Re: Learning a language

From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 06/16/04 

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:33:30 +0300

In article <40D02EA2.7D54@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

<deletions>

> Have you not heard of "mixed languages," such as Métif and Ma'a? No one
> who has studied them (recently: they have only recently been coming to
> light) considers them a creole, because they do not exhibit the
> grammatical characteristics of creoles.

Mixed languages, mixed schlanguages! We are talking about pidgins, and the
four defining characteristics of pidgins are the consequence of
sociolinguistic factors:
1. they lack native speakers;
2. they are not the product of intergenerational transmission;
3. they are functionally restricted;
4. they have to be learned as auxiliary varieties by *all* of their
speakers, the learning strategy for native speakers of the lexifying
language can often be reduced to a word-game-like algorithm for
pidginizing the lexical items of the lexifying language.

> IN SPECIFIC WAYS (which, as Bickerton has shown, reflect "UG")

Bickerton seems to be assuming that the languages involved in the
pidgin-to-creole process are basically isolating with minimal
agglutinative morphology, or at least can produce a language system that
works according to that typology.

<deletions>

> It's nice that you can reproduce the standard definitions -- but not
> nice that you miss the single most salient fact: all pidgins, and all
> creoles, share certain structural features regardless of the underlying
> languages.

This is just the point that I am questioning. If you have two languages
with simple and largely redundant inflectional morphology colliding, you
are going to get something typologically similar to Tok Pisin or Haitian
Creole. If you have languages with highly integrated and crucially
important morphology colliding, you stand to get something typologically
different.

Holm also recognizes that the anture of the *power relationship* between
the speakers of the languages that form the input to the creole play a
crucial role in pidgin formation. The more equal the power relationship,
the greater the likelihood that the langauges involved will contribute
equally to the lexicon (Holms 1988, pg. 6).

The definition of pidgin given in all of the standard introductions to the
field emphasizes the sociolinguistic situations that obtained during their
emergence and the limited functionality of their use once they have become
viable norms of communication, not their structural features:

Source: John A. HOLM. *Pidgins and Creole. Volume I. Theory and
Structure*. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, etc. 1988. Page 4 ff.:

<quote>
  A *pidgin* is a reduced language that results from extended contact
between groups of people with no language in common; it evolves when they
need some means of verbal communication, perhaps for trade, but no group
learns the native langauge of the other group for social reasons that may
include lack of trust or close contact. Usually those with less power
(speakers of *substrate* languages) are more accommodating and use words
from the language of those with more power (the *superstrate*), although
the meaning, form, and use of these words may be influenced by the
substrate languages. When dealing with the other groups, the superstrate
speakers adopt many of these changes to make themselves more reqadily
understood, and no longer try to speak as they would among their own
group. They co-operate with the other groups to creat a make-shift
language to serve their needs, simplifying by dropping unnecessary
complications such as inflections (e.g. *two knives* becomes *two knife)
and reducing the number of different words they use, but compensating by
extending their meanings or using circumlocutions. be definition the
resulting pidgin is restricted to a very limited domain such as trade, and
it is no one's native language (Hymes 1971: 43).

<deletions>
</quote>

Holms gives the same definition in his *An Introduction...*, 2000, pg. 4 ff.

Suzanne Romaine (Suzanne ROMAINE, *Pidgin & Creole Languages*, Longman,
London and New York, 1988) is a more wary, and she explores several
definitions, emphasizing the social as well as the structural aspects of
creole formation and use. Some of her arguments are based on principles
and parameters theiry, but she also acknowledges (pg. 28, passim), that
the processes of 'simplifying' a the structure of an analytical language
is differtent from that of simplifying a synthetic one.

> This was first explained by their all developing out of
> Portuguese; then, perhaps, by Dillard as by their all developing out of
> West African English; but these theories proved untenable when other
> creoles were identified. If a language doesn't exhibit the "universal"
> structure of a pidgin/creole, then it's not a pidgin/creole; it emerged
> via some other etiology than did pidgins/creoles.

That is your view if you regard pidginization as primarily a type of
structural process. Not all specialists in the field do, though. Many
regard pidginization as a type of language change that produces a code
having specific sociolinguistic characteristics (lack of native speakers
or intergenerational transmission, limited functionality, the necessity to
be learned by all speakers, simple algorithms for converting lexifier
words to pigin words) due to the nature of the sociolinguistic conditions
within which the changes tokk place.

Russenorsk, which Holm and everybody else regards as a pidgin, lacks some
of these 'typical' structural features, perhaps because one of its input
languages, Russian, had a complex and "serious" inflectional system,
perhaps due to the fact that Norwegian and Russian contributed to the
formation of the pidgin more equally than is the case in "typical" pidgin
formation. Russenorsk differs from many pidgins in having a system of
morphological derivation for word formation as well as relatively
consistent morphological markers to indicate whether a word is a noun,
e.g. klæba (< R. khleb), 'bread', mokka (< R. muka) 'flour', damosna (< R.
tamozhnaya) 'customs office', fiska (< N. fisk) 'fish', penga (< N.
penger) 'money', or a verb betalom (< N. betale) 'to pay', drikkom (< N.
drikke), robotom (< R. rabotat'). Many verbs, borrowed as finite forms,
lack this suffix: bestil (< N. bestil imperative) 'to order [something]',
snai (< R. znai imperative) 'to know', stoit (< R. stoit 3 sg present) 'to
cost'. Careful study of the existing corpus of Russenork shows that the
-om largely marks verbs of non-Russian origin, with only five examples
violating this, including the robotom 'to work', given as an exampole
above. (Source: Ingvild Broch, Ernst Håkon Jahr, *Russenorsk - et
pidginspråk i Norge* ["Russenorsk - a Pidgin language in Norway], Novus
Forlag, Oslo, 1984, pg. 43 ff.

Regards,
Eugene Holman

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