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
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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