I recently read an article about how creole languages around the world are remarkably similar, which the author used to suggest that human beings are "pre-wired" for language, and that creole grammar is the most natural.

A friend read it as well, and while I agreed with the author, she thought it was ridiculous. We got into a bit of a debate about it. She argued that all creole languages probably share a similar grammar because the master-slave relationship existed in all cases and the master's language in all cases was a Latin language. I pointed out that English is only somewhat Latin-based and that Dutch most certainly is not. She then rolled her eyes and said, "Fine, but they're all Romance languages, anyway."

I thought that Romance languages are, by definition, Latin-based. What is the definition of a Romance language?

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Romance (adjective) as 'derived or descended from Latin; designating or pertaining to any of the languages descended from Latin; of or pertaining to these languages collectively.'

The same dictionary defines English as 'Originally the language spoken by Germanic invaders of Britain in the 5th century A.D.. Now the language descended from this, used in Britain etc.' Dutch is from a West Germanic language.

The closest living language to English is Frisian, the language of a Northern Province of the Netherlands: " 'Good bread and good cheese' is good English and good Fries "

The influence of Latin in English is often overstated. Our grammar has very little in common with Latin grammar ; not many words of Latin have given us words directly; most words that we have of Latin origin have come from other languages, the languages of invaders who had got them from the Latin of their Roman conquerors long before.
A student of Latin has far less difficulty reading Spanish , Italian or even French than English simply because the vocabulary is largely recognisable from its Latin ancestry. You can take bets that they won't find that with English !

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 06-11-03 at 12:48 PM.]

Romance languages are those which are direct descendants of Latin, meaning that they are simply the later form of Latin that developed in different environments. The Romance languages are French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Rumanian, but there are many other descendants of the original Latin which have some claim to being languages in their own right, notably Catlan (spoken in Catalonia in Spain and in adjoining regions of France), Provençal in France, Romansch in Switzerland, and on and on. Much depends here on how you distinguish a different language from a mere variant dialect, but in any case, the principle is the same: Romance languages are derivatives of Latin (though it is perhaps important to point out that these are usually derived from dialects of Latin that were called vulgar, to differentiate them from the classical form of the language recorded in Cicero.

Dutch is not a Romance language. Like English, which is its very near relative, it is a Germanic language.

By the way, English cannot be properly said to be Latin based in any sense. English has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French, and a very considerable part more directly from Latin itself, but in its syntax, sound system, and basic lexicon, it is still thoroughly Germanic and very un-Latin-like.

The question about why Pidgin languages around the world often bear such close resemblance in syntax is an entirely different issue. Ever since the advent of generative-transformational grammar in the 60's, linguists have been greatly interested in the question of whether language acquisition devices are indeed hard-wired into the human brain. The subject is fascinating, and far too complex for me to do justice to here. There is already an immense body of literature on "universals of grammar" which goes far toward showing that, in fact, all human languages are much closer in underlying patterns than might be expected, and which are too easily obscured by the superficial differences among them.

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By the way, English cannot be properly said to be _Latin based_ in any sense. English has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French, and a very considerable part more directly from Latin itself, but in its syntax, sound system, and basic lexicon, it is still thoroughly Germanic and very un-Latin-like.
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Maiku, I know that you're right, but I've been ruminating about my argument with my friend, and lately I've been playing my own devil's advocate.
Here's what I've been debating with myself:

It seems to me that the structure of English and Spanish is not all that different. For example, I've heard that some languages require speakers to place a verb at the end of the sentence. To me, that is fundamentally different from English. That would be very hard for me to learn to do, I think. But Spanish requires very few such "mental gymnastics" for an English speaker. The major rethinking comes from the subjunctive case, but beyond that, I really don't see any huge differences between the way Spanish and English work. Perhaps I'm too comfortable with Spanish and have forgotten how hard it was to learn certain aspects of the language, but I still suspect that learning Chinese would be a far greater leap from English than learning Spanish was. Thus, I think that although English is not technically a Latin language, it is still clearly related to Spanish - perhaps it's enough that they are both Indo-European languages.

When my friend and I were discussing creoles, I was arguing that it really is remarkable that all of them chose to place auxiliary verbs before the verb. Later, though, I realized that both English and Spanish will generally place an auxiliary verb right before the verb itself (for example, "I had gone" and "Habia ido").

In addition, although Spanish is much looser when it comes to word order, I'd argue that even if I say "Habia ido yo" (had gone I) the language is still fundamentally subject-verb-object in word order, conceptually speaking, because the subject is inherent in the verb. The speaker must think of the subject first in order to conjugate the verb properly, so it might not come as a surprise that creoles coming out of such a language would choose S-V-O order.

I don't know how much Dutch resembles Spanish and English in these respects. Do you know if it does? I'm beginning to wonder if the similarities between creoles don't come from similarities between Indo-European languages.

If so, that might explain the similarity between creoles. Since the "master" language in all situations that led to creoles was an Indo-European language, that might account for the general similarities.

What do you think?

You are raising a very complex and even controversial issue here, Sarai.

Creole languages, insofar as their existence in many cases runs parallel with Western European colonial expansion, would of course be expected to reflect the structure of the parent Indo-European languages--Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese, largely--on which they are usually based. And of course all of these languages, descendents from a common parent, do have much in common in their syntax, as you observe. It would certainly account for the preferred SVO order, say. But be careful, here. This feature is really a very superficial one, according to some analysts, and as you probably already know, English used to have SOV word order in subordinate clauses, as modern German still does, along with its SVO order in main clauses. (Nor is this kind of "global" adjustment in word order at all hard to master. It is, in fact, hardly different from what you do when you make Pig Latin words out of ordinary English ones, and is no way really any more trouble to learn and learn quickly.)

Even so, tracing creole syntactic features to those of the generating languages alone would not account for many features creoles often have in common which are shared by none of the I.E. languages they are derived from. For example, creoles very often employ serial or concatenated verb constructions in subordinate clauses or phrases, use iteration of an adjective to show intensification, lose the morphological distinction between adjectives and adverbs, and generally adopt a system of aspectual particles to replace tense.

It is truly not understood completely why this should be the case. One hypothesis is that creole grammars, being free inventions of their creators, with minimal feedback from the "model" languages they reflect, draw from a set of features which are in some sense universals of language acquisition and are hardwired into the human brain, as I said above.

There is a very extensive literature on the subject, and it is a hotly debated one.