.
 
Essentially, just as after a certain time cross breeds of dog (or any animal) end up being classified as pure breeds, after a certain time (much longer than with dogs) creoles are no longer classified as creoles, but as unique languages.
 
When Byerly Turk was put to its first English mare, the colt that resulted was a cross. A hybrid. In language terms a creole. Three hundred years later thoroughbred horses are not viewed as crosses or hybrids but as purebred. Essentiall the same is true of languages (and indeed human races)
Moreover by all definitions provided here creoleness is not something lost in time (like you argued on animals), a language is or is not a creole, is or is not the result of creolisation.
If you do claim the contrary then a) provide authoritative linguistic references b) tell me after how many years a creole language stops being a creole

Irrelevant. I wasn't talking about them because they were living beings, or even referring to the fact that they were living beings. Just that once they were called crosses and are now called purebred. Similarly what we now call a ship would not have been called one 300 years ago, and what we used to call a frigate is very different from what we now call a frigate.
It is highly relevant. The notions "breed" and "cross" are semantically dependent on the living beings they refer to, more exactly on how living beings reproduce. Unless you can establish that the genesis, the death and evolution of languages is highly analogous with that of living beings, equivocating terms from one field (biology) to another (linguistics) is fatally flawed.


Second, languages differ not only from region to region, but from speaker from speaker, even in different moments of life of a speaker (which learns the language better or on the contrary forgets it). If by an analogy it would be suggested that langauge is a living organism, then this should be what we express (or better said what we could potentially express) in every moment with our mind and our articulating capacities (otherwise the analogy would be transformed into one of cancerous breeds having their DNA mutating continuously during their life ). One of the materials presented by us in this thread (I will look it later if you missed it, now I'm in hurry) reasonably questioned the "Standard English" reference as virtually no speakers actually speak it, we all speak mutated forms of English. This is valid for any language and any speaker. 

True, but I don't see the point. I've come up with lots of West Country dialect stuff here myself.
I don't think you actually understood my point. I showed your previous analogy to be flawed.

That's begging the question. The question is whether it should be classified as a Germanic language or a borderline Germanic/Romance one. And I suspect you may well find the answer to that depends on whether you are talking to a linguist as someone who studies the history of language or a linguist who studies and works with modern languages as a translator/interpreter.
That's incorrect. You didn't provide any reputable source to assert English is anything but a Germanic language.
 
Arguing that something must be so because it's always said to be isn't very convincing. It wouldbe more convincing to explain why English forms its plurals with an 's' the same way French does if it's only a Germanic language.  Or why you can say 'I'm going to go to London' and 'Je vais aller à Londres' but not 'Ich gehe gehen zu London'. In fact If I'm flying to London or I'm walking there I can say 'I'm going to London' or 'Je vais à Londres' but you can't say 'ich gehe zu London' unless I'm walking (and I'm informed you can't or at least don't do it in Danish either).
 
Or in English and French 'The boy I don't know' or 'Le petit je ne connais pas' whereas German has to be 'Die Knabe kenne ich nicht.' (That's also Danish word order.)
 
And so on and so on.
 
But it may only be when you earn your living from this sort of stuff that you really pay attention to it.
But this really doesn't prove anything. It seems to me you have the belief that to be a Germanic language means to have only Germanic words or only Germanic grammar or only Germanic phonology, but this is false. You can find thousands of non-Germanic words and grammar features in Germanic languages, none of these will make the Germanic languages not Germanic or Germanic-whatever.
 
I'm giving you specific language evidence about where English resembles French and differs from German. It doesn't need scholarship except to confirm those examples are correct. But if you look them up you'll find I'm right, so it's up to you to come up with an explanation.
But I already said it several times - no one denies English has French influence. To be Germanic means to display some features which English has them and that's it, the taxonomical dilemma is over.
 
Find evidence that the increasing mixture of English with other language (which continued long after the birth of Middle English) is creolisation or as you called it earlier hybridisation.
I will when you deal with the evidence and scholarship I've already presented.
You presented nothing to support your case. The only evidence you brought was about various influences and interactions between European languages. Like I said, it was not denied, therefore it is nothing to be dealt.
 
Then what do you call it? A politically dominant culture meets a subordinate one: the two get along together and interbreed: they each contribute different elements to the common language they end up speaking.
 
What are you going to call that language?
It depends very much on how the language is created, on the sociolingustics behind it. Most of them are certainly not creoles. 
 
It would also mean that there is no point in calling a language 'mixed' because all languages are mixed (in your view). There'd be no point in saying a language had a grammar either, since all I can think of are analysable in grammatical terms.
Very good point. There's actually no valid concept "grammar languages", all languages have grammar. Similarly it's wrong to hold the concept "hybrid languages" merely because a language has foreign influences in it. "Creole languages" is a concept which means something different, the languages which are created from a very simple, ad-hoc language called pidgin. As it was detailed in some of the materials I linked, some scholars expanded this concept and tried more general definitions, or define new similar concepts (e.g. creoloid). However, when the generalization becomes too wide, it starts to lose distinctiveness by encompassing virtually all languages. And this is where my own counter-argument matched the counter-argument brought by Görlach.
 


Edited by Chilbudios - 30-May-2008 at 17:47
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  Quote Cyrus Shahmiri Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 19:53

p. 27: "In 1985 Dougals Adams showed that the Northwestern Indo-European word for "apple" *abVI- (Gaulish avallo, OE œppel, OCS (j)ablŭki, "apple" etc.) displays [...] a late Indo-European feature [...]. It is probably ultimately a loanword, perhaps a metathetic variant of the southern "apple" word *maHlo- (Lat. mālum, Homeric Gk. mêlon, etc.), i.e. PIE *Hmlo-, with *amlo- > ablo-, possibly ocurring first in Celtic"

Are Iranian langauges also considered as Indo-European langauges?

Avestan Saplu
modern Persian Sib (Apple) & Alu (Plum)

[s->h] Haplu-> Apple  (Ossetic Pael/Fael



Edited by Cyrus Shahmiri - 30-May-2008 at 19:59
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  Quote Sarmat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:13
Originally posted by Slayertplsko

It's the same in the western branch - človek Sg. - if you need a plural you use ľudia. (Ludej in russian I think)
Similar to the English person and people.
And yes, it applies to all nouns.
 
Not sure if I got what you meant, but in Russian we do use chelovek in plural meaning.
 
1-odin chelovek, 2-dva cheloveka, 3-tri cheloveka, 4-chetyre cheloveka, 5-pyat chelovek and so on...


Edited by Sarmat12 - 30-May-2008 at 20:17
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:15
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

p. 27: "In 1985 Dougals Adams showed that the Northwestern Indo-European word for "apple" *abVI- (Gaulish avallo, OE œppel, OCS (j)ablŭki, "apple" etc.) displays [...] a late Indo-European feature [...]. It is probably ultimately a loanword, perhaps a metathetic variant of the southern "apple" word *maHlo- (Lat. mālum, Homeric Gk. mêlon, etc.), i.e. PIE *Hmlo-, with *amlo- > ablo-, possibly ocurring first in Celtic"

Are Iranian langauges also considered as Indo-European langauges?

Avestan Saplu
modern Persian Sib (Apple) & Alu (Plum)

[s->h] Haplu-> Apple  (Ossetic Pael/Fael



What about PGer *ap(a)laz and PIE ab(e)l? (b->p)
So your point is now that Proto-Germanic comes from some Iranian language or that Saxon is not Germanic?? It's not clear...again.


Edited by Slayertplsko - 30-May-2008 at 20:16
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  Quote Sarmat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:16
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

It doesn't relate to our discussion.

What was the Old Saxon word for Kurgan (barrow/burial mound)? Berg -> Middle Persian Bereg

 
BTW, Bereg means bank (in the meaning of "bank of a river") or shore in Russian.
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:19
Originally posted by Sarmat12

Originally posted by Slayertplsko

It's the same in the western branch - človek Sg. - if you need a plural you use ľudia. (Ludej in russian I think)
Similar to the English person and people.
And yes, it applies to all nouns.
 
Not sure if I got what you meant, but in Russian we do use chelovek in plural meaning.
 
1-odin chelovek, 2-dva cheloveka, 3-tri cheloveka, 4-chetyre cheloveka, 5-pyat chelovek and so on...


Well it is occasionally used here too, but considered somewhat incorrect by many people - it sounds strange človekovia. The strange thing is that it is provided in grammar book as a regular plural, but you would most probably get corrected if you used it here.


Edited by Slayertplsko - 30-May-2008 at 20:21
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  Quote Sarmat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:49

Interestingly, in Russian you can use both, but then the form of the numeral will change e.g.

You can either say: dva cheloveka, or dvoe chelovek; tri cheloveka or troe chelovek, but the latter form just seems to be less appropriate for a Russian speaker.
 
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 20:56
Originally posted by Sarmat12

Interestingly, in Russian you can use both, but then the form of the numeral will change e.g.

You can either say: dva cheloveka, or dvoe chelovek; tri cheloveka or troe chelovek, but the latter form just seems to be less appropriate for a Russian speaker.
 


Interesting...we don't have such phenomenon. We have some doublets though:
dvaja psi (animate form)
dva psy (inanimate form)
pes - sabaka/dog
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  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 21:17

Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

Are Iranian langauges also considered as Indo-European langauges?
Yes, they are.

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  Quote Sarmat Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-May-2008 at 23:20
Originally posted by Slayertplsko


Interesting...we don't have such phenomenon. We have some doublets though:
dvaja psi (animate form)
dva psy (inanimate form)
pes - sabaka/dog
 
Interesting...
 
BTW we also have pes, which is a Slavic word for dog.
 
But the Russian word Sobaka, is actually Scythian. It's not really related to the discussion, but since we are talking about Scythians...Smile
 
It was recorded by Herodotus BTW. He wrote that the Scythian word for dog is "spaka." Besides Russian language it survived only in Talysh AFAIK.
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 08:27
We have some Scythian loan words too. Maybe we're both Scythian/Saxon peoples.Smile
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  Quote Cyrus Shahmiri Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 11:50

"Slav/Slov" comes from Persian Sakalaba, Arabic Saqaliba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba) and Greek Sklabos

Saka laba = Scythian Speakers

Laba also means "Lip" and "Verbal/Oral" in Persian.

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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 12:18
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

"Slav/Slov" comes from Persian Sakalaba, Arabic Saqaliba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba) and Greek Sklabos



It's vice-versa buddyWink
From Middle English sclave < Mediaeval Latin sclavus < Byzantine Greek σκλάβος < Old Church Slavonic словѣнинъ, словѣне. Probably related to слово. Beyond this, the ultimate etymology has long been a matter of dispute among linguists.










Edited by Slayertplsko - 31-May-2008 at 12:38
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 12:41
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

Laba also means "Lip" and "Verbal/Oral" in Persian.



And 'paw' in Western Slavic languages and Romanian, 'profit' in Indonesian, 'speaker/horn' in Mandarin, 'these' in Xhosa...so what??
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  Quote Cyrus Shahmiri Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 13:05
Originally posted by Slayertplsko

Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

"Slav/Slov" comes from Persian Sakalaba, Arabic Saqaliba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba) and Greek Sklabos



It's vice-versa buddyWink
From Middle English sclave < Mediaeval Latin sclavus < Byzantine Greek σκλάβος < Old Church Slavonic словѣнинъ, словѣне. Probably related to слово. Beyond this, the ultimate etymology has long been a matter of dispute among linguists.
 
I think "linguists" prefer to believe that there was no Scythians at all or no Iranian people in the eastern Europe! It is just important what Greeks and Romans say not those Iranian peoples who lived there!! Does it really matter for you what a Germanic or Slavic word means in the Iranian languages (at least as an Indo-European language)?
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 13:19
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

Originally posted by Slayertplsko

Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri

"Slav/Slov" comes from Persian Sakalaba, Arabic Saqaliba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba) and Greek Sklabos



It's vice-versa buddyWink
From Middle English sclave < Mediaeval Latin sclavus < Byzantine Greek σκλάβος < Old Church Slavonic словѣнинъ, словѣне. Probably related to слово. Beyond this, the ultimate etymology has long been a matter of dispute among linguists.
 
I think "linguists" prefer to believe that there was no Scythians at all or no Iranian people in the eastern Europe! It is just important what Greeks and Romans say not those Iranian peoples who lived there!! Does it really matter for you what a Germanic or Slavic word means in the Iranian languages (at least as an Indo-European language)?


What are you talking about?? словѣне doesn't resemble sakalaba at all..tell me now, honestly..does it??
I proved your etymology wrong so what's up?
Make it clear finally - what are you trying to prove?? (hitherto you have been trying to prove the Iranian origin of every nation whose name came up in this thread...that's quite suspicious don't you think so??)
So what are you trying to prove now?? And please stick to one theory finally and don't change it every two days. OK?Smile



Edited by Slayertplsko - 31-May-2008 at 13:31
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  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 14:32
Here are another two materials on the Middle English as creole hypothesis. I downloaded all the relevant pages, but I'm not sure anyone actually reads them so I'll just link the books and excerpt a bit from them. If you need more just ask me:
 
 
Andrei Danchev - The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited (p. 79-108)
 
"Beside the highly problematic existence of a foregoing pidgin, Middle English does not meet all the creoleness criteria [...] formulated by Bickerton [...], Markey [...], Mühlhäusler [...], Holm [...], Romaine [...] and others. Nor do the authors who strive to promote the case for ME creolization agree on whether Scandinavian or French were the main factors in that process.
Taken in their narrow sense, then, the the terms creolization and creole undoubtely do not fit very well a language like Middle English" (p. 81)
 
After acknowleding that Middle English displays some creole-like features, Danchev details on 17 such features identified by various other scholars studying creoles finding Middle English manifesting only 9 of them:
"In any case, it should be fairly clear by now that although a number of ME developments coincide almost completely with what we find in creoles, their evidence is not sufficient for tagging Middle English as a creole." (p. 98)
 
Related to the initial stage of our debate, on mixed languages:
"one can hardly resist the temptation to recall the well-known statements by Max Müller - "Es gibt keine Mischsprache" and of Hugo Schuchardt - "Es gibt keine völlig ungemischte Sprache" [...] These two statements, made during the latter half of the nineteenth century, have inspired and fuelled a lot of scholarly research and discussion. As a whole, the passage of time has vindicated the latter view, namely that every language is more or less mixed, that is, "pure" languages do not exist. But then, as Mühlhäusler [...] remarks "even though all langauges are 'mixed', some - to paraphrase Orwell's famous expression - are more 'mixed than others". And coming to the point now that interests us, how "mixed", really, is Middle English?" (p. 99)
 
"Returning to the question now posed at the beginning of this paper [...] we must repeat once again that Middle English was no creole.
On the other hand, however, it must be conceded that though falsified in an number of ways, the Middle English creolization hypothesis has served the useful purpose of stimulating debates and of drawing attention to a significant number of creolization-like, that is, near-universal simplification, features of Middle English." (p. 102)
 
http://books.google.com/books?id=tt5-AuIgsQMC
 
Christiane Dalton-Puffer - The French Influence on Middle English Morphology, section 5.2 Considering the possibilities of a creolist approach at p. 46-53
 
While she shows how several scholars suggesting the Middle English = creole dodged the traditional definition, she formalizes the problem (I'll put it here, so anyone using definition like Crystal's can see one of the essential difficulties in claiming a creole):
"set up the following calculus: if A and B both hold then C must hold too.
A) If Middle English is a Creole and
B) if a Creole is an extended pidgin
C) then there must have existed a pidgin before Middle English
It is obvious that there is total lack of evidence such a pidgin existed." (p. 48)
 
"As Middle English is undoubtely a product of language contact it is only natural that it should share certain features with Creoles and also with recessive languages. This, however, does not automatically qualify it as one of these, unless, of course, we are not too worried about being imprecise in our terminology." (p. 53)
 
It should be mentioned that in the review this latter book received in Language, 74.2/1998, p. 392-395, the reviewer Ingo Plag wrote "However, the idea that Middle English is a creole [...] has long been dismissed as thoroughly inadequate" wondering why the author felt necessary to dedicate as much as 8 pages to it.
 
Also, I've noticed the materials suggesting Middle English is not a creole are generally more recent that the materials suggesting it is, which suggests it was an older theory which is, for the moment, refuted.
 
Please note this is only a discussion for Middle English. For Old English, Yiddish, Bulgarian, Romance and whatever other langauges were claimed to be creole all the above problems must be resolved before claiming creoleness. After I've read also about further creolization criteria, it seems to me very unlikely (if not outright impossible) to have any of these other langaues as creoles (or even creole-like, to use one of those less rigid approaches). Because though many of them simplified relatively to their ancestors (e.g. Romance vs Latin, Bulgarian vs Common Slavic, etc.), none of them experienced such drastic simplifications as Middle English and they will certainly score worse when compared to real creole languages like those attested during early Modern European colonization overseas. It seems, after all, as several of these scholars remarked, that throwing left and right labels like "creole" or "mixed" is rather a matter of inaccuracy/lack of terminology than of anything else.
 
 


Edited by Chilbudios - 31-May-2008 at 14:34
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  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 18:02
Chilbudios, this is getting too difficult to handle here and too many different issues are getting mixed up. It's also the wrong place for the discussion anyway.
 
So I plan to open up the same issues in the Linguistics forum with more than one thread, and I've started by opening with a piece about the utility of simply calling English 'Germanic' (and the tree model of language development in general).
 
I'll do another on the subject of definitions of pidgin and creole, and then start one in the historical development of the English people and their language.
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  Quote Slayertplsko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-May-2008 at 18:12
Originally posted by Cyrus Shahmiri


It is just important what Greeks and Romans say not those Iranian peoples who lived there!! Does it really matter for you what a Germanic or Slavic word means in the Iranian languages (at least as an Indo-European language)?


Fistly, those Iranian peoples got little to say as we know almost nothing about their langauge. Secondly, wasn't it you who would quote Greeks and Romans so often??

And as for your question...yes it does, but and 'slověne' doesn't mean 'saka speaker'. Just as 'saka' isn't an equivalent to 'sake' in Japanese.
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