Re: Creole/mixed language question

Silence, knave! The Czhangman speaks!

> Pidgins and creoles overwhelming tend towards
> non-inflected forms and simplicity, hence quite
> often pidgins are called perjoratives like "broken
> language" or "baby talk." Pidgins and creoles are
> mutant offspring of both the lexifier-language and
> substrate languages, thus are totally new languages:
> 1 lexifier-language (i.e. the colonial language) + 1
> substrate language (the native language) = a 3rd
> language
Well, this is the situation I have: 1 base/substrate language +
2 lexifier languages. All three languages are morphologically
complex -- several noun genders and cases, person/tense/number
marking on verbs, etc. So my big question is, speaking as
"realistically" as possible, how morphologically complex is the
bastard offspring language likely to be?

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...

And spank you very much for all the info and book references, by
the way.

Thomas

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