Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona

French has been called pidgin Latin but it's actually more mumbled Latin. You have to mumble it just right or they don't listen to you, though.

I have always suspected that they (and other Roman peoples) followed assimilation policies in their colonies because they had been forcibly assimilated themselves. The Romans were brutal, but anyone could become Roman, and after a few generations they were proudly Roman. Horace was the son of a Greek slave and Terence was an African slave himself. Americans have been called the new Romans for assimilating so many people, but we have a legacy of racism confused with out slavery which the Romans didn't.

How did Roman languages survive the barbarian migrations in so much of the old empire?

I think the idea of "mother tongue" may be relevant here. It's more obvious in Iberia, where a Visigothic surname with a Roman mother tongue is typical. Later in Ireland its better documented how Oliver Cromwell tried to push the Irish into Connaught as the Britons had been pushed back into Wales, but he sent no women, the settlers married (or took) Irish natives and within a generation or so the people were as Gaelic speaking as ever.


> On Nov 2, 2016, at 9:59 AM, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
>
> I've always been baffled how the french wound up speaking French instead of a Germanic language derived from Frankish, or gaulois. Wouldn't French have been at least somewhat a creole language engaging those two people? The roman contingent of their population was in the minority, yet after the 5th c their language replaced gaulois and Frankish.
> It's been explained to me how that happened, but I still remain baffled.
> ken
>
> Kenneth Harrow
> Dept of English and Film Studies
> Michigan State University
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> From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
> Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
> Date: Tuesday 1 November 2016 at 18:18
> To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Re: SV: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
>> As Abiola Irele points out in "In Praise of Alienation' and as Frank Ogiomoh sums up strikingly, are the Romance languages not forms of pidgin, the remnants of the erasure of native European languages by Roman colonization, making Dante's great Divine Comedy the first written literary work in pidgin Latin, as Ogiomoh put it? Dante waged a great and ultimately successful campaign to transform this language from a purely everyday language to one of high art and scholarship, laying out his case in his De Vulgaria Eloquentia, On the Vulgar Tongue, written in Latin, the language of scholarship at the time, and writing his epic poem Divina Commedia in a dialect of what was then the 'vulgar tongue', which I expect was the language of the masses, thereby contributing significantly to changing its fate forever, leading to today's Italian.
>
> Are Romance languages like French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc. also pidgins? Of course not. They are so-called Vulgar Latin, the previously nonstandard forms of Latin, which later became standardized with the rise of linguistic nationalisms. To have a pidgin, at least in the classical conception of the term, you need the confluence of an indigenous language and a foreign language.
>
> Farooq
>
> Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Journalism & Emerging Media
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> "The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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