Re: Learning a language
From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 06/11/04
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Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:22:21 +0300
In article <40C99DB0.3F41@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40C92D01.3FFC@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
<deletions>
> >
> > By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with native
> > speakers. Being a creole is the *consequence* of the elaboration and
> > acqisition of a body of native speakers of an earlier jargon or pidgin
> > which had arisen from contact between speakers of different languages.
> >
> > Indonesian arose from a transplantation of Malay to a specific locality,
> > after which it was strongly modified due to its rapidly becoming the
> > language of people who spoke a different, highly divergent languages, such
> > as Dutch, Javananese, English, and Pidgin English. The result was
> > something that looks like a streamlined version of Malay, with
> > regularization or loss of some of the more quirky grammatical details of
> > classical Malay and radically different strategies for augmenting
> > vocabulary.
> >
> > Although I would agree with you that Indonesian is not a creole, I would
> > argue that many, perhaps most, of the features differentiating it from
> > Malay are consequences of a period in its recent history when it a
> > rapidly acquired a large body of second-language speakers, and their
> > non-native patterns of usage acquired enough prestige to function as a
> > major input into the process of elaborating further, alternative norms
> > (understood in a loose sense as the consistent patterns of spoken and
> > written usage in characterizing various registers). The notion creoloid
> > input would be useful here, as it is when studying the evolution of
> > Afrikaans.
> >
> > What, in your opinion, qualifies as a genuine creole? What term do you use
> > to refer to the non-native mixed varieties of a language that arise
> > consequent to language contact and the urgent need to learn and elaborate
> > rough and ready vernacular mixtures of two or more languages?
>
> PLEASE get a dictionary of linguistics. I'd suggest either those by
> Larry Trask or those by David Crystal.
David Crystal: *Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics*, 4th edition,
1997, Blackwell: Oxford, pg. 99:
<quote>
*creole (creolize, de-creoliz-ation)* A term used in SOCIOLINGUISTICS to
refer to a PIDGIN LANGUAGE which has become the mother-tongue of a SPEECH
community, as is the case in Jamaica, Haiti, Dominica, and several other
ex-colonial parts of the world. The process of *creolization* expands the
STRUCTURAL and STYLISTIC range of the pidginized language, such that the
*creolized language* becomes comparable in FORMAL and FUNCTIONAL
COMPLEXITY to other languages. A process of *decreolization* takes place
when the STANDARD language begins to exert influence on the creole, and a
POST-CREOLE CONTINUUM emerges.
</quote>
John Holm: *An introduction to pidgins and creoles*, 2001, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, pg. 10:
<quote>
However, others say that these particular varieties are rather the
products of *semi-creolization*, which occurs when people with different
first languages shift to a typologically distinct target language (itself
an amalgam of different dialects in contact, including fully restructured
varieties) under social circumstances that partially restrict their access
to the target language as normally used by native speakers. The processes
that produce a semi-creole include *dialect levelling* (see
*koineization*) below, preserving features that may be archaic or regional
in the standard language; *language drift*, following internal tendencies
within the source language, such as phonotactic morphological or syntactic
simplification; *imperfect language shift* by the entire population,
perpetuating features from ancestral languages or *interlanguages* (see
below) in the speech of monolingual descendants, and *borrowing* features
from fully pidginized or creolized varieities of the target language
spoken by newcomers or found locally but confined to areas where
sociolinguistic conditions are favourable to full restructuring; in some
cases *secondary levelling*, corrsponding to the *decreolization* which
full creoles can undergo. These processes result in a new variety with a
substantial amount of the source langauge's structure, but also with a
significant number of the structural features of a creole, such as those
inherited from its substrate or the interlanguages that led to its
preceding pidgin (Holm 1998aq, 1998b, fc).
</quote>
This second scenario, semi-creolization or, in my formulation, having an
input from creolized varieties in its recent past, is what I have been
talking about for the past week, and Holm claims it to have been a factor
in the evolution of Afrikaans and Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
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