Learning a language
Patrick Powers
This is a creole with lots of Arabic and some Chinese, Portugese,
English, Pidgin, Latin, and who knows what else. The grammar is
simple, regular, and unambiguous, with virtually every word always a
noun, verb, adjective, etc. so the complex grammar of English is
unneeded. The Latin alphabet is used and spelling is almost
completely phonetic. The only non-Western sound is the glottal stop.
Idioms are very rare.
I am renting a room in a homestay where a three-year-old girl lives
and am learning the language much faster than her. I can also compare
my skill with myself at age seven when I lived for one year in
Bavaria. I'd say I learned German more quickly and better, but the
difference is not all that marked.
In defense of three-year-old girls, it is surely much easier to learn
a language if one can read and write as oppose to simply overhearing
full-speed conversation. I've never noticed anyone teaching her to
speak.
I got nowhere for two months until I realized I could not memorize
sounds and did much better with written words. Even back when I was
seven one of the best tools for learning was comic books. I had to
sit down and brute force memorize using flash cards. Now that I have
a good start memorizing words by sounds is much easier. Perhaps the
brain rejects something quite unfamiliar as "not a word". It is much
easier to learn words similar to what is known.
I also teach English here. Many people learn English in school
starting with middle school. The emphasis is on reading and writing,
so while many can do that quite well often they cannot speak a single
sentence without the aid of paper. Europeans often can speak English
almost as well as a native speaker. When I asked why I was told that
English language shows were on television with subtitles so they had
heard the language all their lives.
One of the best English speakers I have met had never studied the
subject in school. He did not know the grammar and simply read a good
deal and practiced conversation whenever possible. I think it is
quite possible that knowledge of grammar is an impediment to learning.
There is no question that the most important thing in learning to
speak is practice.
I've been told that Indonesian has "no grammar", that it is monotone,
and that syllables are not accented, none of which is true. All these
shows is that cultural conditioning can render one partially deaf. Or
perhaps having studied music all my life improved my ear. I also do
better than most with the accent, but this is purely mechanical. Most
adult westerners do not realize they should move the tongue back in
the mouth about half an inch.
Another odd thing is the difficulty everyone has with ending a word
with 's' for plural. It is such a simple rule, and plenty of
Indonesian words end with 's'. More complicated rules such as the
tenses of "to be" are learned more easily.
Another thing I've noticed in the writing of Balinese people is their
ability to construct grammatically correct sentences that nevertheless
seem quite alien. I'm convinced that people do not learn language in
a logical way. The may infer some rules, but mostly it is "when I
want to do this I say that". Grammatically correct phrases and
sentences are memorized for the most part. For that matter, English
has plenty of idioms that made no literal sense at all. In other
words, language is built by imitation, memorization and building on
what one knows, not by using rules to define the space of possible
sentences then choosing the best sentence from that space. Such a
space is far too large. I've also realized how repetitions everyday
life tends to be and how little one needs to be quite fluent. Reading
the newspaper is a whole 'nother matter.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
> This is a creole
It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Patrick Powers wrote:
> >
> > I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
> > This is a creole
>
> It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with a 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 asre 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 wgen 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?
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Brian M. Scott
(Eugene Holman) wrote in
<news:holman-1106...@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi> in
sci.lang:
> In article <40C92D...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>> Patrick Powers wrote:
>>> I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
>>> This is a creole
>> It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
> By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with a native
> speakers.
But not a perfectly normal *Austronesian* (or Germanic, or
Slavic, or ...) language. A creole is missing the unbroken
chain of native speakers.
[...]
Brian
benlizross
>
> In article <40C92D...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Patrick Powers wrote:
> > >
> > > I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
> > > This is a creole
> >
> > It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
>
> By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with a 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,
What locality do you have in mind? And when do you think this happened?
Ross Clark
Harlan Messinger
Looks like somebody's slipped back into iso-2022-jp.
--
Harlan Messinger
Remove the first dot from my e-mail address.
Veuillez er le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.
Eugene Holman
b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 08:21:21 +0300 hol...@elo.helsinki.fi
> (Eugene Holman) wrote in
> <news:holman-1106...@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi> in
> sci.lang:
>
> > In article <40C92D...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >> Patrick Powers wrote:
>
> >>> I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
> >>> This is a creole
>
> >> It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
>
> > By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with a
> > body of native speakers.
>
> But not a perfectly normal *Austronesian* (or Germanic, or
> Slavic, or ...) language. A creole is missing the unbroken
> chain of native speakers.
Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use, it
is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers from
the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they were
native speakers or not is beside the point. For some of the people using
it when it was evolving, it was an off-beat variety of English modified in
a specific and systematic manner.
The same holds true for another archetypical creole: Haitian. There has
always been some degree of intelligibility between it and French, so the
issue of native speakers does not seem to be of primary importance. Even
more than is the case with Tok Pisin, Haitian also disposes over a range
of registers, so that there is a continuum between radical creole and
French-influenced creole.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
PLEASE get a dictionary of linguistics. I'd suggest either those by
Larry Trask or those by David Crystal.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40C92D...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
<deletions>
> >
> > By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with native
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
POT-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
inout 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
Eugene Holman
> > input would be useful here, as it is when studying the evolution of
input from creolized varieties in its recent past, is what I have been
Eugene Holman
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40C92D...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@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.
Peter T. Daniels
Then you would do well to start using the standard terminology in its
standard usages, rather than "your formulation."
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deletions>
> >
> > 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.
>
> Then you would do well to start using the standard terminology in its
> standard usages, rather than "your formulation."
The terminology an concepts are not set in stone, and alternative
formulations focus on different aspects. McMahon spoke of "creoloid"
languages, focusing more on the result, Holm speaks of
"semi-creolization", focusing on the processes of language change in
conditions characterized by massive language contact and high prestige for
the jargonized varieties that thus emerge, whereas I spoke of languages
"having an input from creolized varieties in the recent past", focusing on
the sociolinguistics of norm elaboration. As a practicing diachronically
oriented sociolinguist I certainly have the right to use and adapt
terminology to fit specific cases and sets of circumstances. Nowhere did I
use the terms "pidgin" or "creole" in an unacceptable manner.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
benlizross
>
> benlizross <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
>
> Looks like somebody's slipped back into iso-2022-jp.
>
> --
> Harlan Messinger
> Remove the first dot from my e-mail address.
Yah, OK. But this time there were no funny letters, so you should have
been able to read it, right?
People keep posting things that have bits of funny-language in them. I
fool around with the document encoding to see if I can get them legible.
Then I leave it there. It doesn't seem to make ordinary A-Z illegible --
in fact provides a bit of visual variation which I enjoy. But I must
admit I am using an ancient version of Netscape. Maybe with more
advanced machinery life is not so simple.
Ross Clark
Harlan Messinger
"benlizross" <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message
news:40C9C0...@ihug.co.nz...
> Harlan Messinger wrote:
> >
> > benlizross <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> >
> > Looks like somebody's slipped back into iso-2022-jp.
> >
> > --
> > Harlan Messinger
> > Remove the first dot from my e-mail address.
> > Veuillez ôter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel.
>
> Yah, OK. But this time there were no funny letters, so you should have
> been able to read it, right?
Not really: My newsreader, for some reason, is configured to display
Japanese in a teeny-tiny font. Yeah, I could change it, but it was easier to
hassle you, especially since you should change your charset anyway. :-)
Brian M. Scott
[...]
> The terminology an concepts are not set in stone, and alternative
> formulations focus on different aspects. McMahon spoke of "creoloid"
> languages, focusing more on the result,
This is a bit disingenuous, at least if it refers to her
remarks in _Understanding Language Change_: she *objects* to
the terminology.
[...]
Brian
Eugene Holman
b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
Yes, she does, but she admits that it exists. I remember first encoutering
the concept as I understand it in the writings of Peter Trudgill.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
John Atkinson
"Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
> b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
>
> > (Eugene Holman) wrote:
> >
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > >> Patrick Powers wrote:
> >
> > >>> I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
> > >>> This is a creole
> >
> > >> It's hardly a creole. It's a perfectly normal Austronesian language.
> >
> > > By definition a creole is a perfectly normal language with a
> > > body of native speakers.
> >
> > But not a perfectly normal *Austronesian* (or Germanic, or
> > Slavic, or ...) language. A creole is missing the unbroken
> > chain of native speakers.
>
> Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
> that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use, it
> is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
> evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers from
> the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they were
> native speakers or not is beside the point.
Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
childhood) is *exactly* the point. Tok Pisin did not have any native
speakers for the first few generations of its existence (in all-male
communities), and even today most speakers learn it as a second language.
Bazaar Malay always had native speakers. Thus TP is today an expanded
(creolised) pidgin. Bahasa Indonesia is not.
I think you're exaggerating the (non-lexical) differences between B
Indonesia (and B Malaysia, which is almost identical) and the Melaka dialect
of Malay, which is the direct descendent of Classical Malay. (However, I'm
far from an expert on any of these.)
Of course, Indonesians include monolinguals, bilinguals who've been exposed
to it from infancy, people who learned it at school, Orang Ulu who first
encountered it in adulthood, and people whose native language is some other
form of Malay. Thus some varieties of BI are surely much more "simplified"
and "pidginish" than others.
What I said above would, however, apply to the standard language, the
variety government people use (or attempt to use) in official texts, and
that they aim to teach in schools.
John.
Eugene Holman
Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote:
> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
><deletions>
> >
> > Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
> > that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use, it
> > is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
> > evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers from
> > the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they were
> > native speakers or not is beside the point.
>
> Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
> childhood) is *exactly* the point.
I question this. Is there really any significant difference between:
1. a native speaker, that is to say, one who learns language X as his/her
first language, and
2. a public speaker, that is to say, one who uses language X, learned
rather than acquired natively, as his/her default language for all
communication outside of the family circle.
Living in Helsinki, I am quite familiar with this phenomenon. Our city is
officially bilingual, and abut ten percent of the population has Swedish
as their native language. Nevertheless, the default language here is, with
few exceptions, Finnish, and many Swedish speakers use Finnish in a wider
range of situations and thus have a better command of it than they do of
their native Swedish.
> Tok Pisin did not have any native
> speakers for the first few generations of its existence (in all-male
> communities), and even today most speakers learn it as a second language.
Necertheless, it probably had speakers who were more fluent in it and were
used to using it in a wider range of communicative situations than they
were their native languages. The people they interacted with in Tok Pisin
were not concerned with their possible native speaker ability, but rather
with their ability to interact with them in Tok Pisin better than they
could in any other language.
<deletions>
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Brian M. Scott
(Eugene Holman) wrote in
<news:holman-1206...@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi> in
sci.lang:
> In article <ytsyc.5220$sj4....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "John
> Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote:
>> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
>><deletions>
>>> Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
>>> that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use, it
>>> is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
>>> evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers from
>>> the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they were
>>> native speakers or not is beside the point.
>> Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
>> childhood) is *exactly* the point.
> I question this. Is there really any significant difference between:
> 1. a native speaker, that is to say, one who learns language X as his/her
> first language, and
> 2. a public speaker, that is to say, one who uses language X, learned
> rather than acquired natively, as his/her default language for all
> communication outside of the family circle.
Yes.
[...]
Brian
Eugene Holman
b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
Why? Both are confronted with the same task. The adult fluent second
language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
John Atkinson
"Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
Did these Finns speak and hear nothing but Swedish until they reached
adulthood, and then travel away from their Swedish-speaking communities to
live in all-male communities of non-Swedish-speakers for periods lasting
typically 5 years (where they learn and use TP), and on their return home
resume their previous life and never use TP again? This was the situation
with TP during the first half-century or more of its existence, which is why
it was a typical pidgin.
Today, of course, the situation with TP is a bit more like what you describe
with Helsinki Swedish, at least in some localities.
> > Tok Pisin did not have any native
> > speakers for the first few generations of its existence (in all-male
> > communities), and even today most speakers learn it as a second
language.
>
> Necertheless, it probably had speakers who were more fluent in it and were
> used to using it in a wider range of communicative situations than they
> were their native languages.
Sure, some plantation workers never made it back to their native islands.
In time, they might forget how to apply their native languages to
non-domestic situations, and therefore be "more fluent" in TP. They might
marry girls from around their workplaces (native speakers of a local
language), and have children who might correspond fairly well to the Swedish
Finns you describe. But these men were a small minority in the early
decades. They and their children are still a minority today, but a much
larger one, which is why TP is now a creole.
> The people they interacted with in Tok Pisin
> were not concerned with their possible native speaker ability, but rather
> with their ability to interact with them in Tok Pisin better than they
> could in any other language.
Of course (since they had no other languages in common).
John.
Eugene Holman
Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote:
Nothing quite that extreme, but there are many cases of families with one
Swedish-speaking and one Finnish-speaking parent whose oldest child
attended Swedish-medium school and thus has Swedish as his/her native
language, but the younger children attended Finnish-medium school, and
have Finnish as their native language. In practice, they are absolutely
fluent in both languages, but when it comes to the more sophisticated,
nuanced, or technical areas of vocabulary and communication, those who
attended Swedish school *might* be better in Swedish than they are in
Finnish. A native speaker of English with a fluent and quasi-native
speaker command of Finnish, I would be hard pressed to explain the
binomial theorum or the theory of universal gravity, which I have only
studied in English and are not things that I frequently talk or think
about, in Finnish, even though, having studied the subjects in Finnish in
Finland, I have no difficulty teaching historical linguistics or acoustic
phonetics in that language.
There are certainly Finland-Swedes who grew up in monolingually Swedish
areas of Finland such as Åland or Munsala or Närpas in Ostrobothnia, and
then moved to Helsinki as young adults, where they live their lives mostly
or solely in Finnish. They only use Swedish when they return to their home
districts for holidays and family events.
Finland-Swedish, at least as spoken in greater Helsinki and greater Vaasa,
both nominally bilingual conurbations, differs from the Swedish of Sweden
primarily consequent to obviously Finnish influence in phonology,
phraseology, pragmatics, and lexicon.
I remain unconvinced that first-generation native speaker influence on
the development of a creole or semi-creolized variety of a language
necessarily has a greater impact on its evolution than sociolinguistically
prestigious public-speaker second-language-speaker influence.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
Add language acquisition to the many topics in linguistics of which you
are ignorant.
Eugene Holman
Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote:
> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
>
> > "John Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote:
> >
> > > "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
> > ><deletions>
> > > >
> > > > Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
> > > > that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use,
> it
> > > > is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
> > > > evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers
> from
> > > > the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they
> were
> > > > native speakers or not is beside the point.
> > >
> > > Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
> > > childhood) is *exactly* the point.
> >
> > I question this. Is there really any significant difference between:
> > 1. a native speaker, that is to say, one who learns language X as his/her
> > first language, and
> > 2. a public speaker, that is to say, one who uses language X, learned
> > rather than acquired natively, as his/her default language for all
> > communication outside of the family circle.
> >
> > Living in Helsinki, I am quite familiar with this phenomenon. Our city is
> > officially bilingual, and abut ten percent of the population has Swedish
> > as their native language. Nevertheless, the default language here is, with
> > few exceptions, Finnish, and many Swedish speakers use Finnish in a wider
> > range of situations and thus have a better command of it than they do of
> > their native Swedish.
>
> Did these Finns speak and hear nothing but Swedish until they reached
> adulthood, and then travel away from their Swedish-speaking communities to
> live in all-male communities of non-Swedish-speakers for periods lasting
> typically 5 years (where they learn and use TP), and on their return home
> resume their previous life and never use TP again?
Nothing quite that extreme, but there are many cases of families with one
Swedish-speaking and one Finnish-speaking parent whose oldest child
attended Swedish-medium school and thus has Swedish as his/her native
language, but the younger children attended Finnish-medium school, and
have Finnish as their native language. In practice, they are absolutely
fluent in both languages, but when it comes to the more sophisticated,
nuanced, or technical areas of vocabulary and communication, those who
attended Swedish school *might* be better in Swedish than they are in
Finnish. A native speaker of English with a fluent and quasi-native
speaker command of Finnish myself, I would be hard pressed to explain the
binomial theorum or theory of universal gravity, which I have only
studied in English and are not things that I frequently talk or think
about, in Finnish, even though, having studied the subjects in Finnish in
Finland, I have no difficulty teaching historical linguistics or acoustic
phonetics in that language.
There are certainly Finland-Swedes who grew up in monolingually Swedish
areas of Finland such as Åland or Munsala or Närpäs in Ostrobothnia, and
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
<deletions>
> >
> > Why? Both are confronted with the same task. The adult fluent second
> > language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
> > for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
> > others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
>
> Add language acquisition to the many topics in linguistics of which you
> are ignorant.
Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner, Wilhelm
Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
belongs.
Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaborartion of
Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
determine what the norms of the language would be than the mixed-race,
often bastard, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
lovers/meal tickets.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
<deletions>
> >
> > Why? Both are confronted with the same task. The adult fluent second
> > language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
> > for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
> > others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
>
> Add language acquisition to the many topics in linguistics of which you
> are ignorant.
Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner, Wilhelm
Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
belongs.
Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the mixed-race,
Peter T. Daniels
Yet somehow neither your English nor your Finnish is "creolized."
> There are certainly Finland-Swedes who grew up in monolingually Swedish
> areas of Finland such as Åland or Munsala or Närpäs in Ostrobothnia, and
> then moved to Helsinki as young adults, where they live their lives mostly
> or solely in Finnish. They only use Swedish when they return to their home
> districts for holidays and family events.
>
> Finland-Swedish, at least as spoken in greater Helsinki and greater Vaasa,
> both nominally bilingual conurbations, differs from the Swedish of Sweden
> primarily consequent to obviously Finnish influence in phonology,
> phraseology, pragmatics, and lexicon.
>
> I remain unconvinced that first-generation native speaker influence on
> the development of a creole or semi-creolized variety of a language
> necessarily has a greater impact on its evolution than sociolinguistically
> prestigious public-speaker second-language-speaker influence.
Then you simply do not know anything about the origin of creoles.
There are quite a few books entitled simply "Pidgins and Creoles," and
you would do very well to read at least one of them before continution
along these lines.
Authors include Loreto Todd, Peter Mühlhäusler, Alan Kaye and Mauro
Tosco, and even (a pioneering work) Robert A. Hall, Jr.; the seminal
collection in the field is that published by Dell Hymes in 1971. (You've
apparently skimmed John Holm's small Red book on the topic, but the
first volume of his Green set would be far more enlightening.)
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CAF2...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> <deletions>
> > >
> > > Why? Both are confronted with the same task. The adult fluent second
> > > language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
> > > for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
> > > others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
> >
> > Add language acquisition to the many topics in linguistics of which you
> > are ignorant.
>
> Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
> Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
> and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
> Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner,
You were at Cornell about the same time I was??? (Then how did you
manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr., the first linguist to take an
interest in pidginization?)
> Wilhelm
> Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
> Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
> Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
> belongs.
Language acquisition was not a significant field of study in linguistics
in those days (though Chas Hockett bristled when years later I suggested
they didn't take acquisition phenomena into account -- but the topic is
barely mentioned in his textbook).
> Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
> show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
> questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
> elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
> scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
> important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
> semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
"Prestigious [second-language is redundant] speakers of pidgins" is an
oxymoron. As has already been pointed out, "semi-creole" is a disfavored
term not used in the subfield.
> There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
> Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
> still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
> determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the mixed-race,
> often bastard, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
> lovers/meal tickets.
And no one, except perhaps you in your misuse of terminology, has
suggested that Afrikaans is a creole.
I have to assume you're not Guy Tops, a Belgian grad student at Cornell
in my day, who liked to insist that Afrikaans was the best language of
all because it was so regular. (Dutch with the hard parts taken out.)
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deltions>
> >
> > Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
> > Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
> > and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
> > Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner,
>
> You were at Cornell about the same time I was???
Class of '66 [I graduated a term early, in January '66].
> (Then how did you
> manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr., the first linguist to take an
> interest in pidginization?)
I knew and was on good terms with Bob Hall due to our Friday afternoon
linguistics colloquium, but, specializing in Germanic (Marchand, Kufner)
and Slavic (Liston, the Samilovs) linguistics, as well as general
linguistics (Hockett, Kelly, Franklin, Durbin), I never took any courses
from him.
>
> > Wilhelm
> > Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
> > Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
> > Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
> > belongs.
>
> Language acquisition was not a significant field of study in linguistics
> in those days (though Chas Hockett bristled when years later I suggested
> they didn't take acquisition phenomena into account -- but the topic is
> barely mentioned in his textbook).
>
> > Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
> > show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
> > questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
> > elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
> > scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
> > important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
> > semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
>
> "Prestigious [second-language is redundant] speakers of pidgins" is an
> oxymoron.
No it isn't. Think of all the clergymen and teachers that brought
modernization to Papua New Guinea.
> As has already been pointed out, "semi-creole" is a disfavored
> term not used in the subfield.
>
> > There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
> > Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
> > still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
> > determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the mixed-race,
> > often bastard, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
> > lovers/meal tickets.
>
> And no one, except perhaps you in your misuse of terminology, has
> suggested that Afrikaans is a creole.
I did *not* suggest that it was a creole. I suggested that creolized
varieties of Dutch were a significant part of the input which resulted in
its elaboration as a language distinct from Dutch.
> I have to assume you're not Guy Tops, a Belgian grad student at Cornell
> in my day, who liked to insist that Afrikaans was the best language of
> all because it was so regular. (Dutch with the hard parts taken out.)
No, I'm not. Although I do not toally diagree with his characterization.
Regards,
Eugene Holman, Cornell '66
"Far above Cayuga's waters..."
Eugene Holman
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deltions>
> >
> > Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
> > Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
> > and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
> > Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner,
>
> You were at Cornell about the same time I was???
Class of '66 [I graduated a term early, in January '66].
> (Then how did you
> manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr.,
I knew and was on good terms with Bob Hall due to our Friday afternoon
linguistics colloquium, but, specializing in Germanic (Marchand, Kufner)
and Slavic (Liston, the Samilovs) linguistics, as well as general
linguistics (Hockett, Kelly, Franklin, Durbin), I never took any courses
from him.
>the first linguist to take an interest in pidginization?)
What?! Have you never heard of Hugo Schuchardt, the father of
pidgin/creole studies?
> > Wilhelm
> > Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
> > Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
> > Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
> > belongs.
>
> Language acquisition was not a significant field of study in linguistics
> in those days (though Chas Hockett bristled when years later I suggested
> they didn't take acquisition phenomena into account -- but the topic is
> barely mentioned in his textbook).
>
> > Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
> > show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
> > questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
> > elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
> > scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
> > important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
> > semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
>
> "Prestigious [second-language is redundant] speakers of pidgins" is an
> oxymoron.
No it isn't. Think of all the Tok Pisin speaking clergymen and teachers
that brought modernization to Papua New Guinea. Think of all the Tok Pisin
speaking plantation order-givers, whose commands given in Tok Pisin meant
food on the table for their underlings.
Brian M. Scott
>> Yes.
> Why? Both are confronted with the same task.
Don't be silly. L2 acquisition is *not* the same task as L1
acquisition.
> The adult fluent second
> language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
> for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
> others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
But children -- the next 'class' of adults -- are influenced
primarily by other children.
Brian
Eugene Holman
b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
Of course it is not. But the issue of establishing future norms is not a
function of L1 as opposed to L2 acqisition. Prestige is a function of
being able to get things done. Nobody cares if the code you are using to
get things done was acquired or learned.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Brian M. Scott
>>>> Yes.
The issue of establishing future *spoken* norms was dealt
with in the part of my post that you snipped: 'But children
-- the next 'class' of adults -- are influenced primarily by
other children.'
Oh, and the kind of prestige that appears to be involved at
the adult level is most certainly *not* necessarily
associated with being able to get things done; this is
pretty basic sociolinguistics.
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CAFC...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> <deltions>
> > >
> > > Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
> > > Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
> > > and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
> > > Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner,
> >
> > You were at Cornell about the same time I was???
>
> Class of '66 [I graduated a term early, in January '66].
>
> > (Then how did you
> > manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr.,
>
> I knew and was on good terms with Bob Hall due to our Friday afternoon
> linguistics colloquium, but, specializing in Germanic (Marchand, Kufner)
> and Slavic (Liston, the Samilovs) linguistics, as well as general
> linguistics (Hockett, Kelly, Franklin, Durbin), I never took any courses
> from him.
>
> >the first linguist to take an interest in pidginization?)
>
> What?! Have you never heard of Hugo Schuchardt, the father of
> pidgin/creole studies?
I said linguist, not philologist, and IIRC his major work was not
published during his lifetime.
Hall's book was published in 1966, so he must have been doing intensive
seminars on the topic during your time. To us (BA '72), he handed out
the chapters of External History of the Romance Languages as they came
off the ditto-machine.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
<deletions>
> > What?! Have you never heard of Hugo Schuchardt, the father of
> > pidgin/creole studies?
>
> I said linguist, not philologist, and IIRC his major work was not
> published during his lifetime.
Was the difference relevant during the late 19th century? His work is
always discussed in histories of *linguistics*, since, in addition to
being the father of pidgin and creole studies, he, an anti-neogrammarian,
was also an important figure in the elaboration of the theory of sound
change, at that time one of the central issues of linguistic theory.
Scguchardt's important articles on pidgins and creoles were indeed
published during his lifetime (1842-1927), e.g.: Schuchardt, Hugo (1883).
"Kreolische Studien. V. Über das Melaneso-Englische." Sitzungsberichte der
k.k. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien (Philosophisch-historische
Klasse). Vienna 105: 131-161.
Schuchardt, Hugo (1889). "Beiträge zur Kenntnis des englischen Kreolisch.
II. Melaneso-Englisches." Englische Studien 13: 158-162.
> Hall's book was published in 1966, so he must have been doing intensive
> seminars on the topic during your time.
During my time at Cornell Professor Hall was immensely proud of his
"Introductory Linguistics* (1964), of his opposition to and antipathy
towards both popularizer Mario Pei and the then nascent school of
generative grammar, which Hockett had become hooked on. Only later (in his
bitter polemic "The State of the Art, 1968") did Hockett regard Chomsky's
*Syntactic Structures* as a 'breakdown' rather than a 'breakthrough' in
linguistics (cf. his 1964 LSA presidential address) in linguistics.
He had also published a grammar of what he called Melanesian Pidgin
English in 1943: Hall, Robert A., Jr. (1943). Melanesian Pidgin English:
Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Baltimore, MD: Linguistic Society of America /
Madison, WI: United States Armed Forces Institute.
> To us (BA '72), he handed out
> the chapters of External History of the Romance Languages as they came
> off the ditto-machine.
His books on the history of the Romance languages are interesting and
important, but they represent a type of historical linguistics that is
somewhat passé.
Regards,
Eugene Holman, Cornell BA '66
John Atkinson
"Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote ...
> Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
> show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
> questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
> elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
> scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
> important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
> semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
>
> There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
> Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
> still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
> determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the
mixed-race,
> often bastard, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
> lovers/meal tickets.
I obviously don't know enough about what happened on South African farms to
question this, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't true for the plantation
pidgins developed by the slaves in the Americas or the contract workers in
the SW Pacific.
The "broken English" used by the bosses was "foreigner language", a weak
attempt to imitate the plantation workers' speech. Few whites ever bothered
to learn to speak this grammatically, just because they thought of it as
"bad English". Freshly arriving workers learned the language from those
already there, not from the bosses. In the Carribean, the average time a
slave survived was about ten years, and female slaves were "discouraged"
from having children, since plantation owners found it cheaper to ship in
replacement workers from Africa rather than grow their own. (This wasn't
the case in the USA, which maybe has something to do with why US black
English deviates less from the standard than the Carribean or SW Pacific
creoles -- also, of course, most US plantations were smaller, with the
slaves interacting much more with their English-speaking owners.) In the
Pacific, the workers were all men.
Thus we have a language with a generation time of 5-10 years (instead of the
more usual 20 plus), where nearly all speakers learn it as adults, and where
the speakers have very restricted contact with the lexifying language.
Of course the first slaves did learn English from their owners or overseers,
and many of them would have come to speak a good approximation to the
standard language (or whatever dialect their owners spoke). It would be
only after having been passed on through several generations of speakers
(with, as I said, restricted exposure to the owners' language) that the
plantation languages deviated enough from English to become the pidgins we
know.
This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been common
outside the colonial plantation system of the last few centuries, including
the cattle stations of N Australia, and, perhaps, the S African farms Eugene
is talking about. Though in S Africa, most workers on each farm would have
been wantoks, and so able to use their own language when interacting with
each other. Also, in S Africa, as in southern Australia, interbreeding may
have been more important -- and thus native peakers -- children -- may have
been involved from the start. That is, "creolization" (in Eugene's sense),
but no real pidgin.
"Trade pidgins" are a different animal altogether, of course, and have
developed many times all over the world.
Just my attempt at introducing some empirical (?) data ... (with a little
help from Salikoko Mufwene)
John.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CBCB...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> <deletions>
> > > What?! Have you never heard of Hugo Schuchardt, the father of
> > > pidgin/creole studies?
> >
> > I said linguist, not philologist, and IIRC his major work was not
> > published during his lifetime.
>
> Was the difference relevant during the late 19th century? His work is
The difference became relevant when linguistics was invented by such as
Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield; and Baudouin de Courtenay and Jakobson and
so on.
> always discussed in histories of *linguistics*, since, in addition to
> being the father of pidgin and creole studies, he, an anti-neogrammarian,
> was also an important figure in the elaboration of the theory of sound
> change, at that time one of the central issues of linguistic theory.
> Scguchardt's important articles on pidgins and creoles were indeed
> published during his lifetime (1842-1927), e.g.: Schuchardt, Hugo (1883).
> "Kreolische Studien. V. Über das Melaneso-Englische." Sitzungsberichte der
> k.k. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien (Philosophisch-historische
> Klasse). Vienna 105: 131-161.
> Schuchardt, Hugo (1889). "Beiträge zur Kenntnis des englischen Kreolisch.
> II. Melaneso-Englisches." Englische Studien 13: 158-162.
That's a total of 34 pages on the topic. Who's the German-named creolist
in Hawaii whose major work was not published during his lifetime?
> > Hall's book was published in 1966, so he must have been doing intensive
> > seminars on the topic during your time.
>
> During my time at Cornell Professor Hall was immensely proud of his
> "Introductory Linguistics* (1964), of his opposition to and antipathy
> towards both popularizer Mario Pei and the then nascent school of
> generative grammar,
His tiny article in the Trager volume shows a wilful misunderstanding of
Chomsky's notion of "rule" -- it may have been the first sign of the
mental instability that later surfaced in his championing of the
authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone ("the mistakes are so patent
that no one could have invented this text on his own!") and, I was told,
Holocaust denial. (His series of memoirs, beginning with *A Stormy
Petrel in Linguistics*, must be one of the nastiest autobiographies ever
written.)
> which Hockett had become hooked on.
"Hooked on"????
> Only later (in his
> bitter polemic "The State of the Art, 1968") did Hockett regard Chomsky's
> *Syntactic Structures* as a 'breakdown' rather than a 'breakthrough' in
> linguistics (cf. his 1964 LSA presidential address) in linguistics.
>
> He had also published a grammar of what he called Melanesian Pidgin
> English in 1943: Hall, Robert A., Jr. (1943). Melanesian Pidgin English:
> Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Baltimore, MD: Linguistic Society of America /
> Madison, WI: United States Armed Forces Institute.
Of course. America's linguists were assigned, willy-nilly, to prepare
grammars of strategically important languages, whether they had any
experience in them or not. Thus Carleton Hodge had to do Hausa and
Serbo-Croatian, Hockett had to teach Chinese to G.I.s on the "slow boat
to China" even though he knew absolutely nothing about Chinese, etc. The
random assignment to MPE was what got Hall interested in the topic.
> > To us (BA '72), he handed out
> > the chapters of External History of the Romance Languages as they came
> > off the ditto-machine.
>
> His books on the history of the Romance languages are interesting and
> important, but they represent a type of historical linguistics that is
> somewhat passé.
Which is historical linguistics's loss.
alexB
"John Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:9GSyc.18676$sj4....@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> The "broken English" used by the bosses was "foreigner language", a weak
> attempt to imitate the plantation workers' speech. Few whites ever
bothered
> to learn to speak this grammatically, just because they thought of it as
> "bad English".
The following is a quote from J.L. Dillard, Black English, pg 6. Vintage
Books (div. of Random House) 1973 <many parts snipped>
"Among the lesser-known varieties of non-British English ... are the pidgin
and creole languages which are spoken in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the
Caribbean and elsewhere. Many of the people who now speak those languages
are Africans; some indication of a specifically West African variety of
English goes back to the 16th century. Today there is a clear cut case of a
variety of American English related to West African variety in Gullah,..
Recent research presents evidence that the English of most American blacks
retain some features which are common to both Caribbean and West African
varieties of English. ....
"... American Black English can be traced to a creolized version of English
based upon the pidgin spoken by slaves; it probably came from the West
Africa--almost certainly not from Great Britain.
> Of course the first slaves did learn English from their owners or
overseers,
> and many of them would have come to speak a good approximation to the
> standard language
Unlikely.
> This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been common
Does not seem to be true.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "John Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:9GSyc.18676$sj4....@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
>
> > The "broken English" used by the bosses was "foreigner language", a weak
> > attempt to imitate the plantation workers' speech. Few whites ever bothered
> > to learn to speak this grammatically, just because they thought of it as
> > "bad English".
>
> The following is a quote from J.L. Dillard, Black English, pg 6. Vintage
> Books (div. of Random House) 1973 <many parts snipped>
Note the date.
There has been a great deal of research -- both in the field and in the
archives -- and much advance in linguistic theory -- since then. Dillard
(already a senior scholar at the time) was state-of-the-art then, but
for current facts about AAVE and about Gullah (which is not now
considered a form of English), see e.g. the writings of Salikoko
Mufwene.
> "Among the lesser-known varieties of non-British English ... are the pidgin
> and creole languages which are spoken in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the
> Caribbean and elsewhere. Many of the people who now speak those languages
> are Africans; some indication of a specifically West African variety of
> English goes back to the 16th century. Today there is a clear cut case of a
> variety of American English related to West African variety in Gullah,..
> Recent research presents evidence that the English of most American blacks
> retain some features which are common to both Caribbean and West African
> varieties of English. ....
>
> "... American Black English can be traced to a creolized version of English
> based upon the pidgin spoken by slaves; it probably came from the West
> Africa--almost certainly not from Great Britain.
>
> > Of course the first slaves did learn English from their owners or overseers,
> > and many of them would have come to speak a good approximation to the
> > standard language
>
> Unlikely.
Why?
> > This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been common
>
> Does not seem to be true.
What doesn't seem to be true? It is true that in the rest of the world,
pidgin-development wasn't the result of men from many communities being
uprooted and thrust into groups where none could talk to each other.
alexB
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:40CCBB...@worldnet.att.net...
See below.
> > > This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been
common
> >
> > Does not seem to be true.
>
> What doesn't seem to be true? It is true that in the rest of the world,
> pidgin-development wasn't the result of men from many communities being
> uprooted and thrust into groups where none could talk to each other.
First, I want to make a disclaimer. I am not a linguist and my interest in
this area is collateral albeit very strong. It is also temporary. It is
neither my intent to raise my level of sophistication on par with you guys,
seem to be standard-bearers in the field nor try to argue with you on an
equal footing. I am here to learn.
It seems to me, however, that what you just said confirms what I tried to
stress. I tried to make an objection to the post by John Atkinson. In that
paragraph he seemed to say that there had been no COMMON mechanism for
development of Pidgin languages. It seems to me that J.L. Dillard says
otherwise. There is a common mechanism and it seems to be the West African
English. It sounds like the slaves came to America with some English already
to their credit. At least some of them definitely had the skills. Pidgin
English was widespread he says back in the 16th century. Others probably
learned from them. I am not a disciple of Dillard's and I quote him simply
because my library on this subject consists of two books and his is one of
them. He is a very difficult writer to read. He does not express himself
clearly. I am surprised to hear that he was so prominent in his time. He
does seem to say, however, that the pidgin English is essentially a sort of
generalized West African grammar combined with a mixed English and West
African vocabulary. I like this thought. It sounds rational to me. What
Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first learned
English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It does
not make any sense whatsoever.
Peter T. Daniels
Dillard _may_ have been reacting against the theory that the world's
pidgins and creoles are all so similar because they all had a Portuguese
basis. (Pidginization was subsequently identified in regions that had
never had any possibility of contact with either Portuguese or English.)
> It sounds like the slaves came to America with some English already
> to their credit.
Seems unlikely, considering where they were taken from.
> At least some of them definitely had the skills. Pidgin
> English was widespread he says back in the 16th century. Others probably
I don't see him saying that, and I don't see how it could be so, since
the English were just beginning to take to the sea in Elizabeth's time
-- I don't recall Henry VIII being interested in competing with the
Spanish and Portuguese who were sending out colonists by the mid 16th
century.
> learned from them. I am not a disciple of Dillard's and I quote him simply
> because my library on this subject consists of two books and his is one of
> them. He is a very difficult writer to read. He does not express himself
> clearly. I am surprised to hear that he was so prominent in his time. He
> does seem to say, however, that the pidgin English is essentially a sort of
> generalized West African grammar combined with a mixed English and West
> African vocabulary. I like this thought. It sounds rational to me. What
Dillard's book was probably written before the Hymes 1971 conference was
published, and at that time the corpus of pidgins that had been studied
was considerably smaller than it is now.
> Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first learned
> English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It does
> not make any sense whatsoever.
That doesn't seem to me to be what he's saying, but here's his chance to
clarify.
Brian M. Scott
<alex...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:10cpiq6...@corp.supernews.com> in sci.lang:
[...]
> What
> Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first learned
> English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It does
> not make any sense whatsoever.
Of course it does. The sequence that he's envisioning is
clear enough. The first slaves dealt directly with native
speakers of English; some learned the language reasonably
well, while others did not. Later slaves had little contact
with native speakers and were therefore exposed mostly to L2
speakers whose competence varied widely. From this point on
there would have been little reinforcement of the
native-speaker norms.
I don't know whether this is right, but it's plausible, and
it certainly makes sense.
Brian
Eugene Holman
b.s...@csuohio.edu wrote:
Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the slaves
the elements of a new social identity.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
John Atkinson
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote ...
> alexB wrote:
> >
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote...
> > > alexB wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "John Atkinson" <john...@bigpond.com> wrote...
> > > > > The "broken English" used by the bosses was "foreigner language",
a weak
> > > > > attempt to imitate the plantation workers' speech. Few whites
ever bothered
> > > > > to learn to speak this grammatically, just because they thought of
it as
> > > > > "bad English".
> > > >
> > > > The following is a quote from J.L. Dillard, Black English, pg 6.
Vintage
> > > > Books (div. of Random House) 1973 <many parts snipped>
> > >
> > > Note the date.
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > "Among the lesser-known varieties of non-British English ... are the
pidgin
> > > > and creole languages which are spoken in Asia, Africa, the Pacific,
the
> > > > Caribbean and elsewhere. Many of the people who now speak those
languages
> > > > are Africans; some indication of a specifically West African variety
of
> > > > English goes back to the 16th century. Today there is a clear cut
case of a
> > > > variety of American English related to West African variety in
Gullah,..
> > > > Recent research presents evidence that the English of most American
blacks
> > > > retain some features which are common to both Caribbean and West
African
> > > > varieties of English. ....
> > > >
> > > > "... American Black English can be traced to a creolized version of
English
> > > > based upon the pidgin spoken by slaves; it probably came from the
West
> > > > Africa--almost certainly not from Great Britain.
Certainly not from Great Britain directly! It was never spoken by any
significant communities there! (I'm sure he didn't mean that, but can't
work out else this could mean.)
I agree that many (most?) slaves may have started learning the pidgin in
West Africa, where slaves from the interior were often stored for months
waiting for transport on to the New World -- a situation not too different
from that I described on the plantations (short generation time (~1 yr!),
adult learners with no common language, restricted input from standard
English), a situation conducive to pidgin development. Of course, at the
same time there were various trade pidgins developing all along the west
African coast to communicate with visiting ships, and these may well have
formed a basis for the language of the slave camps.
So we're not much in disagreement there. But I think most of the
development of the Carribean and N American pidgins happened after they
reached the plantations.
> > > > > Of course the first slaves did learn English from their owners or
overseers,
> > > > > and many of them would have come to speak a good approximation to
the
> > > > > standard language
> > > >
> > > > Unlikely.
> > >
> > > Why?
> >
> > See below.
> >
> > > > > This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been
common
> > > >
> > > > Does not seem to be true.
Why? When else in the world's history have large numbers of workers been
imported from disparate language groups over an extended period of time
Ancient Rome? Probably. Some pre-modern Muslim states? Perhaps. Modern
European guest workers? Would only be relevant if the phenomenon lasts
considerably longer than it has so far, and if the workers couldn't interact
with their wantoks back home, which is not the case.
> > > What doesn't seem to be true? It is true that in the rest of the
world,
> > > pidgin-development wasn't the result of men from many communities
being
> > > uprooted and thrust into groups where none could talk to each other.
> >
> > First, I want to make a disclaimer. I am not a linguist
Nor am I. Nor is Brian. Peter's main field of expertise is rather far from
this thread. Don't feel inferior!
> > [...]
> > It seems to me, however, that what you just said confirms what I tried
to
> > stress. I tried to make an objection to the post by John Atkinson. In
that
> > paragraph he seemed to say that there had been no COMMON mechanism for
> > development of Pidgin languages.
Not so! The common mechanism is the need for communication between people
with no common language.
> > It seems to me that J.L. Dillard says
> > otherwise. There is a common mechanism and it seems to be the West
African
> > English.
Dillard is obviously restricting his attention to the Atlantic and (perhaps)
Indian Ocean creoles. These may be the most conspicuous group today, but
what about all the Pacific Ocean pidgins and the many other (trade) pidgins
all over the world which have little or no input from any European or West
African language?
> Dillard _may_ have been reacting against the theory that the world's
> pidgins and creoles are all so similar because they all had a Portuguese
> basis. (Pidginization was subsequently identified in regions that had
> never had any possibility of contact with either Portuguese or English.)
Yep.
> > It sounds like the slaves came to America with some English already
> > to their credit.
>
> Seems unlikely, considering where they were taken from.
Why not? Picked up (as adults) in the West African slave camps. See above.
> > At least some of them definitely had the skills. Pidgin
> > English was widespread he says back in the 16th century. Others probably
>
> I don't see him saying that, and I don't see how it could be so, since
> the English were just beginning to take to the sea in Elizabeth's time
> -- I don't recall Henry VIII being interested in competing with the
> Spanish and Portuguese who were sending out colonists by the mid 16th
> century.
Sure. For simplicity, I (and, I think, others here) used the word "English"
several times, but meant it to be inclusive of the Portuguese and Spanish
(and French) based pidgins that developed in very similar situations, and in
fact somewhat earlier.
> > [...] He [Dillard]
> > does seem to say, however, that the pidgin English is essentially a sort
of
> > generalized West African grammar combined with a mixed English and West
> > African vocabulary. I like this thought. It sounds rational to me.
Of course. No one here doubts this, I think (except maybe Eugene?). Just
as Tok Pisin is generalised Oceanic grammar (arguably, just that of the
languages of the Gazelle Peninsula), combined with a mixed English and
Melanesian vocabulary.
> > Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first
learned
> > English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It
does
> > not make any sense whatsoever.
>
> That doesn't seem to me to be what he's saying, but here's his chance to
> clarify.
Brian has already clarified the point I was trying to make much better than
I could.
John
Eugene Holman
> On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:51:21 -0400 "alexB"
> <alex...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> <news:10cpiq6...@corp.supernews.com> in sci.lang:
>
> [...]
>
> > What
> > Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first learned
> > English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It does
> > not make any sense whatsoever.
>
> Of course it does. The sequence that he's envisioning is
> clear enough. The first slaves dealt directly with native
> speakers of English; some learned the language reasonably
> well, while others did not. Later slaves had little contact
> with native speakers and were therefore exposed mostly to L2
> speakers whose competence varied widely. From this point on
> there would have been little reinforcement of the
> native-speaker norms.
>
> I don't know whether this is right, but it's plausible, and
> it certainly makes sense.
Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the slaves
the elements of a new social identity. Addtionally, in condtions of
illiteracy, with no mass communications, and most of their contact with
native-speaker English being the local dialects, it seems obvious that the
language of the slaves would embark on its own path of evolution.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
> > Dillard _may_ have been reacting against the theory that the world's
> > pidgins and creoles are all so similar because they all had a Portuguese
> > basis. (Pidginization was subsequently identified in regions that had
> > never had any possibility of contact with either Portuguese or English.)
>
> Yep.
>
> > > It sounds like the slaves came to America with some English already
> > > to their credit.
> >
> > Seems unlikely, considering where they were taken from.
>
> Why not? Picked up (as adults) in the West African slave camps. See above.
Were the slave camps English-run and English-staffed? I did not know
that. Yet another thing for the Home Island to be proud of.
> > > At least some of them definitely had the skills. Pidgin
> > > English was widespread he says back in the 16th century. Others probably
> >
> > I don't see him saying that, and I don't see how it could be so, since
> > the English were just beginning to take to the sea in Elizabeth's time
> > -- I don't recall Henry VIII being interested in competing with the
> > Spanish and Portuguese who were sending out colonists by the mid 16th
> > century.
>
> Sure. For simplicity, I (and, I think, others here) used the word "English"
> several times, but meant it to be inclusive of the Portuguese and Spanish
> (and French) based pidgins that developed in very similar situations, and in
> fact somewhat earlier.
not me ...
> > > [...] He [Dillard]
> > > does seem to say, however, that the pidgin English is essentially a sort of
> > > generalized West African grammar combined with a mixed English and West
> > > African vocabulary. I like this thought. It sounds rational to me.
>
> Of course. No one here doubts this, I think (except maybe Eugene?). Just
> as Tok Pisin is generalised Oceanic grammar (arguably, just that of the
> languages of the Gazelle Peninsula), combined with a mixed English and
> Melanesian vocabulary.
Or, it's the surfacing of UG templates ...
> > > Atkinson says sounds totally irrational. He says that slaves first learned
> > > English, then after a few generations developed the Pidgin English. It does
> > > not make any sense whatsoever.
> >
> > That doesn't seem to me to be what he's saying, but here's his chance to
> > clarify.
>
> Brian has already clarified the point I was trying to make much better than
> I could.
But because of the way threading works, I saw your reply first ...
Peter T. Daniels
"Elaborating their own norms"??
Have you been skimming Joshua Fishman with zero attention to the social
context of slavery?
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
<deletions>
> >
> > Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the slaves
> > the elements of a new social identity. Addtionally, in condtions of
> > illiteracy, with no mass communications, and most of their contact with
> > native-speaker English being the local dialects, it seems obvious that the
> > language of the slaves would embark on its own path of evolution.
>
> "Elaborating their own norms"??
>
> Have you been skimming Joshua Fishman with zero attention to the social
> context of slavery?
No. Rather I have been thinking about the rise and persistence of
so-called non-standard, even stigmatized norms, roughly along the lines of
Labov's study of Martha's Vineyard. They are marks of in-group solidarity.
For a slave, who had precious little else to call his/her own, a distinct
way of speaking English, perhaps with a bit of irony and healthy
disrespect for the rules defining the speech of the overseeing class,
would have been a valuable possession.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
LEE Sau Dan
Patrick> The only non-Western sound is the glottal stop.
Really? I don't think so. It is just not represented in the writing.
But it does exist.
How do you say "he eats" or "I ate"? Do you insert a glottal stop?
You've learnt German, right? Then, how does one pronounce "beeilen"?
"geeignet"? What's that in between the "ee", if not a glottal stop?
What about "be_inhalten"? "be_einflussen"? "Ver_ein"? "Er_eignis"?
How do you say "Mittag_essen"?
And I'm wondering whether the "ng" sound at the beginning of a
syllable could be considered a "non-Western" sound feature.
Patrick> I am renting a room in a homestay where a three-year-old
Patrick> girl lives and am learning the language much faster than
Patrick> her.
Not surprising. Some people (Esperantists included) even say that
Malay-Indonesian is even easier than Esperanto. (Esperanto is indeed
quite complicated.)
Patrick> I got nowhere for two months until I realized I could not
Patrick> memorize sounds and did much better with written words.
I'm the same kind of person. Written languages are much easier to me
than spoken languages. My German teachers and friends are pretty
impressed and surprised by my writing and scores at grammar tests,
given that my spoken German is so broken. (The same is true for my
English. I can converse easily in English without big problems. But
my writing is even better -- can often be mistaken for a native
"speaker" [I mean writer].)
Patrick> Even back when I was seven one of the best tools for
Patrick> learning was comic books. I had to sit down and brute
Patrick> force memorize using flash cards. Now that I have a good
Patrick> start memorizing words by sounds is much easier.
I did something similar: read books for children and beginners. Just
insist on it. After the first 10 pages, you'll be touching the
dictionary much less frequent. I even skip the flash card approach,
as I don't have them.
Patrick> Perhaps the brain rejects something quite unfamiliar as
Patrick> "not a word".
Maybe, that explains why foreigners (in the West) are so afraid of
superlongwords in German or Dutch. But once I've learnt enough basic
(short) German words, those longlonglongwords are no longer a problem
for me, because I don't process them in terms of sounds/syllables
anymore, but in terms of basic words/morphemes.
Patrick> It is much easier to learn words similar to what is
Patrick> known.
Of course. That makes memorization easier. It's always easier to
association a new thing with ONE known thing, than to memorize the new
thing as a new concept composed from MANY other things.
Patrick> I also teach English here. Many people learn English in
Patrick> school starting with middle school. The emphasis is on
Patrick> reading and writing, so while many can do that quite well
Patrick> often they cannot speak a single sentence without the aid
Patrick> of paper.
The sounds (actually phonological system) of English are too
unfamiliar to them. Think about it. The stress-timed rhythm is
actually very very difficult to someone accustomed to syllable-timing.
The reduction of un-stressed vowels to a schwa is another thing very
very hard to master (even for people form Romance languages).
Patrick> Europeans often can speak English almost as well as a
Patrick> native speaker.
Due to the similiarities.
Patrick> When I asked why I was told that English language shows
Patrick> were on television with subtitles so they had heard the
Patrick> language all their lives.
Patrick> One of the best English speakers I have met had never
Patrick> studied the subject in school. He did not know the
Patrick> grammar and simply read a good deal and practiced
Patrick> conversation whenever possible. I think it is quite
Patrick> possible that knowledge of grammar is an impediment to
Patrick> learning. There is no question that the most important
Patrick> thing in learning to speak is practice.
It's much more efficient (for an adult learner of a very different
language) to do some grammar, rather than just inducing the grammar by
examples. I guess it had taken your informant a lot of time to master
the tense system of English, right? Learning from examples is not
easy for learning the tense system.
Patrick> I've been told that Indonesian has "no grammar", that it
Patrick> is monotone, and that syllables are not accented, none of
Patrick> which is true.
English sounds like that too to anyone who don't understand it. The
fact is: to anyone who doesn't understand language X, X sounds
monotone, dull, barbaric, impossible to learn, etc.
Patrick> All these shows is that cultural conditioning can render
Patrick> one partially deaf.
True. Those are just "unintelligible sounds" or "noise". How can it
be melodic, rhythm-full, or even meaningful? :)
Patrick> Or perhaps having studied music all my life improved my
Patrick> ear.
It does help.
Patrick> I also do better than most with the accent, but this is
Patrick> purely mechanical.
"Accent" has so many meanings that I don't know what you mean here.
Patrick> Most adult westerners do not realize they should move the
Patrick> tongue back in the mouth about half an inch.
What? Do you mean you move your tongue back half an inch WHENEVER you
speak Indonesian? Or are you just talking about particular sounds?
Patrick> Another odd thing is the difficulty everyone has with
Patrick> ending a word with 's' for plural. It is such a simple
Patrick> rule,
Simple != easy. This rule is as difficult as gender for those who
don't have (compulsory) plural marking in their languages. It can
take a whole life to learn, and still not master this single rule.
Patrick> and plenty of Indonesian words end with 's'.
I don't think it's a problem with the pronunciation. It's a problem
of learning the *concept* of (compulsorily marked) plural. This is
VERY VERY difficult.
Patrick> More complicated rules such as the tenses of "to be" are
Patrick> learned more easily.
Really? Can they use the tense system as easily as a native speaker?
Do they use many different tenses? Correctly?
Patrick> In other words, language is built by imitation,
Patrick> memorization and building on what one knows, not by using
Patrick> rules to define the space of possible sentences then
Patrick> choosing the best sentence from that space.
The rules are important for reducing the amount of things that need to
be memorized. E.g. memorizing "present perfect tense => "have"
(inflected accordingly) past participle" is much easier than
memorizing that the perfect tense form of "to do" is "I haVE done",
"he haS done", "they haVE done", etc. Yes, with enough exposure, a
person with normal intelligence can infer those rules. But it's just
more efficient to learn the rule and then apply it.
Patrick> Such a space is far too large. I've also realized how
Patrick> repetitions everyday life tends to be and how little one
Patrick> needs to be quite fluent.
True. That's why many immigrants just learn enough of the local
language to "survive". That can mean just knowing the words and
expressions for a supermarket visit and reading the road signs.
Patrick> Reading the newspaper is a whole 'nother matter.
That involves a much wider context.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
Peter T. Daniels
Good grief. "Distinct" from _what_? Do you think Massah was often out in
the slave cabins talking to them?
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deletions>
> >
> > No. Rather I have been thinking about the rise and persistence of
> > so-called non-standard, even stigmatized norms, roughly along the lines of
> > Labov's study of Martha's Vineyard. They are marks of in-group solidarity.
> > For a slave, who had precious little else to call his/her own, a distinct
> > way of speaking English, perhaps with a bit of irony and healthy
> > disrespect for the rules defining the speech of the overseeing class,
> > would have been a valuable possession.
>
> Good grief. "Distinct" from _what_? Do you think Massah was often out in
> the slave cabins talking to them?
1. House slaves had quite a lot of linguistic interaction with the slave
owners: raising their children, fixing their meals, keeping house,
shopping for them, and working as chauffeurs.
2. It is no secret that many male slave owners had liaisons with their
female slaves. The mother of Sally Hemings, allegedly Thomas Jefferson's
paramour for more than thirty-five years, was the half-sister of
Jefferson's wife, as his Jefferson's father-in-law had taken advantage of
this ancient privilege of ownership.
Since the field slaves were uneducated, did not usually travel very much,
and interacted linguistically mostly with other slaves, it would be
surprising if their English did not evolve some sociolinguistic features
which marked it off from the more "refined" but nevertheless dialectally
colored speech of the slave owners. House slaves would have had to be able
to code-switch between both varieties.
The movie "Gone with the Wind" does not constitute a legitimate source of
linguistic data, but one very obvious aspect that the film focuses on is
the very different types of English spoken by the different members of the
planation community. I doubt if so much effort would have been put into
this if the film-makers, who were able to consult with people who still
had first-hand memories of the planation society being depicted, had not
convinced them of how important the melange of registers was as part of
the overall linguistic landscape.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CD9E...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Eugene Holman wrote:
> <deletions>
> > >
> > > No. Rather I have been thinking about the rise and persistence of
> > > so-called non-standard, even stigmatized norms, roughly along the lines of
> > > Labov's study of Martha's Vineyard. They are marks of in-group solidarity.
> > > For a slave, who had precious little else to call his/her own, a distinct
> > > way of speaking English, perhaps with a bit of irony and healthy
> > > disrespect for the rules defining the speech of the overseeing class,
> > > would have been a valuable possession.
> >
> > Good grief. "Distinct" from _what_? Do you think Massah was often out in
> > the slave cabins talking to them?
>
> 1. House slaves had quite a lot of linguistic interaction with the slave
> owners: raising their children, fixing their meals, keeping house,
> shopping for them, and working as chauffeurs.
> 2. It is no secret that many male slave owners had liaisons with their
> female slaves. The mother of Sally Hemings, allegedly Thomas Jefferson's
> paramour for more than thirty-five years, was the half-sister of
> Jefferson's wife, as his Jefferson's father-in-law had taken advantage of
> this ancient privilege of ownership.
You haven't made the connection either between house slaves and field
slaves, or between house slaves' dialects and the development of AAVE.
> Since the field slaves were uneducated, did not usually travel very much,
> and interacted linguistically mostly with other slaves, it would be
> surprising if their English did not evolve some sociolinguistic features
> which marked it off from the more "refined" but nevertheless dialectally
> colored speech of the slave owners. House slaves would have had to be able
> to code-switch between both varieties.
>
> The movie "Gone with the Wind" does not constitute a legitimate source of
> linguistic data, but one very obvious aspect that the film focuses on is
> the very different types of English spoken by the different members of the
> planation community. I doubt if so much effort would have been put into
> this if the film-makers, who were able to consult with people who still
> had first-hand memories of the planation society being depicted, had not
> convinced them of how important the melange of registers was as part of
> the overall linguistic landscape.
Yeah, Clark Gable's and Leslie Howard's Southern accents were
impeccable.
There were no Streeps in those days; _no_ attention was paid to regional
accents by American actors and directors. Vivien Leigh, of course, was
not American. (I don't know what Leslie Howard's excuse was, except
maybe that he'd been playing Americans in films with his own voice for a
decade.)
AlexB
> clear enough. The first slaves dealt directly with native
> speakers of English; some learned the language reasonably
> well, while others did not. Later slaves had little contact
> with native speakers and were therefore exposed mostly to L2
> speakers whose competence varied widely. From this point on
> there would have been little reinforcement of the
> native-speaker norms.
>
> I don't know whether this is right, but it's plausible, and
> it certainly makes sense.
I can imagine according to your scenario that the slaves had an introductory
lecture by the owners right after the auction, then some English as second
language classes three times a day with two hours of library time for
homework. And don't forget the quality time they had every evening drinking
tea with the bossa's family. It also helped them to become fluent quickly.
AlexB
"Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote in message news:holman->
> Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the slaves
> the elements of a new social identity.
What do you mean by that? Could you rephrase it in a plain English. What
does it mean "elaborating their own norms for English?" What norms?
Grammatical norms of their previous language? How could they be elaborated
for English? I am beginning to get a feeling that making vague statements is
a norm in your profession. Or perhaps it is an idiom of sorts? Don't bother
answering if you are making a sarcastic remark in here. Then it "makes
sense."
Brian M. Scott
<al...@comcast.net> wrote in
<news:Or-dnXUdZ5x...@comcast.com> in sci.lang:
Oh, a jackass. Never mind, then.
Peter T. Daniels
It certainly would be nice if you'd identify whom you're quoting, even
when you go on to say something stupid.
Eugene Holman
<al...@comcast.net> wrote:
> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote in message news:holman->
> > Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the slaves
> > the elements of a new social identity.
>
> What do you mean by that? Could you rephrase it in a plain English.
The pioneering works in sociolinguistics, specifically Labov's studies of
the centralization of the ay and aw variables in Martha's Vineyard and the
reintroduction of post-vocalic-r in New York City during WW II, indicate
that elaborating and adhering to a specific speech norm, often originally
regarded as an idiosyncracy of pronunciation or usage, often suffices to
distinguish "us" from "them". Similarly, the issue of why certain socially
defined communities of English speakers insist on using stigmatized forms
such as "I goes", "you goes", but "he go" is, once again, to be understood
as a matter of in-group solidarity reinforced by vernacular norms.
Expressing in-group solidarity by making certain selections as concerns
vernacular norms is regarded as more important than speaking "properly"
and thus weakening the repertoire of features that distinguish "us" from
"them".
> What
> does it mean "elaborating their own norms for English?" What norms?
> Grammatical norms of their previous language? How could they be elaborated
> for English?
Norms that make it easy to distinguish "slaves' speech" from "masters'
speech". These can come from a previous language, from foreigner's speech,
or from universal language simplifying strategies. What is most important
is not where they come from, but rather the fact that the innovations
arising from any of these sources can and do establish themselves as
alternative norms, actual linguistic changes that oust alternative norms.
Due to the very different educational and social backgrounds of slaves and
masters, there would have been numerous features of pronunciation,
grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics which would have distinguished the norms
of speech, grammar, and usage used by the two groups and reinforcing their
specific linguistic identities and social distance.
> I am beginning to get a feeling that making vague statements is
> a norm in your profession.
No, I am working on the assumption that most readers of sci.lang are
familiar with basic linguistic terminology and thus do not need to have
everything explained in minute detail.
> Or perhaps it is an idiom of sorts? Don't bother
> answering if you are making a sarcastic remark in here. Then it "makes
> sense."
No, I am not making sarcastic remarks. Slave societies are typically
extremely hierarchical, and hierarchical social organization is typically
reflected in and reinforced by different norms of usage. Read some of the
early work in pre-Labovian sociolinguistics (or sociology of language, if
you will) by J. J. Gumperz, such as his important 1958 article "Dialect
Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village".
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
<deletions>
>
> You haven't made the connection either between house slaves and field
> slaves, or between house slaves' dialects and the development of AAVE.
House slaves and field slaves both belonged to the "they" group, from the
standpoint of slave owners. Field slaves would speak mostly wih each other
and their overseers, and the environment was strongly male dominated.
House slaves were more "salonfähig", if you will allow me to use that
word, and, as members of the household with important housekeeping
responsibilities, such as following orders given by their owners, raising
the owners' children, and catering both the owners' meals and social
events, they had far more opportunities to interact with people spoke
standard English. Since house slaves were involved in cleaning, cooking,
and child-rearing, their world was as female dominated as the world of the
field slave was male dominated. One would expect, that after the workday
was over, many of the female house slaves would return to the slave
quarters to spend time with their field slave spouses or partners.
> > Since the field slaves were uneducated, did not usually travel very much,
> > and interacted linguistically mostly with other slaves, it would be
> > surprising if their English did not evolve some sociolinguistic features
> > which marked it off from the more "refined" but nevertheless dialectally
> > colored speech of the slave owners. House slaves would have had to be able
> > to code-switch between both varieties.
> >
> > The movie "Gone with the Wind" does not constitute a legitimate source of
> > linguistic data, but one very obvious aspect that the film focuses on is
> > the very different types of English spoken by the different members of the
> > planation community. I doubt if so much effort would have been put into
> > this if the film-makers, who were able to consult with people who still
> > had first-hand memories of the planation society being depicted, had not
> > convinced them of how important the melange of registers was as part of
> > the overall linguistic landscape.
>
> Yeah, Clark Gable's and Leslie Howard's Southern accents were
> impeccable.
That's not really important. What is important is that they spoke
differently from both the house slaves, such as Mammy, and the anonymous
field slaves that we seldom heard talking at all, except when saying
"Quittin' time!".
> There were no Streeps in those days; _no_ attention was paid to regional
> accents by American actors and directors.
Regional, hardly any. Social, yes. All of the slave characters in the film
spoke English characterized by pronunciations e.g. (/a:v/ rather than
/aiv/; /gwain/ rather than /gouiN/), and usage (frequent 'ain't no', 'she
be' rather than 'she is', etc.) that were conspicuously absent from the
norms adhered to by the white characters, who, by the way, did not speak
the same type of English, cf. the clearly Irish-accented English of
Scarlet's father, the southern accents of Scarlet's beau and first husband
at the beginning of the film.
> Vivien Leigh, of course, was
> not American. (I don't know what Leslie Howard's excuse was, except
> maybe that he'd been playing Americans in films with his own voice for a
> decade.)
They did attempt to speak in an elevated register of English that was
consistently different, that is to say, followed different norms, from the
English spoken by the slave characters.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CDD1...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> <deletions>
> >
> > You haven't made the connection either between house slaves and field
> > slaves, or between house slaves' dialects and the development of AAVE.
>
> House slaves and field slaves both belonged to the "they" group, from the
> standpoint of slave owners. Field slaves would speak mostly wih each other
> and their overseers, and the environment was strongly male dominated.
> House slaves were more "salonfähig", if you will allow me to use that
> word, and, as members of the household with important housekeeping
> responsibilities, such as following orders given by their owners, raising
> the owners' children, and catering both the owners' meals and social
> events, they had far more opportunities to interact with people spoke
> standard English. Since house slaves were involved in cleaning, cooking,
> and child-rearing, their world was as female dominated as the world of the
> field slave was male dominated. One would expect, that after the workday
> was over, many of the female house slaves would return to the slave
> quarters to spend time with their field slave spouses or partners.
You might expect, but do you have evidence?
So now you claim that 1938 dialect coaches had knowledge of speech
patterns and their social stratification 80 years earlier -- though
sociolinguistics wouldn't be invented for another generation, and the
Linguistic Atlas materials for the Southeast had not yet even been
gathered?
> norms adhered to by the white characters, who, by the way, did not speak
> the same type of English, cf. the clearly Irish-accented English of
> Scarlet's father, the southern accents of Scarlet's beau and first husband
> at the beginning of the film.
>
> > Vivien Leigh, of course, was
> > not American. (I don't know what Leslie Howard's excuse was, except
> > maybe that he'd been playing Americans in films with his own voice for a
> > decade.)
>
> They did attempt to speak in an elevated register of English that was
> consistently different, that is to say, followed different norms, from the
> English spoken by the slave characters.
"They" were not aware of "elevations of register." Leslie Howard and
Clark Gable made NO attempt to alter their speech patterns for any role
they played. (I don't know enough Olivia de Havilland to say anything
about her accent here vs. elsewhere, and I can't picture Melanie in my
mind's ear anyway.) It's Scarlett.
Peter T. Daniels
> No, I am not making sarcastic remarks. Slave societies are typically
> extremely hierarchical, and hierarchical social organization is typically
> reflected in and reinforced by different norms of usage. Read some of the
> early work in pre-Labovian sociolinguistics (or sociology of language, if
> you will) by J. J. Gumperz, such as his important 1958 article "Dialect
> Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village".
Or, read some of the recent work in (post)Labovian sociolinguistics in
order to be aware of the work that's been done in the 40 _most recent_
years. Mr. Holman's in a time warp.
John Atkinson
> In article <N8OdneN3beX...@comcast.com>, "AlexB"
> <al...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote
> > > Elaborating their own norms for English would also have given the
It occurs to me that probably the most similar situation in today's west to
the social situation on the slave plantations might be the societies that
develop within prisons -- socially isolated, extremely hierarchical, keen to
differentiate themselves linguistically from the warders and other
outsiders. Prison jargon develops, but (because the lexifying language is
known by all), there's little language mixing or grammatical
"simplification". Thus no pidgin development, as a rule.
John.
alexB
Thanks for explaining. I appreciate it. I will have to read it 5 more times
at least to get a sense (perhaps) of some fine print. There is also a huge
gap between us and ultimately it boils down to how differently our minds
work. It is aside from the fact that I am totally ignorant in the matters
you are talking about. My hope is to catch the pith.
I want to use this opportunity to test your theory. I will give it a
touchstone. But first I want to rephrase the key part to make sure I
understood it correctly. You are saying that what happened at Martha's
Vineyard can be used as a model to the fact that a separate pidgin English
(apart from a standard English) was developed 300 years ago by the African
slaves in America. You are saying that their sole motivation was to
distinguish themselves, to set themselves apart. I assume it for granted
that I am correct in interpreting what you said this way, if not, disregard
the rest of the message.
Now, using your theory please explain the first and second consonant shifts
in Germany during the Middle Ages. The Second one is the Grim' Law, I
reckon. Was it that the whole nation was driven by the desire to set itself
apart from itself?
Regards, - A
Eugene Holman
<alex...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
> news:holman-1506...@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi...
<deletions>
>
> Thanks for explaining. I appreciate it. I will have to read it 5 more times
> at least to get a sense (perhaps) of some fine print. There is also a huge
> gap between us and ultimately it boils down to how differently our minds
> work. It is aside from the fact that I am totally ignorant in the matters
> you are talking about. My hope is to catch the pith.
>
> I want to use this opportunity to test your theory. I will give it a
> touchstone. But first I want to rephrase the key part to make sure I
> understood it correctly. You are saying that what happened at Martha's
> Vineyard can be used as a model to the fact that a separate pidgin English
> (apart from a standard English) was developed 300 years ago by the African
> slaves in America.
In a very general sense, yes. The speakers of a language, any language,
are constantly subject to conflicting social pressures to express
themselves so that they can be understood by everyone else who speaks the
same language, and to use the language in a way which expresses their
individuality and thus distinguishes them and the peer group they
identitfy with at any particular time from everyone else. For a
relatively recent theoretical framework, see L. Milroy 1987, *Language and
Social Networks*. In the slave subcultures that developed in North America
there were many communicative needs, but one of them was to elaborate
varieties of English that would reflect the different social statuses of
slave and slave-owner. Briefly put, slave-owners had more and better
access to the standard English of the time than slaves did, and the
choices that they made with respect to the variety of English that they
elaborated and handed down to the next generation were governed by a
different input and by different norms than the English, including the
heavily accented and "broken" foreigners' English that the slaves had
access to and handed down to their offspring. Different vernacular norms
arose and, as was the case in Martha's Vineyard, some of their features
became sociolinguistic markers, that is to say, features of usage widely
recognized as signs of a specific social identity: "Why do you say /gwain/
rather than /'goiN/? Because that's what is expected of slaves when they
speak their recognized form of vernacular English."
> You are saying that their sole motivation was to
> distinguish themselves, to set themselves apart.
Please. don't put words into my mouth. I'm saying that this is a factor,
one factor. In Labov's recent monumental work in linguistic change he
recognizes three types of factors that contribute to the process which
allows linguistic innovations to acquire semiotic valency and thus
establish themselves as changes and social markers: structural factors,
functional factors, and social factors. Sturctural factors make it
probable that certain types of linguistic innovation, such as the loss of
the redundant ending in the third person singular present of English verbs
(he goes > he go) will occur, functional factors, the desire to express
individuality by testing or even flaunting existing norms, will allow it
to become established in a given vernacular norm, and social factors, the
ability to resist pressure to conform to the old norm and consciousness
that this alternative norm serves to distinguish "us" from "them", will
provide the confidence and motivation to use this alternative norm in at
least certain types of communicative situations. This is what, in Labov's
formulation, resulted in the reversal of the trend to level the
"centralization" of the aw and ay variables that had been noted in
Martha's Vineyard by Kurath and his fieldworkers during the 1930s and
semioticize it as a linguistic sign of "island-owner stgatus".
> I assume it for granted
> that I am correct in interpreting what you said this way, if not, disregard
> the rest of the message.
I've tried to give more detail. I've been taught to distinguish carefully
between linguistic innovations and linguistic changes. Due to the
complexity, irrationality, and high degree of redundancy in all human
languages, innovations will constantly by cropping up. Indeed, speakers of
the same language will come up with the same innvations such as dropping,
generalizing, or mirror-imaging that pesky third person singular present
of English verbs (he goes > he go, or I goes, you goes, he goes, or I
goes, you goes, he go) due to "drift". What is done with the innovations
produced by drift as new vernacular norms are elaborated is a different
issue altogether, see e.g. J. Cheshire "Present Tense Verbs in Reading
English" (1978).
> Now, using your theory please explain the first and second consonant shifts
> in Germany during the Middle Ages.
First, you have your dates and times all wrong.
The First Sound Shift, aka the Grimm's law changes (e.g. PIE *p > PG*f.
PIE *d > PG t, PIE *gh > PG *g), took place during the last-pre-Christian
millennium in conjunction with the spread of the Indo-European dialects
spoken by the agriculturalists and conquerers from the south-east into
what are now northern Germany and southern Scandinavia.
The Second Sound Shift, aka the High German Sound Shift (e.g. PG *p > HG
pf/ff, PG *t > HG ts/ss, PG *k > HG kx/xx) took lace much later, beginning
in what are now Switzerland and south-eastern Germany some time during the
first five centuries of the Christian era and arguably still going on, or
at least stalled, with modern Standard German reflecting a more
conservative stage of the change than the phonologically most innovative
(in this respect) Alemennic dialects of Switzerland.
> The Second one is the Grim' Law, I
> reckon. Was it that the whole nation was driven by the desire to set itself
> apart from itself?
It was the first one, not the second one, that is popularly known as
Grimm's Law.
Why these changes took place is, given the time depth, difficult to say.
However many linguists in this part of the world attribute the massive
changes undergone by Indo-European as it was introduced to the area
concerned, already sparsely inhabited by pre-Indo-European foragers, some
of whom evidently spoke Finno-Ugric languages, to a period of language
contact followed by a period of rapid Indo-Europeanization of some
pre-Indo-European language, possibly a Finno-Ugric one. Of all the
reconstructed Indo-European matrix languages (e.g. Proto-Germanic,
Proto-Romance, Proto-Slavic, Proto-Baltic, etc.) Proto-Germanic shows the
most radical innovations in phonology (e.g. the Grimm's law changes, the
mergers of PIE *o and *a to PG *a, and of PIE *â and ô to PG *ô, the
replacement of a mobile musical accent with a fixed root-initial one) and
morphology (the radical restructuring and simplification of the IE case
system, the radical restructuring and simplification of the IE systems of
tense and mood, the systematization of Ablaut in the verb system, as well
as the introduction of the dental past tense marker), not to mention the
high frequency of basic vocabulary items such as 'hand' and 'finger' with
no equivalents outside of Germanic, to a pre-Indo-European substrate
language. Simply put, proto-Germanic appears to have originated as
Indo-European with many features taken over from some earlier language
that would have been quite different in phonology, morphology, and
lexicon.
Why the phonological changes collectively referred to as the Second Sound
Shift took place I cannot say. I do not subscribe to the old
pre-theoretical explantion of it being the consequnece of "Steigerung des
Lebensgefühls" due to the beauty of the Slpine areas from which it
radiated northwards. I would not be surprised, although I will not further
speculate, if it might have had something to do with the introduction of
Germanic to an area with a Celtic substratum.
The Second Sound Shift today plays an important role in distinguishing one
local variety of German from another, something every student of German
dialectology learns when acquainting his or herself with the so-called
Benrath line
(http://www.deutsch-lernen.com/learn-german-online/german_language.htm#benrath).
Which constellation of sounds the Second Sound shift affected plays an
important role in determining which German traditional dialect is which
(http://www.deutsch-lernen.com/learn-german-online/german_language2.htm)
and thus has obvious sociolinguistic relevance.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
access to the standard Englishes of the time than slaves did, and the
choices that they made with respect to the variety of English that they
elaborated and handed down to the next generation were governed by a
different input and by different norms than the English, including the
heavily accented and "broken" foreigners' English, that the slaves had
access to and handed down to their offspring. Different vernacular norms
arose and, as was the case in Martha's Vineyard, some of their features
became sociolinguistic markers, that is to say, features of usage widely
recognized as signs of a specific social identity: "Why do you say /gwain/
rather than /'goiN/? Because that's what is expected of slaves when they
speak their recognized form of vernacular English."
> You are saying that their sole motivation was to
> distinguish themselves, to set themselves apart.
Please. don't put words into my mouth. I'm saying that this is a factor,
one factor. In Labov's recent monumental work in linguistic change he
recognizes three types of factors that contribute to the process which
allows linguistic innovations to acquire semiotic valency and thus
establish themselves as changes and social markers: structural factors,
functional factors, and social factors. Structural factors make it
probable that certain types of linguistic innovation, such as the loss of
the redundant ending in the third person singular present of English verbs
(he goes > he go), will occur, functional factors, the desire to express
individuality by testing or even flaunting existing norms, will allow it
to become established in a given vernacular norm, and social factors, the
ability to resist pressure to conform to the old norm and consciousness
that this alternative norm serves to distinguish "us" from "them", will
provide the confidence and motivation to use this alternative norm in at
least certain types of communicative situations. This is what, in Labov's
formulation, resulted in the reversal of the trend to level the
"centralization" of the aw and ay variables that had been noted in
Martha's Vineyard by Kurath and his fieldworkers during the 1930s and
semioticize it as a linguistic sign of "native islander status".
> I assume it for granted
> that I am correct in interpreting what you said this way, if not, disregard
> the rest of the message.
I've tried to give more detail. I've been taught to distinguish carefully
between linguistic innovations and linguistic changes. Due to the
complexity, irrationality, and high degree of redundancy in all human
languages, innovations will constantly by cropping up. Indeed, speakers of
the same language will come up with the same innvations, such as dropping,
generalizing, or mirror-imaging that pesky third person singular present
of English verbs (he goes > he go, or I goes, you goes, he goes, or I
goes, you goes, he go) due to "drift". What is done with the innovations
produced by drift as new vernacular norms are elaborated is a different
issue altogether, see e.g. J. Cheshire "Present Tense Verbs in Reading
English" (1978).
> Now, using your theory please explain the first and second consonant shifts
> in Germany during the Middle Ages.
First, you have your dates and times all wrong.
The First Sound Shift, aka the Grimm's law changes (e.g. PIE *p > PG *f,
PIE *d > PG *t, PIE *gh > PG *g), took place during the last-pre-Christian
millennium in conjunction with the spread of the Indo-European dialects
spoken by the agriculturalists and conquerers from the south-east into
what are now northern Germany and southern Scandinavia.
The Second Sound Shift, aka the High German Sound Shift (e.g. PG *p > HG
pf/ff, PG *t > HG ts/ss, PG *k > HG kx/xx) took place much later, beginning
Indo-European restructured with many features taken over from some earlier
language that would have been quite different in phonology, morphology,
and
lexicon.
Why the phonological changes collectively referred to as the Second Sound
Shift took place I cannot say. I do not subscribe to the old
pre-theoretical explantion of it being the consequence of "Steigerung des
Lebensgefühls" due to the beauty of the Alpine areas from which it
radiated northwards. I would not be surprised, although I will not further
speculate, if it might have had something to do with the introduction of
Germanic to an area with a Celtic substratum. The varieties of Germanic
most affected by the Second Sound Shift are relatively late colonial
varieties located at the southernmost periphery of the Germanic dialect
continuum in areas that once had Celtic populations.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
Hardly. I teach (using R. Wardhaugh: *An Introduction to
Sociolinguistics*, 4th edition (2002) and John Holm: *An Introduction to
Pidgins and Creoles (2000) as the course textbooks), do research, and
publish in sociolinguistics, most recently on language policy in the
Baltic countries of the former Soviet Union "Acculturation and
Communicative Mobility among Former Soviet Nationalities,". Annual Review
of Applied Linguistics 17 (1997), and the evolution of English as a
language of scientific discourse in Finland
(www.degruyter.com/journals/multilin/2003/pdf/22_309.pdf), both
co-authored with Harald Haarmann. I'm still working through Labov's
massive *Principles of linguistic Change*, vol. 2, so while not being too
much into post-Labovian sociolinguistics, I am quite familiar with his
thinking, including his current ideas about and revisions of that
thinking, over a career spanning more than forty years.
Knowing your subject means knowing the publications that were seminal
during its formative years. Familiarity with Einar Haugen's *The Norwegian
Language in America; a Study in Bilingual Behavior* (1953), Uriel
Weinreich *Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems* (1953), as well as
Gumperz's above-mentioned important and often-referred to article from
1958, is hardly indicative of being in a time warp.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Nigel Greenwood
<...>
> the complex grammar of English is
> unneeded.
But wouldn't you say that the object-focus construction is difficult
to get used to?
<...>
> Idioms are very rare.
That sounds very unlikely. Might be true of a conlang.
<...>
> Most
> adult westerners do not realize they should move the tongue back in
> the mouth about half an inch.
Does this apply to speakers of all European languages?
Nigel
ScriptMaster language resources (Persian/Turkish/Modern & Classical
Greek/Russian/IPA):
http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk
alexB
Many thanks. I will have to read it again a few times. I could not get to
the two links above. Authorization required?
I am basically done with theoretical arguing on the subject.
Thanks, - A
Peter T. Daniels
Continuing to apply only Haugen and Weinreich to language contact
situations _is_ indicative of a time warp. (Using Holm's Red book
instead of Holm's Green books is also not a good sign. We've already
seen how out of touch you are with contemporary
pidginistics/creolistics.)
When I went from Cornell to Chicago, I became exposed to what had been
going on in linguistics _after_ post-Bloomfieldianism, but, particularly
at LACUS meetings and to some extent at the ILA and in *Word*, I still
find senior scholars who have spent their entire career attacking
Chomsky 1957 and Chomsky 1965. That's what we were taught at Cornell in
those days (that generation was on the verge of retirement when I was
there), but it had already been superseded.
Peter T. Daniels
You really have a knack for ferreting out the
influential-among-outsiders but dubious-to-specialists, don't you! The
Milroys are widely read and widely disputed.
> In the slave subcultures that developed in North America
> there were many communicative needs, but one of them was to elaborate
> varieties of English that would reflect the different social statuses of
> slave and slave-owner. Briefly put, slave-owners had more and better
> access to the standard Englishes of the time than slaves did, and the
> choices that they made with respect to the variety of English that they
> elaborated and handed down to the next generation were governed by a
> different input and by different norms than the English, including the
> heavily accented and "broken" foreigners' English, that the slaves had
> access to and handed down to their offspring. Different vernacular norms
> arose and, as was the case in Martha's Vineyard, some of their features
> became sociolinguistic markers, that is to say, features of usage widely
> recognized as signs of a specific social identity: "Why do you say /gwain/
> rather than /'goiN/? Because that's what is expected of slaves when they
> speak their recognized form of vernacular English."
>
> > You are saying that their sole motivation was to
> > distinguish themselves, to set themselves apart.
>
> Please. don't put words into my mouth.
I hope this helps you realize that your excessive verbiage and your
convoluted syntax don't much help getting across whatever your points
may be? Here we have a theoretical innocent who is _trying_ to follow
you sympathetically and, you say, not succeeding.
> I'm saying that this is a factor,
> one factor. In Labov's recent monumental work in linguistic change he
> recognizes three types of factors that contribute to the process which
> allows linguistic innovations to acquire semiotic valency and thus
> establish themselves as changes and social markers: structural factors,
> functional factors, and social factors. Structural factors make it
> probable that certain types of linguistic innovation, such as the loss of
> the redundant ending in the third person singular present of English verbs
> (he goes > he go), will occur, functional factors, the desire to express
> individuality by testing or even flaunting existing norms, will allow it
> to become established in a given vernacular norm, and social factors, the
> ability to resist pressure to conform to the old norm and consciousness
> that this alternative norm serves to distinguish "us" from "them", will
> provide the confidence and motivation to use this alternative norm in at
> least certain types of communicative situations.
A 104-word sentence with nary a semicolon.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deletions>
>
> Continuing to apply only Haugen and Weinreich to language contact
> situations _is_ indicative of a time warp.
They are obviously not the only ones that I use, not I even the most
important. Living in a bilingual country with a solid tradition of
dialectology and sociolinguistic studies, I have plenty of contemporray
studies done by Finnish scholars on language contact, language
acquisition, and language variation and change in societies that are
bilingual. Additionally, I have been closely following the situation in
Estonia, where Russian and Estonian have done a flip-flop in status since
1989, with interesting sociolinguistic consequences.
> (Using Holm's Red book
> instead of Holm's Green books is also not a good sign. We've already
> seen how out of touch you are with contemporary
> pidginistics/creolistics.)
You can't really make the best use of the green books unless you have
read the red book or some similar introduction to the field.
> When I went from Cornell to Chicago, I became exposed to what had been
> going on in linguistics _after_ post-Bloomfieldianism, but, particularly
> at LACUS meetings and to some extent at the ILA and in *Word*, I still
> find senior scholars who have spent their entire career attacking
> Chomsky 1957 and Chomsky 1965. That's what we were taught at Cornell in
> those days (that generation was on the verge of retirement when I was
> there), but it had already been superseded.
I appreciate your point. I am probably about ten years older than you and
approaching *Festschrift*, if not yet retirement age. I escaped what
became a nasty and vindictive atmosphere at Cornell with respect to
keeping up with developments in linguistics by immigrating to Finland and
acquainting myself with the very interesting tradition of linguistic
studies here. Although Bloomfield and Chomsky have had their followers,
Scandinavian, British, German, and Pragueian trends were more important,
as was a strong indigenous tradition of dialectology, the study of bi- and
multilingualism, and historical linguistics. So my "time warp", the
existence of which I do not completely deny, since Bill Labov will always
be the father of sociolinguistics for me, is partially attributable to my
scepticism about the Anglo-American world always being at the vanguard of
and having the last word to say about theoretical linguistics. The
bittersweet experience of one of my former colleagues, Raimo Anttila, in
the American academic rat race, and his marginalization for refusing to
accept excess formalization or Chomskyism as the be all and end all of
linguistics, shows how inward looking a lot of contemporary American
linguistics is.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
<alex...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Eugene Holman" <hol...@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
> news:holman-1506...@c518-m3.eng.helsinki.fi...
<deleted>
>
> Many thanks. I will have to read it again a few times. I could not get to
> the two links above. Authorization required?
Hmm. I have no trouble accessing it. If you can't get it, go to the German
dialects page at http://www.ex.ac.uk/~pjoyce/dialects/mapgerm.html, which
has maps of both the Benrath Line and the Rhenish Fan (de "Rheinische
Fächer"). You cannot understand the High German or Second Sound Shift
without knowing about these two dialect landscapes and isoglosses. They
are discussed in some detail in Bloomfield 1933 in the chapter on
dialectology, as well in more recent books such as J. K. Chambers and P.
Trudgill, *Dialectology*, 1988 and R. Wardhaugh *An Inroduction to
Sociolinguistics*, 4th edition, 2002.
> I am basically done with theoretical arguing on the subject.
You might want to read Labov's pioneering article: "The Social Motivation
for a Sound Change" (1963), reprinted in his *Sociolinguistic Patterns*,
1972 to gain an understanding of how people semioticize specific
instantiations of variation to define social groups, identities, and
vernacular norms.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
reference to Chomskyism. Unfortunately, besides Lehmann's baby book, his
was the only textbook of historical linguistics available in 1973.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Anttila is incomprehensible
Why? the somewhat heavy European "convoluted" style, despite the heavy
editing done by Andrew Sihler? Anttila's book introduced serious semiotics
to historical linguistics, in addition to providing numerous examples from
Finnish and other Finno-Ugric lanuages that most English-speaking readers
were unlikely to be familair with.
> -- and often wrong -- quite without
> reference to Chomskyism.
Could you quote a few examples?
> Unfortunately, besides Lehmann's baby book, his
> was the only textbook of historical linguistics available in 1973.
We used Lehmann's "baby book" during the second term of Prof. Agard's
introuction to general linguistics course during the spring term of 1963.
Robert King's now forgotten but interesting and dogmatic *Historical
Linguistics and Generative Grammar*, 1968, attempted to fill the lacuna,
and both Hockett's *Course in Modern Linguistics* and Hall's *Introductory
Linguistics* had strong and challenging chapters dealing with historical
linguistics for those who still thought along
Neogrammarian-Saussurian-descriptivist lines. I learned my serious
historical linguistics, "first version", by reading and rereading A.
Bach's *Geschichte der deutschen Sprache" in a history of German course
taught by Herbert Kufner during my sophomore year, fall 1963. In 1966
William Labov's *The Social Stratification of English in New York City*
appeared. I do not remember reading it until 1969 when I was already in
Finland. I read it as part of the requirements for a block of studies in
phonetics, not linguistics. I would say that that book, along with
Eugenio Coserio's *Synchronie, Diachronie und Geschichte*, and the Anttila
textbook which you dislike, but which I had taught from the master himself
when it had just appeared, were the formative works that defined my
understanding of how and why languages change.
Here in Finland the work of Labov and Anttila remains influential, and one
of the more popular research topics of the yyounger generation of Finnish
linguists is the relationship between variation, change, and the
elaboration of vernacular norms.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CEE9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Anttila is incomprehensible
>
> Why? the somewhat heavy European "convoluted" style, despite the heavy
> editing done by Andrew Sihler? Anttila's book introduced serious semiotics
> to historical linguistics, in addition to providing numerous examples from
> Finnish and other Finno-Ugric lanuages that most English-speaking readers
> were unlikely to be familair with.
And thus very unsuitable for an introductory textbook; the lack of
exercises; and the bizarre theoretical orientation.
People still ask for explanations of that IE isogloss "map" near the
front.
> > -- and often wrong -- quite without
> > reference to Chomskyism.
>
> Could you quote a few examples?
No; see the reviews of the reprint (falsely advertised by Benjamins as a
new edition).
> > Unfortunately, besides Lehmann's baby book, his
> > was the only textbook of historical linguistics available in 1973.
>
> We used Lehmann's "baby book" during the second term of Prof. Agard's
> introuction to general linguistics course during the spring term of 1963.
>
> Robert King's now forgotten but interesting and dogmatic *Historical
> Linguistics and Generative Grammar*, 1968, attempted to fill the lacuna,
> and both Hockett's *Course in Modern Linguistics* and Hall's *Introductory
> Linguistics* had strong and challenging chapters dealing with historical
> linguistics for those who still thought along
> Neogrammarian-Saussurian-descriptivist lines.
By 1969-70, John U. Wolff (teaching Intro Ling for the first time) used
Gleason for the first semester and Bloomfield for the second semester.
Neither Hockett's nor Hall's was suitable as a classroom textbook -- the
former is a summation of all that was known to post-Bloomfieldianism,
the latter far too detailed and idiosyncratic (and I think I mentioned
how hard it was to track down a copy -- I finally found one, years
later, in Chicago).
> I learned my serious
> historical linguistics, "first version", by reading and rereading A.
> Bach's *Geschichte der deutschen Sprache" in a history of German course
> taught by Herbert Kufner during my sophomore year, fall 1963. In 1966
> William Labov's *The Social Stratification of English in New York City*
> appeared. I do not remember reading it until 1969 when I was already in
> Finland. I read it as part of the requirements for a block of studies in
> phonetics, not linguistics. I would say that that book, along with
> Eugenio Coserio's *Synchronie, Diachronie und Geschichte*, and the Anttila
> textbook which you dislike, but which I had taught from the master himself
> when it had just appeared, were the formative works that defined my
> understanding of how and why languages change.
Coseriu. Gene Gragg introduced him in Intro Hist Ling, but the
significant work was (is still?) only available in Romanian.
> Here in Finland the work of Labov and Anttila remains influential, and one
> of the more popular research topics of the yyounger generation of Finnish
> linguists is the relationship between variation, change, and the
> elaboration of vernacular norms.
The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
in Labov, that's for sure.
benlizross
>
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40CEE9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Anttila is incomprehensible
> >
> > Why? the somewhat heavy European "convoluted" style, despite the heavy
> > editing done by Andrew Sihler? Anttila's book introduced serious semiotics
> > to historical linguistics, in addition to providing numerous examples from
> > Finnish and other Finno-Ugric lanuages that most English-speaking readers
> > were unlikely to be familair with.
>
> And thus very unsuitable for an introductory textbook; the lack of
> exercises; and the bizarre theoretical orientation.
I have to agree with Peter on this point. Anttila is way too hard for an
introductory (undergraduate) course, though it is full of interesting
things that would be profitable to read for someone who had already been
through the basics. (I found something similar with Hockett's
introductory linguistics textbook in the 60s.)
> People still ask for explanations of that IE isogloss "map" near the
> front.
What? The IE waves? That's one of the things I like! It does require
careful examination to understand it, but then the facts are complex. Do
you know of a better graphic presentation of the same thing?
Ross Clark
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > People still ask for explanations of that IE isogloss "map" near the
> > front.
>
> What? The IE waves? That's one of the things I like! It does require
> careful examination to understand it, but then the facts are complex. Do
> you know of a better graphic presentation of the same thing?
A huge improvement would have been simply to draw the isoglosses on an
actual map rather than a square diagram.
alexB
Thanks, this link worked. It is interesting.
Thanks again, - A
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
<deletions>
>
> The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> in Labov, that's for sure.
Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
Its Dutch-looking name notwithstanding, a significant percentage of the
inhabitants of the town are descendants of Finnish immigrants from
Ostrobothnia (Western mid-coastal Finland) who settled there during the
early 20th century (for details, see http://www.fingerlakesfinns.org/).
Almost all of the inhabitants of van Etten, whether of Finnish descent or
not, speak what could be initially characterized as a local, heavily
anglicized variant of Finnish. Its grammatical structure is clearly
Finnish, even if study of its details reveals this to be that of
illiterate 19th century Ostrobothnian rural Finnish, not that of the
current literary language. Its lexicon, but not its phonology, has been
restructured towards English:
Van Etton Finnish (VEF) English etymon Standard Finnish (SF)
karpitsi garbage roska
peipipukki baby-buggy lastenvaunut
portsi porch kuisti
pussia to push työntää
rouata to throw heittää
Most current native speakers of Standard Finnish are fluent in English,
and they would understand it, even if they would regard it as a
hilarious-sounding (VEF mun komia akka 'my beautiful wife'/SF kaunis
vaimoni 'my beautiful wife'; mun [colloquial register] 'my', komea
'magnificent', akka 'hag'], corrupt, illiterate-sounding,
English-permeated version of their language.
This local patois functions in van Etten as a widely used code language
and has enabled the local basketball team to win several New York state
championships (although they were once crushingly defeated in interstate
competition by a team from New Jersey, where the local patois was American
Estonian. Estonian is phonologically more innovative than Finnish, with
many originally unstressed syllables having been lost due to phonetic
attrition, for which reason speakers of Estonian understand Finnish more
easily than vice versa).
In any case, van Etten Finnish, which I shall refer to in the following as
Vanettenese, arose from transplanted, dialectal varieties of Finnish,
first as a code (or norm) to indicate ethnic identity, later as a local
code language with virtually no input from Standard Finnish but a major
input from the locally spoken English, that can be used, among other
things, to indicate local loyalty. It is nobody's native language. The few
native speakers of Standard Finnish in the area have to learn Vanettenese
as a new and foreign code, just as native speakers of English have to
learn Tok Pisin. Conversely, the local Finnish church, which maintains
links with the Finnish Lutheran Church and thus ensures that there is a
constant presence of native speakers of Standard Finnish in the area,
conducts its services in Standard Finnish, which a decreasingly small
number of speakers of Vanettenese really understand.
In my understanding, Vanettense is an independent offshoot of the
dialectal Finnish of several generations ago that was transplanted to an
area where English was the dominant language and which evolved into a
structurally simplified, functionally limited jargon used first between
native speakers of Finnish and the English speakers, who knew or had
learned some Finnish, with which they interacted. Eventually it assumed
the status that it has now of a code that is too far from Finnish to be
regarded as simply a localized variant. Simply stated, Vanettenese is a
linguistic code in which 19th century rural Finnish grammatical structure
and segmental phonology have amalgated with American English lexicon,
suprasegmental phonology, and pragmatics. Vanettenese is nobody's native
language, and the primary reason for using it is to show local loyalty to
van Etten; it is not a symbol of Finnish heritage or sympathy for things
Finnish.
Vanettenese, did not arise in a slave or plantation culture, like a
paradigmatic pidgin. Nevertheless, it is the consequence of the
transplantation of one variety of language and some of its speakers, and
the efforts of these speakers, most of them first generation subsistence
farmers and lumberjacks, professions of low social status and with a
strict delineation of gender roles, to communicate with the English
speakers, generally of higher social status, in the locality to which they
moved.
What methodological objection do you have to calling Vanettenese a
Finnish-based pidgin? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the
social environment in which the interaction between the two speech
communities involved was not characterized by the degree of social
distance that accompanies the evolution of the paradigmatic pidgins? And
if so, how do you regard Russenorsk, a pidgin that arose along the Arctic
coast between Norwegian and Russian-speaking fishermen? Why does
Russenorsk qualify as a pidgin (according to Holm 1988), but not
Vanettenese?
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
and it has attained some status because it has enabled the local
basketball team to win several New York state championships (although
they were once crushingly defeated in interstate competition by a team
from New Jersey, where the local patois was American Estonian. Estonian is
phonologically more innovative than Finnish, with many originally
unstressed syllables having been lost due to phonetic attrition, for which
reason speakers of Estonian understand Finnish more easily than vice
versa).
In any case, van Etten Finnish, which I shall refer to in the following as
Vanettenese, arose from transplanted, dialectal varieties of Finnish,
first as a code (or vernacular norm) to indicate ethnic identity, later as
a local code language with virtually no input from Standard Finnish but a
major
input from the locally spoken English, that can be used, among other
things, to indicate local loyalty. It is nobody's native language. The few
native speakers of Standard Finnish in the area have to learn Vanettenese
as a new and foreign code, just as native speakers of English in Papua New
Guinea have to learn Tok Pisin. Conversely, the local Finnish church,
which maintains links with the Finnish Lutheran Church and thus ensures
that there is a constant presence of native speakers of Standard Finnish
in the area,
conducts its services in Standard Finnish, which a decreasingly small
number of speakers of Vanettenese really understand or are interested in.
In my understanding, Vanettense is an independent offshoot of the
dialectal Finnish of several generations ago that was transplanted to an
area where English was the dominant language and which evolved into a
structurally simplified, functionally limited jargon that was used first between
native speakers of Finnish and the English speakers, who knew or had
learned some Finnish, with which they interacted. Eventually it assumed
the status that it has now of a code that is too far from Standard Finnish
to be regarded as simply a localized variant. Simply stated, Vanettenese
is a linguistic code in which a subset of 19th century rural Finnish
grammatical structure and segmental phonology have amalgated with American
English lexicon, suprasegmental phonology, and pragmatics. Vanettenese is
nobody's native language, and the primary reason for using it is to show
local loyalty to van Etten; it is not a symbol of Finnish heritage or
sympathy for things Finnish.
Vanettenese, did not arise in a slave or plantation culture, like a
paradigmatic pidgin. Nevertheless, it is the consequence of the
transplantation of one variety of a language and some of its speakers to a
new environment, and of the subsequent efforts of these speakers, most of
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CEF9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> <deletions>
> >
> > The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> > in Labov, that's for sure.
>
> Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
> your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
>
> About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
Four years there, and I never heard of the town, much less its Finnish
dialect.
Because of your statement in the second paragraph after my comment
above: "Its grammatical structure is clearly Finnish."
None of the sociological or sociolinguistic details are relevant to the
structure of the dialect.
"Pidgin" does not refer to a social situation, but to a linguistic
phenomenon.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40CEF9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > <deletions>
> > >
> > > The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> > > in Labov, that's for sure.
> >
> > Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
> > your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
> >
> > About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
>
> Four years there, and I never heard of the town, much less its Finnish
> dialect.
>
<deletions>
> Because of your statement in the second paragraph after my comment
> above: "Its grammatical structure is clearly Finnish."
It is, even though reduced and with some forms that would be regarded as
illiterate simplifications. Finnish is an agglutinative/fusional language
with a highly integrated morphological structure that would be rather
impervious to influence from English. That does not mean that this Finnish
grammatical structure cannot be made to function with a totally different
lexicon, thus making it questionable whether the reulting code could
reasonably be called Finnish or not. I could just as well have said the
grammatical structure of Hawaiian Creole, which arose from an unstable
jorgon with, is clearly English, or that the grammatical structure of
Chinese Pidgin English shows many clearly Chinese features of
morpho-syntax. Its lexicon is as clearly English.
Pussi peipipukki päkjaardilta livinruumiin. Sen jälkee teikauta karbitsi.
push baby-buggy back-yard-ABL living-room-ILLAT it-GEN after take-aut
garbage.
"Push the baby carriage from the back yard into the living room. After
that take out the garbage."
(Standard Finnish: Työnnä lastenvaunut takapihalta olohuoneeseen. Sen
jälkeen vie roskat.)
> None of the sociological or sociolinguistic details are relevant to the
> structure of the dialect.
>
> "Pidgin" does not refer to a social situation, but to a linguistic
> phenomenon.
It is, but linguistic phenomena are social *by nature* and thus reflect
social situations.
1. A pidgin is a functionally restricted language lacking a community of
native speakers that arises when speakers of two or more languages who
share no common language have to communicate, usually in a only a limited
range of communicatuve situations. [Being restricted to certain types of
speech situations, lacking native speakers are socially defined
parameters.]
2. The type of language that arises in this type of situation is an
amalgam, typically having a *lexicon* derived primarily from one of the
contact languages, typically the one of higher status, and a *grammatical
structure* combining elements of one or more of the substrate languages
with simplifications resulting from general language learning strategies
and the jettisoning of non-functional morphological variation. [The fact
that a language is in a substratum or superstratum position within a
specific territory is a consequence of social factors and typically
defines their relative prestige and the manner in which they will
influence each other. The substrate language will borrow cultural
vocabulary from the superstrate language, sometimes having to borrow
phonology, morphological patterns, and syntax as well, the superstrate
language will be more likely to borrow terms, overwhelmingly, nouns, for
local topography, flora, fauna, culinary items, and exotica. The nature
and degree of borrowing is determined by socially determined factors.]
3. A pidgin is different enough from the languages that gave rise to it to
be a linguistic norm that marks a clear break from the norms of the
contributing language: it is a fundamentally new lnguistic system, rather
than one handed down from the previous generation. [It is a new set of
norms for communicating; everybody who wants to use it has to make an
effort to learn it. Learning is a social activity.]
4. A pidgin can acquire a body of speakers large enough for it to be
handed down to their offspring and become the nucleus of their native
languages. This next generation will elaborate its grammatical structure
and range of functional valency, in which case it becomes a creole. [What
was once merely "speaking funny" becomes a real language with speakers who
take it seriously. This is a social re-evaluation of a system of norms and
of the people who adhere to it.]
5. A creole can further evolve in such a manner that its speakers
*associate* or *dissociate* it with the language of higher prestige in
their speech community. This can lead to a *creole continuum*, in which
the creole establishes itself as the basilect of speakers who use some
variety of the higher prestige lexifier language in certain speech
situations (e.g. the Jamaican Creole continuum), or it may lead to a
distinction between two cognate but coexisting linguistic systems, each
with its own set of registers, norms, etc. (e.g. Sranan Tongo and Dutch in
Surinam). [This is a further re-evaluation of sets of norms, this time of
co-existing and competing norms, and of assigning each of them to its
proper place and status. Jamaican Creole is evaluated in its speech
community as having lesser status than standard West Indian English does
and it is consigned to speech situations characterized by informality and
in-group orientation, Standard West Indian English being assigned to
formal, out-group oriented situations. Sranan Tongo has been assigned a
status more equal with Dutch in Surinam, thus it is the appropriate code
to use in a wider variety of formal, out-group oriented speech
situations.]
Why is the "broken Finnish" that has been almost completely relexified
with English lexical morphemes, is used as an important secret code by
local sports teams, as well as for socially circumscribed communicational
situations by the inhabitants of Van Etten, New York, and which is
nobody's native language or sole variety, not a Finnish-based pidgin? To
speak it you have to learn 1) a few hundred high frequency Finnish
mosphemes, lexical and grammatical, in the meanings and pronunciations
they had a century ago in Ostrobothnia dialect, 2) how to pass English
lexical morphemes through a Finnish phonological filter and then 3) how
use them in the most Finnish syntactic templates.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Eugene Holman
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40CEF9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > <deletions>
> > >
> > > The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> > > in Labov, that's for sure.
> >
> > Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
> > your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
> >
> > About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
>
> Four years there, and I never heard of the town, much less its Finnish
> dialect.
>
<deletions>
> Because of your statement in the second paragraph after my comment
> above: "Its grammatical structure is clearly Finnish."
It is, even though reduced and with some forms that would be regarded as
illiterate simplifications. Finnish is an agglutinative/fusional language
with a highly integrated morphological structure that would be rather
impervious to influence from English. That does not mean that this Finnish
grammatical structure cannot be made to function with a totally different
lexicon, thus making it questionable whether the reulting code could
reasonably be called Finnish or not. I could just as well have said the
grammatical structure of Hawaiian Creole, which arose from an unstable
jorgon, is clearly English lexically, or that the grammatical structure of
Chinese Pidgin English shows many clearly Chinese features of
morpho-syntax. Its lexicon is as clearly English.
Pussi peipipukki päkjaardilta livinruumiin. Sen jälkee teikauta karpitsi.
push baby-buggy back-yard-ABL living-room-ILLAT it-GEN after take-aut
garbage.
"Push the baby carriage from the back yard into the living room. After
that take out the garbage."
(Standard Finnish: Työnnä lastenvaunut takapihalta olohuoneeseen. Sen
jälkeen vie roskat.)
The grammatical structure is clearly of Finnish origin, the lexicon is as
clearly English.
> None of the sociological or sociolinguistic details are relevant to the
> structure of the dialect.
>
> "Pidgin" does not refer to a social situation, but to a linguistic
> phenomenon.
It is, but linguistic phenomena are social *by nature* and thus reflect
social situations, in the case of a pidgin, a specific sequence of social
situations.
1. A pidgin is a functionally restricted language lacking a community of
native speakers that arises when speakers of two or more languages who
share no common language have to communicate, usually in a only a limited
range of communicatuve situations. [Being restricted to certain types of
speech situations, and lacking native speakers are socially defined
parameters.]
2. The type of language that arises in this type of situation is an
amalgam, typically having a *lexicon* derived primarily from one of the
contact languages, typically the one of higher status, and a *grammatical
structure* combining elements of one or more of the substrate languages
with simplifications resulting from general language learning strategies
and the jettisoning of non-functional morphological variation. [The fact
that a language is in a substratum or superstratum position within a
specific territory is a consequence of social factors and typically
defines their relative prestige and the manner in which they will
influence each other. The substrate language will borrow cultural
vocabulary from the superstrate language, sometimes having to borrow
phonology, morphological patterns, and syntax as well, the superstrate
language will be more likely to borrow terms, overwhelmingly, nouns, for
local topography, flora, fauna, culinary items, and exotica. The nature
and degree of borrowing is determined by socially determined factors.]
3. A pidgin is different enough from the languages that gave rise to it to
be a linguistic norm that marks a clear break from the norms of the
contributing languages: it is a fundamentally new lnguistic system, rather
than one handed down from the previous generation. [It is a new set of
norms for communicating; everybody who wants to use it has to make an
effort to learn it before being able to use it competently. Learning is a
social activity.]
lexical morphemes through a Finnish phonological filter, and then 3) how
use them in the most frequent Finnish morphophonemic and syntactic templates.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <40CFBA...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > Eugene Holman wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <40CEF9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > <deletions>
> > > >
> > > > The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> > > > in Labov, that's for sure.
> > >
> > > Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
> > > your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
> > >
> > > About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
> >
> > Four years there, and I never heard of the town, much less its Finnish
> > dialect.
> >
> <deletions>
>
> > Because of your statement in the second paragraph after my comment
> > above: "Its grammatical structure is clearly Finnish."
Logorrhea, thy name is Holman.
> It is, even though reduced and with some forms that would be regarded as
> illiterate simplifications. Finnish is an agglutinative/fusional language
> with a highly integrated morphological structure that would be rather
> impervious to influence from English. That does not mean that this Finnish
> grammatical structure cannot be made to function with a totally different
> lexicon, thus making it questionable whether the reulting code could
> reasonably be called Finnish or not. I could just as well have said the
> grammatical structure of Hawaiian Creole, which arose from an unstable
> jorgon, is clearly English lexically, or that the grammatical structure of
> Chinese Pidgin English shows many clearly Chinese features of
> morpho-syntax. Its lexicon is as clearly English.
>
> Pussi peipipukki päkjaardilta livinruumiin. Sen jälkee teikauta karpitsi.
> push baby-buggy back-yard-ABL living-room-ILLAT it-GEN after take-aut
> garbage.
> "Push the baby carriage from the back yard into the living room. After
> that take out the garbage."
> (Standard Finnish: Työnnä lastenvaunut takapihalta olohuoneeseen. Sen
> jälkeen vie roskat.)
>
> The grammatical structure is clearly of Finnish origin, the lexicon is as
> clearly English.
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.
IN SPECIFIC WAYS (which, as Bickerton has shown, reflect "UG")
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 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.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> > In article <40CEF9...@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
> > <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > <deletions>
> > >
> > > The way you've been approaching pidgins and AAVE doesn't have its roots
> > > in Labov, that's for sure.
> >
> > Now that we've waxed all nostalgic about our shared Cornell past, what is
> > your intake on the following situation from the Cornell area?
> >
> > About twelve miles due south of Ithaca there is a town called van Etten.
>
> Four years there, and I never heard of the town, much less its Finnish
> dialect.
Van Etten is part of what is now officially known as the Village of Spencer.
Live and learn:
Source: http://www.tiogacountyny.com/Spencer-History.asp
<quote>
<deletions>
The Town of Spencer was much larger when first organized in 1806. It
included the towns of Candor, Caroline, Danby, Newfield and Cayuta (Van
Etten).
<deletions>
As the Village of Spencer grew, place names were also given to various
sections. The northern part of the village was known as Bradleytown for
the Bradley brothers, who improved the area and built a large store in
1850.
The downtown area was known as łThe Corners.˛ In this area the Fishers,
the Emmons and others built stores and businesses. Across Catatonk Creek
from the Corners was an area known as łBrooklyn.˛ The western part of town
was known as łSeelytown˛ for the Seely Company that was made up of
sawmill, gristmill, an electric company, store, hotel and a glove factory.
The railroad station was also located there.
About 1909 the Finnish people started moving into the area, buying mostly
the poor farms. There were frugal and prospered. They started the Spencer
Cooperative Society which sold first groceries, then hardware, farm
machinery, and feed. As the poultry industry in Spencer became a very big
business, the Co-Op also bought and sold eggs. As the young Finns grew up,
many went to college, joined the army and did not come back to this area.
The older generation had saved their money and many of them moved to
Florida in their retirement.
Today the biggest industry is the Spencer-Van Etten School. The Tioga
State Bank, which has six branches, has its headquarters in Spencer. Other
businesses are: Northern Lights, an upholstery business, Raymond Hadley
Packaging firm, Starfire Swords, Ltd., a florist, nursery, landscaping,
blacktopping, Bed and Breakfast, food store, café, restaurant, pizza
place, gas station, Ford car dealer, local newspaper and many other small
businesses.
There are five churches and a Historical Society with a museum. There is a
Doctorąs clinic, an osteopath, a Message Therapist, midwife, and
veterinarians. There are nine dairy farmers.
</quote>
Its Finnish "dialect" is a local variety of Finlgish, something that is a
cross between a heavily anglicized dialect of Finnish and a word game
using a simplified version of Finnish morphology and syntax, and close to
100% English lexicon modified through the filter of Finnish phonology. As
such, it has to be learned; it cannot be understood by monolingual
speakers of English or Finnish:
Source: http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/P1/RSV/jt-fingl.html
<quote>
<deletions>
The Finglish Speech Community
The main characteristic of immigrant speech communities is that the
dominant language of the speakers is the language they brought with them
from their country of origin. It is the language that English will, in
time, transform in accordance with its own structure and the background of
individual speakers. In Astoria, Oregon, for example, the speakers ranged
from Finnish monolinguals (who did not speak enough English to cope with
their daily lives) to English-dominant bilinguals whose knowledge of
Finnish varied depending on their background.
The two defining features of a speech community are
€ a shared language variety and
€ homogeneous norms for its use.
Finglish is unique to this type of community because neither Finnish nor
English speakers are able to comprehend it. As for shared norms, Finglish
speakers use their speech variety within the community, but become very
conscious of their speech when communicating with either Americans or
Finns. On such occasions they try to shift respectively toward English or
Finnish as much as possible
<deletions>
Characteristic of Finglish is that
almost all voiced consonants in English are replaced by their voiceless
counterparts in Finglish, e.g.:
lumperi ‹ 'lumber'
piiri ‹ ' beer'
rapoli ‹ 'trouble'
karpetsi ‹ 'garbage'
three contiguous vowels are not allowed. They are broken up by inserting
either a back or front glide depending on the phonetic environment, e.g.
leijata ‹ 'to play'
sauveri ‹ 'shower'
syllabic consonants are modified by inserting a vowel in front of them, e.g.:
kaluna ‹ 'gallon'
rapoli ‹ 'trouble'
words should end in a vowel. The preferred word-final vowel is /i/ but
/a/ is also encountered, e.g.:
reimi‹ 'frame'
kaara‹ 'car'
heerkatti‹ 'haircut'
loijari‹ 'lawyer'
when the word in English begins with two or three consonants, all but the
last consonant must be deleted before the word is acceptable for Finglish,
e.g.:
raikki ‹ 'strike'
touvi ‹ 'stove'
raippi ‹ 'stripe'
rosseri ‹ 'grocery'
<deletions>
<quotes>
This local Finnish "dialect" is widely spoken in the area (visted there in
1975 and can attest to that), and it serves a) as a mark of local
solidarity for exchanging pleasantries and simple conversation, often with
code-switching into English, b) as a secret code that has enabled local
sports teams to exchange verbal comments without being understood. As far
as I know, it has no other functions, and will probably persist as part of
the local linguistic scene. In this sense it can be regarded as a
linguistic system which succeeded in carving out a functional niche for
itself and found a body of speakers when it was in what might otherwise be
considered the final stage of language death.
A similarly anglicized and radically simplified variant of Hungarian is
used in and around McKeesport, Pennsylvania, not only by people of
Hungarian descent, but as a local "in-group" code-language, cf. Anna
VENYVESI:
- "Nyelvkontaktus és nyelvvesztés az amerikai magyarban: A hasonulások
sorsa a mckeesporti beszélők nyelvében" [Language contact and language
loss in American Hungarian: The fate of assimilations in the speech of
McKeesport speakers]. Presented at the 9. Élőnyelvi Konferencia [9th
Language Use Conference], August 22-24, 1996, Szeged, Hungary.
- "Hungarian-American case: Morphological change in McKeesport,
Pennsylvania". Presented at the 11th Conference of the Finno-Ugric Studies
Association of Canada , May 28-29, 1996, Brock University, St. Catharines,
Ontario.
- "Patterns of borrowing and language attrition: American Hungarian in
McKeesport, Pennsylvania". Presented at the Third International Conference
on the Structure of Hungarian , January 10-13, 1996, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
benlizross
> push baby-buggy back-yard-ABL living-room-ILLAT it-GEN after take-aut
> garbage.
> "Push the baby carriage from the back yard into the living room. After
> that take out the garbage."
> j舁keen vie roskat.)
I'm sorry that I have not had the time to read the enormous volume of
postings in these threads, but I wonder what are the real issues at
stake? The "pidgin" and "creole" terminology has been in crisis for a
couple of decades, as more examples of interesting contact languages
which don't fit the classical type emerge in the literature. The
response of most specialists has been to keep the terms "pidgin" and
"creole" for languages conforming closely to the original types so
described, and to try to develop a broader theory of contact languages
which would encompass both these and others such as Afrikaans, Ma'a,
Singapore English, etc. etc. Some terminology like "intertwined
language" and "indigenized varieties" has developed, but admittedly
it's still not adequate. Holman, by contrast, seems to be happy to
broaden the use of these terms to include the entire range of
contact-influenced languages. Van Etten Finnish is certainly
interesting, and I'm disappointed to find that (apparently) nobody has
published a description of it. In some respects it sounds like
Anglo-Romani, a terminal version of an ancestral language functioning as
a cryptolect. But here the roles of grammar and lexicon are reversed.
Still, one would have two immediate reservations about describing it as
a "pidgin" -- (1) the survival of at least some Finnish grammatical
morphology; (2) Is it really "nobody's native language"? From what
Holman says, it appears to be understood throughout the community. At
what age do people learn it? Even if most of its users have English as a
primary language, they can perfectly well have a second native language.
Forgive me if I have missed any important points made in this
discussion. I guess I am suggesting that the argument is largely
terminological and hence not ultimately very interesting. But I sense a
kind of resentment or hostility on Holman's part against something, and
I don't know whether that something is just Peter T.Daniels, or
something more general in linguistics that he thinks has gone wrong. Or
maybe he's just spent too much time in the snake pits of soc.culture.*?
Ross Clark
Eugene Holman
<gram...@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
Eugene Holman
> Eugene Holman wrote:
<deletions>
>
> I'm sorry that I have not had the time to read the enormous volume of
> postings in these threads, but I wonder what are the real issues at
> stake?
The issue of whether the notion of pidgin is better defined in terms of
the sociolinguistic features that prevailed during its evolution, and
which prevail during its existence as a language lacking native speakers
and useful only for certain severely restricted types of communication.
This is not a trivial issue, and it is discussed with considerable
erudition in Suzanne Romaine's *Pidgin & Crealoe Languages*, 1988, chapter
2.
> The "pidgin" and "creole" terminology has been in crisis for a
> couple of decades, as more examples of interesting contact languages
> which don't fit the classical type emerge in the literature. The
> response of most specialists has been to keep the terms "pidgin" and
> "creole" for languages conforming closely to the original types
"types" defined in terms of shared structural features (with influence
from theories of Principles and Parameters and universal grammar), or
"types" defined in terms of the outcome of a specific and well-defined set
of sociolinguistic prerequisites (collision of at least two languages,
typically with inequalities of power between their speakers, resulting in
a desire between the two grouops to communicate in order to perform basic
activities such as trade, and the satisfaction of this desire in the form
of the emergence of a mixed but easily learned new language that lacks
native speakers and intergenerational transmission, is usable only for
certain types of communicative situations, and has a simple mechanism for
modifying words of the lexifier language to fit its norms and thus augment
its lexical stock.)
> so
> described, and to try to develop a broader theory of contact languages
> which would encompass both these and others such as Afrikaans, Ma'a,
> Singapore English, etc. etc. Some terminology like "intertwined
> language" and "indigenized varieties" has developed, but admittedly
> it's still not adequate.
> Holman, by contrast, seems to be happy to
> broaden the use of these terms to include the entire range of
> contact-influenced languages.
Not quite. I maintain that no matter how we define pidgin or creole, there
are examples of both pidgins, and piginized *varieties* of languages that
can coexist with the more standard language and influence its subsequent
development. Dutch continued to evolve as Dutch in the Netherlands, but
the subset of Dutch dialects that were transplanted to Africa evolved
according to a different path due, among other things, to their having
acquired a (pidginized >) creolized variety in conjunction with its rapid
and imperfect spread to speakers of local substrate languages. This
creolized variety eventually acquired enough prestige to be able to
provide some of the input which further determined the direction in which
South African Dutch would evolve, the result being a set of linguistic
norms different enough from those of the Dutch of the Netherlands to
justify calling it a distinct language, Afrikaans. So I am not claiming
that Afrikaans is creolized Dutch. I am claiming that Afrikaans is a
transplanted subset of Dutch which has been *influenced* by some of the
creolized varieties it acquired in a new setting,isolated from mainstream
Dutch, to have evolved into something different from Dutch, with many of
the salient differences being the consequence of input into the evolution
of its various norms from creolized varieties. What is interesting is that
the creolized varieties of Dutch, or more precisely their speakers,
acquired enough power to significantly influence the evolution of the
originally prestige variety.
> Van Etten Finnish is certainly
> interesting, and I'm disappointed to find that (apparently) nobody has
> published a description of it.
There are, however, many descriptions of "Finglish", of which Van Etten
Finnish is a curious subvariety. Most of these are only in Finnish, but a
large corpus of material, with an introductory account in English, can be
found in Pertti VIRTARANTA. *Amerikansuomen sanakirja. A Dictionary of
American Finnish*. 329 s. 1992. Siirtolaisuusinstituutti. Turku.*. For
those who read Finnish, a detailed description of the sociolinguistics and
structure of American Finnish is given in his *Amerikansuomi* ["American
Finnish"]. 207 s. + 32 kuvaa. SKS Tietolipas 125 (Karisto)
> In some respects it sounds like
> Anglo-Romani, a terminal version of an ancestral language functioning as
> a cryptolect.
That sounds like a good characterization. With the proviso that it serves
as a sign of local rather than ethnic identity and solidarity.
> But here the roles of grammar and lexicon are reversed.
> Still, one would have two immediate reservations about describing it as
> a "pidgin" -- (1) the survival of at least some Finnish grammatical
> morphology;
Standard Finnish is morphologically an extremely complex language (15
cases, 180 mostly simplex, some periphrastic, distinct forms for every
noun, more than 10,000 forms for each verb), and the morphology is
functionally important and thus not redundant. Unlike the case with the
complex morphology of languages such as Latin, Finnish morphology is quite
straightforward and regular: basically one meaning one representation in
both directions. If a language with such complex morphology is going to be
pidginized, and who is to say that this cannot happen, most of that
morphology is going to remain. Imperfectly learned foreigner's Finnish
also retains the core morphological structure, including the twelve most
important and productive cases, otherwise the language could not be spoken
or understood.
> 2) Is it really "nobody's native language"? From what
> Holman says, it appears to be understood throughout the community. At
> what age do people learn it?
My one informant, a former student and native of Van Etten, told me that
if they are of Finnish descent, they learn it from their parents and
Finnish relatives, if they are not of Finnish descent, they typically
learn it when playing team games: first numbers, than the case endings of
numbers, then simple sentences: Kaheksan passaa pallon kuuvelle! "Eight
passes the ball to six!"
As an amusing footnote, this former student was in a second-year Finnish
class that I taught at the University of Wisconsin. When she came to me
before the term started to find out if her knowledge of Van Etten Finnish
was sufficient allow her to skip elementary Finnish, my hair almost stood
on end when I heard her talk. Her Finnish pronunciation was well-neigh
perfect (except for the English-like intonation), but the grammar was
limited and the vocabulary as "outlandish" as it was old fashioned. The
first month of the course was very difficult for her, because she had to
un-learn a language which she actually did speak as something approaching
a second language witinh her family circle. But she eventually acquired a
fluent command of standard Finnish as well as the ability to code-switch
between the two norms.
> Even if most of its users have English as a
> primary language, they can perfectly well have a second native language.
In its present state, the language is too functionally restricted. It is
used for greetings, to talk about the weather, to make simple purchases,
to talk clandestinely in front of outsiders, and for team games. Its more
elaborated version is the dying language of an immigrant group with fewer
members and little contact with Standard Finnish except through the local
Finnish Lutheran Church.
>
> Forgive me if I have missed any important points made in this
> discussion. I guess I am suggesting that the argument is largely
> terminological and hence not ultimately very interesting. But I sense a
> kind of resentment or hostility on Holman's part against something, and
> I don't know whether that something is just Peter T.Daniels, or
> something more general in linguistics that he thinks has gone wrong. Or
> maybe he's just spent too much time in the snake pits of soc.culture.*?
No. I teach sociolinguistics and am obviously interested in discussing
this issue. As a person more interested in sociolinguistics than in
theoretical linguistics, it is natural that I am interested in
understanding why, as Peter argues, pidgins should be defined in
structural rather than sociolinguistic and functional terms. I also detect
a bias in what he writes towards understanding the process of
pidginization as one involving languages of specific typological types. My
sociolinguistically oriented view is that a language of *any* typological
type will undergo pidginization if the proper sociolinguistic conditions
are met, even though the outsome will be structurally quite different if,
say polysynthetic Georgian or agglutinative/fusional Finnish is pidginized
than if a morphologically simpler language such as English is.
Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
structural features of the outcome.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
> > 2) Is it really "nobody's native language"? From what
> > Holman says, it appears to be understood throughout the community. At
> > what age do people learn it?
>
> My one informant, a former student and native of Van Etten, told me that
> if they are of Finnish descent, they learn it from their parents and
> Finnish relatives, if they are not of Finnish descent, they typically
> learn it when playing team games: first numbers, than the case endings of
> numbers, then simple sentences: Kaheksan passaa pallon kuuvelle! "Eight
> passes the ball to six!"
In other words, it IS a first language of a community, and DOES have
native speakers (all of whom are native speakers of at least one other
language as well.) Too bad he left Cornell after his B.A. -- it would
have made a superb disseration (although I don't think there were any
Uralists there then, or I'd have tried to audit their class).
> Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> structural features of the outcome.
Hey, it's what the specialists say.
Eugene Holman
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> > > 2) Is it really "nobody's native language"? From what
> > > Holman says, it appears to be understood throughout the community. At
> > > what age do people learn it?
> >
> > My one informant, a former student and native of Van Etten, told me that
> > if they are of Finnish descent, they learn it from their parents and
> > Finnish relatives, if they are not of Finnish descent, they typically
> > learn it when playing team games: first numbers, than the case endings of
> > numbers, then simple sentences: Kaheksan passaa pallon kuuvelle! "Eight
> > passes the ball to six!"
>
> In other words, it IS a first language of a community, and DOES have
> native speakers (all of whom are native speakers of at least one other
> language as well.)
Not quite. In 1975 when I visited the only speakers of Standard Finnish in
the community were a handful of people imported from Finland who worked at
the local Lutheran church under contract. The language which my student
spoke with her parents was an extended form of the local patois, but it
had no pretensions to being a full language. It was nobody's native
language. Its speakers knew that it was not even mutually comprehensible
with Finnish, but this elaborated private version had more communicative
functions than the public version, which was primarily a cryptolect.
In this sense you had a situation like this:
1. A few imported speakers of standard Finnish who were there for a few
years as part of a program with the Finnish Lutheran Church. Their job was
to ensure that at least some people in the community could maintain some
contact with Standard Finnish and conduct curch services, weddings,
christenings, funerals, and Christas church celebrations in the language
of the Old Country, even if hardly anybody understood it. Although they
knew English when they arrived, it took some time for them to learn
Vanettenese and they would never use it in church.
2. People of full or partial Finnish descent, few of whom knew Standard
Finnish, but all of whom had English as their native language, and various
elaborations of Vanettenese as a kyökkikieli a language mostly limited
to use in the kitchen in the family circle for talking in the simplest
manner, frequently code-switchin into English about the most basic
aspects of everyday life.
3. People of non-Finnish descent, none of whom knew standard Finnish, most
of whom (it was a Cornell suburb, and many Cornell students and staff
members lived there) had English as their native language, and virtually
all of whom had learned enough Vanettenese to play team games, greet
locals, make simple purchases, and utter snide remarks about outsiders in
front of them.
> Too bad he left Cornell after his B.A.
Blame the Vietnam war and a Fulbright to Finland for that.
> -- it would
> have made a superb disseration (although I don't think there were any
> Uralists there then, or I'd have tried to audit their class).
There weren't, but I was in contact with Uralist supreme, Robert
Austerlitz at Columbia. During the late 1980s he spent a year in Finland,
and I attended his course in Gilyak.
> > Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> > claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> > structural features of the outcome.
>
> Hey, it's what the specialists say.
Some specialists...
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
THEY DID NOT LEARN IT AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE OR AS ADULTS. IT WAS ONE OF
THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGES.
> 3. People of non-Finnish descent, none of whom knew standard Finnish, most
> of whom (it was a Cornell suburb, and many Cornell students and staff
> members lived there) had English as their native language, and virtually
> all of whom had learned enough Vanettenese to play team games, greet
> locals, make simple purchases, and utter snide remarks about outsiders in
> front of them.
In my time, half a decade later, almost no students had cars.
> > Too bad he left Cornell after his B.A.
>
> Blame the Vietnam war and a Fulbright to Finland for that.
The soon to be ex-president of the US didn't seem to have a problem.
> > -- it would
> > have made a superb disser[t]ation (although I don't think there were any
> > Uralists there then, or I'd have tried to audit their class).
>
> There weren't, but I was in contact with Uralist supreme, Robert
> Austerlitz at Columbia. During the late 1980s he spent a year in Finland,
> and I attended his course in Gilyak.
We happened to be seated together at the 1974 LSA Golden Anniversary
Dinner (they took pains to intermix grad students and senior scholars)
and were friends until his death. [I was furious that Tel-Aviv
University insisted that I couldn't go to the 1999 75th Anniversary
meeting in Los Angeles and still turn up at Ben-Gurion Airport the next
day -- and then it turned out that because of snow my departure from New
York was delayed a day anyway, and the people flying direct from L.A.
arrived at the same time. So I didn't get to see Jim McCawley for the
last time.]
> > > Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> > > claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> > > structural features of the outcome.
> >
> > Hey, it's what the specialists say.
>
> Some specialists...
The correct ones!
benlizross
>
[among other things]
>
> Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> structural features of the outcome.
>
> Regards,
> Eugene Holman
Just a couple of quick responses.
I would similarly question your attempt to remove the structural
criteria and operate on a purely sociolinguistic definition. To me a
major part of the interest of these languages is in the structural
changes brought about by the various situations in which they evolve.
And at this stage they cannot simply be read off from the social
circumstances.
I think you're wrong about the Principles & Parameters influence. The
common grammatical features of "classic" creoles were noted by people
like Taylor in the 60s (not to mention earlier writers), before
Bickerton, before P&P, and at a time when Chomskians had no interest in
the matter whatsoever.
And even on purely sociolinguistic grounds, it still seems odd to me to
call vEF a "pidgin", since it is not used *between* two (or more) groups
with different first languages, but *within* a single bilingual
community.
Ross Clark
Eugene Holman
> Eugene Holman wrote:
> >
> [among other things]
> >
> > Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> > claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> > structural features of the outcome.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Eugene Holman
>
> Just a couple of quick responses.
>
> I would similarly question your attempt to remove the structural
> criteria and operate on a purely sociolinguistic definition.
Fine.
Working on structural criteria commits you to a specific typological
template. Simply stated, it commits you to a model of pidgins that
excludes the possibility of a pidgin language having a rich but regular
system of inflectional morphology. It suggests that pidginization of a
morphologically complex language such as Finnish, Turkish, or Georgian
would necessarily result in a linguistic system lacking in morphological
complexity.
> To me a
> major part of the interest of these languages is in the structural
> changes brought about by the various situations in which they evolve.
> And at this stage they cannot simply be read off from the social
> circumstances.
I certainly agree that most of the languages regarded as pidgins that I
have acquainted myself with show similar traits. But I consider that to be
due more to the fact that a relatively small set of typologically similar
languages (English, French, Portuguese, Dutch) have served as the basis
for the majority of the world's pidgins than to the process of
pidginization itself.
I do not subscribe to the idea that so-called isolating typology
represents an absolutely simpler mode of linguistic organization than some
of the alternatives. Despite the seemingly complex morphology of their
languages, Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian children have figured out
works well before the age of three. It seems to me that concentration on
structural criteria is based on the assumption that a pidgin language
cannot have a complex morphology which, in turn, would imply that a
language such as English is more easily pidginized than a language like
Russian or Finnish.
Concentrating on the sociolinguistic universal of pidginization, contact
between mutually incomprehensible languages in situations of sharp
differentials in power between the speakers, the elaboration of a jargon
out of elements from the langauges concerned that is learnable and which
can serve as a limited meanbs of communication without being anyone's
native language, and the subsequent elaboration of its structure, expands
the concept of pidgin to be applicable to any set of languages making
contact within this set of sociolinguistic conditions.
>
> I think you're wrong about the Principles & Parameters influence. The
> common grammatical features of "classic" creoles were noted by people
> like Taylor in the 60s (not to mention earlier writers), before
> Bickerton, before P&P, and at a time when Chomskians had no interest in
> the matter whatsoever.
Nevertheless, structural features of pidgins have been used as arguments
for the existrence of parameters as well as for their unmarked settings.
> And even on purely sociolinguistic grounds, it still seems odd to me to
> call vEF a "pidgin", since it is not used *between* two (or more) groups
> with different first languages, but *within* a single bilingual
> community.
It evolved as a "half-way house" code for limited communication between
monolingual or bilingual (Finnish and Finland-Swedish-speaking) Finns, and
monolingual English speakers at a time when both were under the burden of
a myth that the two languages were so different from one another than it
was impossible for a speaker of one to become a competent speaker of the
other. The community has never been bilingual; at most it has acquired a
minority that was semi- or bilingual in dialectal Finnish and English,
with some of the dialectal Finnish speakers having a knowledge of
dialectal Finland-Swedish as well. Within the Finnish-immigrant minority
the mixed language established itself as a functionally limited basilect
along a continuum, the acrolect of which was dialectal rural Finnish. As
time went by, the Finnish immigrant community underwent a language shift
to English, with a small minority also learning Standard Finnish and
abandoning the low status dialectal rural Finnish of their parents and
grandparents, but maintaining a limited subset of it for specific
purposes.
In most similar situations, the mixed language basilect would disappear,
being no longer useful and lacking any prestige. In the case of
Vanettenese, however, it acquired new status as a symbol of local
identity, and was learned by school-aged children as something between a
cryptolect (a few hundred Finnish vocabulary items, a streamlined but
relatively complete version of Finnish morphological structure, the basic
Finnish syntactic templates) and a Pig-Latin-type language game: in
principle, any English word can be put through its Finnish phonological
filter and modified to such a degree that a native speaker of English with
no competence in Vanettenese would hardly recognize it. This restricted
Finnish/English based code, is part of the local culture, is nobody's
first or native language, and is limited to specific functions, most
famously shouting commands when playing team sports with non-locals.
This is certainly an arrested case of language death. I think that there
is justification for regarding the code in its present form and range of
functions as a pidgin. If so, then it raises interesting questions about
the structural features allegedly universal to pidgins. If not, well, it's
an interesting fate for a mixed code, but one that is perhaps not as
unusual as it sounds.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
benlizross
>
> In article <40D0BF...@ihug.co.nz>, benlizross <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
>
> > Eugene Holman wrote:
> > >
> > [among other things]
> > >
> > > Boiling it down to a signle sentence, I am questioning Peter's insistent
> > > claim that pidginization can be defined primarily in terms of the
> > > structural features of the outcome.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Eugene Holman
> >
> > Just a couple of quick responses.
> >
> > I would similarly question your attempt to remove the structural
> > criteria and operate on a purely sociolinguistic definition.
>
> Fine.
>
> Working on structural criteria commits you to a specific typological
> template. Simply stated, it commits you to a model of pidgins that
> excludes the possibility of a pidgin language having a rich but regular
> system of inflectional morphology. It suggests that pidginization of a
> morphologically complex language such as Finnish, Turkish, or Georgian
> would necessarily result in a linguistic system lacking in morphological
> complexity.
I'm afraid you're rather over-committing me to theoretical claims simply
because I want to keep the structural facts in the picture. But anyhow,
in one pidgin I do know a bit about, Chinook Jargon, a highly
morphologically complex language (Lower Chinook) has had its morphology
reduced to just about zero.
> > To me a
> > major part of the interest of these languages is in the structural
> > changes brought about by the various situations in which they evolve.
> > And at this stage they cannot simply be read off from the social
> > circumstances.
>
> I certainly agree that most of the languages regarded as pidgins that I
> have acquainted myself with show similar traits. But I consider that to be
> due more to the fact that a relatively small set of typologically similar
> languages (English, French, Portuguese, Dutch) have served as the basis
> for the majority of the world's pidgins than to the process of
> pidginization itself.
>
> I do not subscribe to the idea that so-called isolating typology
> represents an absolutely simpler mode of linguistic organization than some
> of the alternatives. Despite the seemingly complex morphology of their
> languages, Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian children have figured out
> works well before the age of three. It seems to me that concentration on
> structural criteria is based on the assumption that a pidgin language
> cannot have a complex morphology which, in turn, would imply that a
> language such as English is more easily pidginized than a language like
> Russian or Finnish.
No, not substantially. Ignoring morphology requires no great effort.
> Concentrating on the sociolinguistic universal of pidginization, contact
> between mutually incomprehensible languages in situations of sharp
> differentials in power between the speakers, the elaboration of a jargon
> out of elements from the langauges concerned that is learnable and which
> can serve as a limited meanbs of communication without being anyone's
> native language, and the subsequent elaboration of its structure, expands
> the concept of pidgin to be applicable to any set of languages making
> contact within this set of sociolinguistic conditions.
>
> >
> > I think you're wrong about the Principles & Parameters influence. The
> > common grammatical features of "classic" creoles were noted by people
> > like Taylor in the 60s (not to mention earlier writers), before
> > Bickerton, before P&P, and at a time when Chomskians had no interest in
> > the matter whatsoever.
>
> Nevertheless, structural features of pidgins have been used as arguments
> for the existrence of parameters as well as for their unmarked settings.
After the fact, which is not what you originally stated.
>
> > And even on purely sociolinguistic grounds, it still seems odd to me to
> > call vEF a "pidgin", since it is not used *between* two (or more) groups
> > with different first languages, but *within* a single bilingual
> > community.
>
> It evolved as a "half-way house" code for limited communication between
> monolingual or bilingual (Finnish and Finland-Swedish-speaking) Finns, and
> monolingual English speakers at a time when both were under the burden of
> a myth that the two languages were so different from one another than it
> was impossible for a speaker of one to become a competent speaker of the
> other. The community has never been bilingual;
You are obviously using "bilingual" in some very restricted sense here.
The community's language repertoir includes (1) English (2) vEF and (3)
Finnish (even if only marginally). It is therefore at least bilingual.
You seem to have learned an enormous amount about this community
considering that (didn't you say?) you've only ever met one speaker and
never been there. But it still doesn't sound like a pidgin.
Ross Clark
Eugene Holman
<deleted>
>
> You seem to have learned an enormous amount about this community
> considering that (didn't you say?) you've only ever met one speaker and
> never been there. But it still doesn't sound like a pidgin.
That one speaker was in my class for a term, and we had many discussions
about her home town and dialect, the existence of which I had been vaguely
aware of when attending Cornell. I also had to teach her how to "unlearn"
her extended variety of the language and learn Standard Finnish, and her
efforts and mistakes taught me a lot about the morphology she was using.
After the term she invited me to visit the community and stay with her
family for a few days as part of my last visit to my alma mater, Cornell.
I visted a few shops in the town, including a car dealership and the local
pizzeria, and found out that it was indeed possible to do business and
exchange pleasantries there in reduced Finnish, even with people of
obviously non-Finnish ancestry. She contacted me when she and her family
visited Finland, her parents for the first time, a few years later. During
the few hours I spent showing them around Helsinki, I thoroughly enjoyed
watching the befuddled reaction of local Finnish speakers to her father's
Vanettenese.
I took a few notes, nothing serious; I regret that I didn't investigate it
more fully.
As a curiosity, a former colleague of mine wrote a dissertation (Marilyn
Vihman. *Livonian phonology with an appendix on stød in Danish and
livonian*. University of California at Berkeley. 1971.) on a similar
topic, this not dealing with pidgins or creoles, but with the results of
prolonged isolation from a nuclear speech community and extensive language
contact that is perhaps even more extraordinary.
Ms. Vihman, at that time a graduate student working on Estonian phonology,
was invited to analyze and determine the origin of the secret language of
two sisters of Latvian origin in their early thirties. They had been
adopted after the war as war orphans by a Latvian-American family.
Although the sisters spoke perfect Latvian, they often conversed in a
quite different language among themselves. Neither the sisters nor their
adopted parents knew what this language was, and they had contacted a
department of linguistics to find out. Ms. Vihman determined quite quickly
that it was a reduced form of Livonian (at that time most
Latvian-Americans knew nothing about the tiny Livonian minority in their
country). Livonian had evidently been the children's first language, but
they had been orphaned when still at pre-school age and spent time in
Latvian orphanages and displaced persons' camps, until eventually being
adopted and taken to America. In a manner similar to Van Etten Finnish,
their private language had preserved Livonian phonology, morphology, and
basic syntactic patterns, but used mostly English and some Latvian lexical
morphemes modified by Livonian phonology to a degree that made it
unintelligible to outsiders.
"So, you aren't real Latvians after all," was the reaction of one of their
adapted relatives when their Livonian ethnicity was revealed.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
Peter T. Daniels
> I do not subscribe to the idea that so-called isolating typology
> represents an absolutely simpler mode of linguistic organization than some
> of the alternatives.
?? Who does?
It looks as though, like the rest of us in those days, you were forced
to read Mario Pei, since nothing else on language was available in the
library. But most of the rest of us unlearned what Pei had written in
those early days.
ORIELO
>Malay-Indonesian is even easier than Esperanto. (Esperanto is indeed
>quite complicated.)
In what way Sau-Dan? Morphology? Well, I'll grant you that in comparison to
Malay, E-o would seem to be complicated; however, 6 verb endings and two
noun/adjective endings to learn doesn't seem like such an intolerable burden.
Familiar Vocabulary ? Depends on who you talk to.....What kind of
correspondence is there between M-I and Cantonese?
Syntax? Esperanto is pretty free; M-I from what I could gather from the
grammers that I've read is somewhat rigid (without an accusative, it can't be
helped).
Word building?
Well here you have a problem. True, the two langauges work much on the same
principles, but M-I has its "dead ends" just like any other natlang. E-o is
planned so that if the result "makes sense" then it's OK to use.
Can't say non-just in English, e.g.
>The reduction of un-stressed vowels to a schwa is another thing very
>very hard to master (even for people form Romance languages).
I don't understand your reference....with the possible exception of French, the
Romance languages do not have a systematic reduction of unstressed vowels like
English does.
>The
>fact is: to anyone who doesn't understand language X, X sounds
>monotone, dull, barbaric, impossible to learn, etc.
Not a fact: I, for one, think a language I don't understand sounds intriguing,
challenging, and exotic. Says more for "anyone's" prejudices than the
language.
>This rule is as difficult as gender for those who
>don't have (compulsory) plural marking in their languages.
Gender a difficult rule? Depends on the language. German? Hell yeah.
However, I have very little to no problem with Russian or Spanish gender. Why?
Well there are rules (5 at the most) to cover upwards of 95% of the nouns you
meet. You learn the rules, gender is easy. Now what's so difficult about "if
there are more than one, add the plural ending" (which in some languages has
only one form and one form only which in turn has one pronunciation and one
pronunciation only)? OK, there are instances where the above rule doesn't work
well, but you can't say that it NEVER works. I liken it to the gender issue:
the rule works in the vast majority of instances, so just tuff out the
exceptions and deal with it.
Seems to me that there is a helluvalot more to deal with in natlangs (ANY of
them; take your pick. No matter which one you pick there will ALWAYS be a
number of bugbears) than in Esperanto.
But don't confuse you with the facts, right?
Orienta Iowa Esperanto-Ligo
ORIELO
>
>That sounds very unlikely. Might be true of a conlang.
INdeed: phrasal verbs (one of the horrors of our language) are a type of idiom.
Orienta Iowa Esperanto-Ligo
Ruud Harmsen
>I don't understand your reference....with the possible exception of French, the
>Romance languages do not have a systematic reduction of unstressed vowels like
>English does.
European Portuguese has. Unstressed a>3, e>1, o>u. Which doesn't mean
that all unstressed syllables have one of these vowels though. But
most have.
>Not a fact: I, for one, think a language I don't understand sounds intriguing,
>challenging, and exotic.
So do I.
>Now what's so difficult about "if there are more than one, add the plural ending"
That you have to decide whether or not there are more than one, even
if that is irrelevant. Seems trivial to us speakers of IE languages,
but isn't to many others.
--
Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> - http://rudhar.com
Ruud Harmsen
>very hard to master (even for people form Romance languages).
I don't know if this remark was about E-o, but AFAIK that language
does not have any such reduction.