[PLUG-TALK] On languages

John Jason Jordan johnxj at gmx.com
Wed Feb 7 23:22:35 UTC 2018


On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 13:47:15 -0800 (PST)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>on the origins of creole <https://tinyurl.com/y8al6244>.

The article is a bit unclear about pidgin vs. creole. Allow me to
clarify.

The word 'pidgin' has nothing to do with birds. It is how merchants
along the Chinese coast pronounced English 'business.' In traditional
linguistics a 'pidgin' is the language that springs up when humans
speaking different languages come into contact and need to communicate.
Although there are some examples of pidgins that arose from other than
commercial contact, business is by far the preponderant impetus.

When a pidgin springs up there may be several languages involved, but
it's easier to explain assuming just two languages. In such a situation
one of the languages typically becomes the lexifier language, that is,
the source of most of the words. The other language supplies most of the
phonology and morphosyntax, the latter typically being highly analytic.
In the case of pidgins that arose from European global commercial
expansion starting in the 16th century the European language was almost
always the lexifier language.

In traditional linguistics the common language can continue as a pidgin
forever, but at some point the children learn it as their first
language, and when they do the language explodes - morphosyntax becomes
more complex, the lexicon expands to equal any other language, and
cultural pursuits such as poetry start to appear. This explosion can
happen in as little as one generation. And at that point the language
ceases to be a pidgin and is referred to as a creole.

What I described above is what is supposed to happen. In reality things
are a lot more messy. The first problem is that the world does not
always follow the prescribed nomenclature. For example, Hawaiian Pidgin
English has been an established creole for a couple hundred years, but
people still call it a pidgin. And 'creole' is sometimes used to
describe what is really nothing more than a dialect. But the biggest
problem is that the explosion doesn't usually happen according to the
script. There are usually multiple languages going on in a community in
addition to the creole, with constant borrowing and code-switching. 

Regarding Sierra Leone and its languages, Prof. Tucker Childs of PSU
has documented numerous endangered languages there and is an expert on
the area. He teaches 'Pidgins and Creoles' at PSU, but hurry up because
I think he is about to retire. And when I took his class he asked me
(because of my prior knowledge of Latin America) to present to the
class about Palenque(ro) and 'the missing Spanish creoles' (there are
only three). I still have the paper I wrote if anyone is curious. Oh,
and a 'maroon' was an escaped slave.



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