We are almost completely certain that Vulgar Latin is not a creole.Agreed. But we can't also know how Vulgar Latin came into existence.
We are almost completely certain that Vulgar Latin is not a creole.Agreed. But we can't also know how Vulgar Latin came into existence.
Actually it's Sardinian. Out of the "major" languages, it's Italian, then Spanish, then Romanian. (French is the most divergent by far.) This has been proven by research.
Very poorly. It would be a little easier (but not much easier) than you going to Germany 2000 years ago and trying to understand this sentence:
Þat hauzidaz awiz akrą flauh.
Or like Xi Jinping landing in Chang'an in 100 AD and trying to understand this sentence:
Kruk ne de gwep te, pe ghak lot gha?
Huh, a little googling suggests that Mr. Xi seems to know at least how to read Classical Chinese fluently. Now, reading isn't writing (especially given a language like Classical Chinese), but yeah, he might have it more easier than I assumed.To be fair, Xi Jinping is familiar with the Analects of Confucius, so he would have very few problems if he could manage to deal with literate people. As I understand it, his calligraphy isn't heinous either, so he'd be quite able to communicate if he didn't slip up and write in simplified characters.
Not very? French Caribbean creoles are almost entirely French in vocabulary (Haitian has almost no African loanwords) but show extensive Gbe influences in grammar. This accords with the idealized model of a creole, where the entire lexicon comes from the lexifier (here French) but derives its grammar from the substrate.
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Umm... /ʃɥi/ is super different from /sʊm/.
We are almost completely certain that Vulgar Latin is not a creole.
Except the consonant clusters, which are totally absent from any Chinese language today, would be a formidable barrier to any modern Chinese speaker. The lack of tones and disyllabic words and a different sentence structure wouldn't help either.And spoken language barriers wouldn't necessarily be the barrier we might intuit. The guy was born in Beijing, and probably only ever needed to learn Henan and Shaanxi dialects, if those. Both are relatively similar to Mandarin - like adjacent dialects of Italian maybe. But he'd have been around people speaking utterly unintelligible languages his whole life; that's just the reality of China. I would hazard a guess that he'd be able to fudge a conversation better than I might in 18 AD Holstein, even though I'm probably a lot more multilingual than Mr Xi.
"Suis" in itself is /sɥi/, but the word (some linguists don't even think it's a word) doesn't work alone. It needs a je in front. And when I speak French, I'd say J'suis /ʃɥi/ instead of Je suis with the schwa and all.Strange, is that spoken/colloquial French? I was always taught it was /sɥi/ , maybe with a hint of /ʃ/ ?
Huh, a little googling suggests that Mr. Xi seems to know at least how to read Classical Chinese fluently. Now, reading isn't writing (especially given a language like Classical Chinese), but yeah, he might have it more easier than I assumed.
Except the consonant clusters, which are totally absent from any Chinese language today, would be a formidable barrier to any modern Chinese speaker. The lack of tones and disyllabic words and a different sentence structure wouldn't help either.
EDIT: Not entirely sure when tonogenesis really took off in Chinese, but regardless it would still have been pretty incomprehensible to modern day speakers.
It's pretty opaque to a native speaker as well. IIRC, tones corresponded to syllable final consonants more than they did to initials, and all the tone splits and merges that have occurred since have basically obliterated any pattern detectable to a non-linguist since most of the Chinese languages outside of the south have lost the majority of final consonants. As a native speaker of Hokkien, which along with the other Min languages arguably kept some key features of Old Chinese that the rest of China did not, having split from Old Chinese before Middle Chinese arose (namely preservation of alveolar stops, some voiced initials, and most of the final consonants), the best I can do is sometimes guess the correct initial consonant in an Old Chinese word.True, true. That said, the tones paralleled existing systems of consonant clusters - people dropping consonants in part used tones to distinguish words that were becoming homophones because of lost phonemes. Which is to say that there might be patterns of consonant clusters to tones that would be relatively intuitive to native speakers - even if they were completely unable to produce the sounds themselves - even if all that is opaque from my perspective as a language learner.
Tone proliferation was sometime after the fall of the Later Han, and when the Sui and Tang were reforming and merging Northern-Southern Chinese, it was already there. Middle (Tang) Chinese is a lot more recognizable than Classical.
It's pretty opaque to a native speaker as well. IIRC, tones corresponded to syllable final consonants more than they did to initials, and all the tone splits and merges that have occurred since have basically obliterated any pattern detectable to a non-linguist since most of the Chinese languages outside of the south have lost the majority of final consonants. As a native speaker of Hokkien, which along with the other Min languages arguably kept some key features of Old Chinese that the rest of China did not, having split from Old Chinese before Middle Chinese arose (namely preservation of alveolar stops, some voiced initials, and most of the final consonants), the best I can do is sometimes guess the correct initial consonant in an Old Chinese word.
Going back to the original topic of whether French Atlantic Creoles are Romance languages, basilectalization is sufficient to provides a break in the normal type of transmission so that it's pointless to call e.g. Haitian a Romance language, since its formative stages appear to have been shaped entirely by second-language speakers (no pidgin stage is attested for Haitian).