Evidence
Keith Whinnom pinpointed the idea that a proto-pidgin "spread via normal linguistic diffusion" and claimed that there are many similarities between Spanish contact vernaculars and languages of this type used in the Philippines and a Portuguese Creole in India. These similarities are to be found in the fields of syntax and certain parts of vocabulary.
While many creoles around the world have lexicons based on languages other than Portuguese (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Dutch), it was hypothesized that such creoles were derived from this lingua franca by means of relexification, i.e. the process in which a pidgin or creole incorporates a significant amount of its lexicon from another language while keeping the grammar intact. There is some evidence that relexification is a real process. Pieter Muysken and Bakker & Mous (1994) show that there are languages which derive their grammar and lexicon from two different languages respectively, which could be easily explained with the relexification hypothesis. Also, Saramaccan seems to be a pidgin frozen in the middle of relexification from Portuguese to English. However, in cases of such mixed languages, as Bakker & Mous (1994) call them, there is never a one-to-one relationship between the grammar or lexicon of the mixed language and the grammar or lexicon of the language they attribute it to.
Todd (1990) attempted to postulate the relatedness of pidgins and creoles, with a lingua franca known as Sabir or Mediterranean Lingua Franca as the starting point, which was then relexified by the Portuguese and then subsequently by various other European powers.
Read more about this topic: Monogenetic Theory Of Pidgins
Famous quotes containing the word evidence:
“Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Important as fathers are, their influence on children shouldn’t be exaggerated just because they were ignored so long. There is no evidence that there is something especially good about fathers as caretakers. There are no areas where it can be said that fathers must do certain things in order to achieve certain outcomes in children. The same goes for mothers.”
—Michael Lamb (late–20th century)
“Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious or so insidious a lobby. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby.... I know that in this I am speaking for the members of the two houses, who would rejoice as much as I would to be released from this unbearable situation.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)