Re: TERMINOLOGY: Re: another new language to check out

En réponse à Joe :


>Surely, a Creole is a Pidgin that is spoken as a firstl language by some
>people...
Not exactly correct. It's true that a pidgin that becomes a L1 turns into a 
creole, but that's a side-effect, not the main definition of the word 
"creole". Basically, pidgins and creoles are both contact languages, and 
the frontier between the two (an admittedly blurred one) is on grammatical 
completeness: a pidgin is normally *not* a complete grammatical system 
(there *are* things that are *totally* unexpressible in a pidgin, how hard 
you try it) while a creole is "complete": it doesn't have this limitation, 
it is a full-fledged language (Some languages called pidgins are actually 
creoles, and vice-versa, but that's common to mix terms among humans :) ). 
So of course, when a pidgin becomes a L1, the L1 speakers will *create* the 
missing structures necessary to make the language full-fledged (it seems to 
be a remarkable feature of the brains to add things where they didn't exist 
at first, and it seems to be rather innate :) . But it's perfectly 
consistent with the works of the brains as pattern-finder :) ), and the 
pidgin will become a creole. But that doesn't make a creole "a pidgin that 
is spoken as firt language by some people". There are creoles out there 
which started out already full-fledged, with no trace of a pidgin stage.


>Is Esperanto?
It has never been a pidgin, but it does have native speakers ("denaskaj 
Esperantistoj" as they are called in Esperanto, although I prefer the term 
"Esperantoparolantoj" and reserve the term "Esperantisto" for people who 
actually believe in the role of Esperanto as world IAL and want to support 
it. I am myself an "Esperantoparolanto": an Esperantophone, but not an 
Esperantist by any stretch of words). I've even been told that there are 
families where the parents are native speakers of Esperanto and the 
children took it over from their parents. So it seems to stay even at adult 
age :) .
________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Ph. D. :


>Another construction which is not official and is not recognized
>by all (most?) Esperantists is the combined progressive tense.
>
>A root X which is fundamentally an adjective can be made into
>a verb which means "to be X":
>
>La papero estas seka = The paper is dry.
>La papero sekas = The paper is dry.
Also not a very accepted construction. Never understood why :( .

>"anta" is the ending of the present active participle, so a
>compound tense can be made (although not commonly used):
>
>Mi estas kuiranta la rizon = I am cooking the rice.
>
>(Normally one would simply say "Mi kuiras la rizon.")
>
>Some Esperantists form one verb from this:
>
>Mi kuirantas la rizon = I am cooking the rice.
>
>Again, this is not official and is deprecated by many Esperantists.
Except in poetry where it's accepted by everyone.

I am myself one of those who insisted on using the synthetic forms rather 
than the periphrastic ones which I found too long and rather foreign to the 
language. The Esperanto structure asks for synthetic forms. Why prevent 
what makes sense?

It's one of the reasons why I stopped having any contact with the Esperanto 
movement. They are a bit too reactionary to my tastes :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

Reply