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hadn't it been for André Martinet requiring me to put African studies and Romanistics
on a par in my curriculum. I eventually came to the conclusion that the most
attractive theories weren't necessarily meant to hold the road. It's certainly my
Romanistic background which stopped the Africanist in me to make my bread and butter
on the most attractive theory.

So far I havn't seen any substratist of prototyper who's training in Romanistics I
could call excellent enough to consider it on a par with the rest of his or her
training.

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would not know the botanical extensions in the meaning of the French word <pied>
"foot" and derived lexical compounds of the type "pied d(e) X"?

I do know them. This knowledge and my position on /pye-bwa/ are not incompatible,
as I hope to have shown above. For someone who chided me for not being sufficiently
cautious, Professor Witman appears rather reckless in drawing conclusions.

Shown where? Even "Creolisters" of persuasions other than mine are left to conclude
that my conclusions as to the inconclusiveness of your "knowledge and ... position"
are far from being "reckless".

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In short, affixes are borrowed until proven inherited.

This attempt at caricature is in fact not too far from the truth.

Sorry, this is rubbish. Affixes in any sort of linguistics are innocent of borrowing
until proven borrowed.

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We find that a certain class of languages (creoles) shows massive morphological
loss.

You failed to establish that for Haitian Creole. Whatever evidence you had to start
with in this debate has gone down the drain. All there is left is to admit as an
article of fait that HC shows "massive morphological loss". The mere etnonym
"Creole" does not have to imply any such belief.

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In those creoles which were early isolated from their lexifiers (Ndjuka and other
Surinamese creoles) we find that NO morphology survived from the lexifier to the
Creole.

This might be true for "Ndjuka and other Surinamese creoles" but we're discussing
here Haitian Creole for which these assertions are false.

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Other creoles, which have remained in contact with their lexifiers, show
derivational but little if any inflectional morphology therefrom. Derivational
morphology is more easily borrowed than inflectional morphology. What would the
simplest, most natural explanation be?

If "other creoles" here means "Haitian Creole", then you have failed to demonstrate
when, why and how HC turned from "affixeless" to something else. Again, we have to
believe you on faith, a.k.a. your framework of believes based on "natural
explanation".

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Why, that those creoles which remained in contact with their lexifiers borrowed
their morphology from their lexifiers. If one believes in the principle of parsimony
(also known as Occam's razor), then this should be one's working hypothesis.

I have shown that parsimony works best within a standard framework of linguistics.
Except for repeating that your razor cut MUST be the right one, you havn't brought up
anything serious to show in which way my applying the priciple of parsimony could be
wrong or not well-founded in any way.

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So, within creole studies, yes: lexifier affixes in creoles are borrowings until
proven otherwise.

Your article of faith number one:It can't be proven to be false!

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And as my previous posting indicated, diachronic phonology cannot be used to prove
that an affix was not borrowed.

Why not. All you have done so far in this debate is repeating your own articles of
faith. It sounds like a neverending prayer mill. You haven't taken up any of my
arguments painstakingly one by one to show me wrong. The following question to you
will be meant as a challenge:Can you explain to us what step by step scientific
method it takes to satisfy the requirement that there must be a FEASIBLE way to show
you wrong? If you can't, your theory isn't falsifiable:Do you know what that
means?

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I don't envy my opponents' position, frankly: the burden of proof is upon them,

It looks like the haydays of inquisition:With faith on your side, you don't have
anything to prove. The burden of prove rests with those that challenge your articles
of faith.

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and there really is no way I can think of for them to prove that their beloved
affixes are indeed inherited.

Well, it looks like we got the answer to what I thought could be a challenge to you:
If "there really is no way" you "can think of" for us to falsify your beliefs, well,
it means that nobody except GOD can debate with you with a fair chance to get
anywhere. Amen.

Appendix 9:REPLY TO PARKVALL (26/02/01)

There'll be eight sections to this reply:9.0. On dishonesty and unscholarly
behavior; 9.1. The "sontaient" syndrome; 9.2Noun class system death and determiner
system renewal; 9.3. The syntax of comparative constructions; 9.4. More on verb
serialization; 9.5. Bimorphemic interrogatives; 9.6. The Saint-Barth "enigma"; 9.7.
Varia; 9.8. The rest of Out of Africa; 9.9. Concluding on Parkvall. I'm sending them
in the following order:(1) 9.0, 9.1, 9.2;(2) 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6;(3) 9.7, 9.8,
9.9. A mime-compliant handout for the examples is available at:

< http://cafe.rapidus.net/hwittman/01h1-glotto9.pdf>

and alternately at:

< http://homepage.mac.com/noula/01h1-glotto9.pdf>

9.0

ON DISHONESTY AND UNSCHOLARLY BEHAVIOR

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Mikael Parkvall wrote (26/02/01)

I have been somewhat reluctant to respond to Henri Wittmann's latest postings for
several reasons. one of these is lack of time, but another one is what I see as a
DISHONEST AND UNSCHOLARLY TREATMENT OF THE MATERIAL he cites from my recent book
[Parkvall 2000, emphasis added].

Regarding the presense of a specific kind of article agglutination found more
frequently in the Indian Ocean than in the Caribbean French creoles, Wittmann says
that:

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Parkvall (2000:81-83) who had all these and other facts at his disposal concludes
notwithstanding that "substrate factors were somehow at work. I have not been
able to identify these, however."

Did I actually conclude this? To be on the safe side, I looked up what I actually
had written, and it turned out that Wittmann had deleted a rather significant part
of the sentence he quoted from me. What I did write was that the data discussed
earlier on the same page, "MIGHT SUGGEST that substrate factors were somehow at
work. I have not been able to identify these, however" (emphasis added). In the
summarising table immediately following upon this, I clearly did not include the
feature in question, as I did elsewhere throughout the book when I claimed to have

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identified a piece of evidence in favour of substrate derivation. I think this
pretty clearly shows that I did not uncritically conclude it to be
substrate-derived.

What it does suggest, however, is a tendency of Wittmann's to DELIBERATELY QUOTE
CITATIONS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT. [Emphasis added]

This particular posting is entirely devoted to Parkvall's posting as cited above.
I'll try to be as dishonest and unscholarly as befits the material at hand. I'll
return specifically to dishonesty and unscholarly behavior in regard to the
agglutination issue in section 9.2.

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Fortunately, Wittmann's Magoua data is extremely more interesting. I have admitted
before that I have never seen any variety of French looking so much like a creole,
and this, of course is what makes it so interesting. In Magoua, Wittmann has a more
powerful argument in favour of the superstratist position than I've ever seen
before. One problem I have, though, is that no one else seems to have described the
variety. Without doubting Wittmann's expertise on Magoua, he does claim that there
are other varieties that look pretty similar, and this is something that is not
borne out by what I have read on colonial varieties French. It may be some time ago,
but I have read about the exotic varieties of French in Monroe county (Michigan),
Old Mines (Mississippi), St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), Louisiana, and elsewhere. And
none of them looked as creole-like as Magoua does in Wittmann's description, despite
many being in an advanced stage of language death. Although we don't know what
sociolinguistic factors that lie behind this, it could be that an unusually large
number of simplificatory changes have happened to cluster in Magoua.

[...]

Though I don't know anything about Magoua except for what Wittmann himself has
taught us (since there seems to be no other source to turn to), I apparently need to
repeat once more that I am familiar with non-standard varieties of French spoken
overseas.

The underlying insinuations require some rectifying comments as to what might be a
problem in a perspective of ethics in scholarship. I heard about Parkvall for the
first time in January 1997 when he was in Aix to learn more about koine French
varieties as a possible input into creole French. Since this is not exactly their
"fort", I was put to contribution and this is how I came to send him the materials he
mentions on page 15 of his thesis. At the time I thought to have reason to believe
he would investigate African origin hypotheses on a par with koine French orientated
evidence. That this is not so is obvious not only from the title but also at the
outset from his "Aim and scope of the study". Though I had sent him everything
Robert Fournier and myself had ever got to writing down, including in preprint form
everything that appeared in 1997 and 1998, only fleeting mention is made to this
material:On pages 70 and 74 from a 1983 review of C. Lefebvre's first version of
relexification and on pages 78 and 90 from our 1996 critique of the same hypothesis
(published in 1998). The 1983 article is used to represent our stand on
serialization though much newer material was available to him. As a matter of fact,
he could have easily averted adverse criticism in part IV (on serialization) by
referring to that material (see here under 9.3 and 9.4). On page 78, he extrapolates
the relevant information on the post-nominal determiner system [that koine French
developed in replacement of the categorially downgraded pre-nominal article system]
to a point where I have difficulty to believe he didn't see the correlated evidence
on "a specific kind" of pre-nominal "article agglutination" continuum (see here under
9.2). I utterly fail to understand how he can thus conclude that (2000:83):

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Even if the French Creole agglutination strategy as such has nothing to do with
substrate influences [...], its very different frequency in various FCs [...]
might suggest that substrate factors [though admittedly unidentifiable] were
somehow at work.

without somehow coming to grips with our hypothesis of natural drift (based on the
diffusion of agglutination phenomena in koine and creole varieties of French) he
admittedly came into contact with (Fournier 1998, cited by him as Fournier 1996). On
page 90, citing from the 1996 preprint version of Wittmann 1998, he demonstrates his
capacity of extrapolating Magoua data when its suits his purposes, leaving aside the

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