"Just Thinking..." #2: what if some isolates are old creoles?
I was just thinking.. What if some isolates are old creoles? If there are really old creoles around, would we not first classify them as isolates? Or as "really weird and simplified members" of their main lexifier's genealogical group? How would we know that they are old creoles if we don't have the sociohistorical context? I was talking to my friend Abbie Hantgan the other day, she's worked on an isolate language called Bangime [ bang1363, dba ] and we got to thinking. What if Bangime is an old Dogon lexified creole? What if this is true of more isolates? Very often we know about the existence of contact languages because we know the socio-historical context of their creation. But that type of knowledge doesn't go back that far, and there is no reason to assume that there weren't contact languages before that. So how do we recognise languages that are old creoles? If we didn't know better perhaps we've been classifying them as isolates...