Re: note on a side project

    Wow!  What an interesting English-based pidgin!
    Pidgins and Creoles are one of my main linguistics-based interests,
though I've never tried to create one myself, and this one--just when you
think you'd seen everything done in a pidgin, you really hit on something
new--especially with the verbs.  I've seen serial verbs before, and seen them
in pidgins, but yours really take the cake, and yet seem quite plausible.

<<solution : compounds


so instead of saying |i| for eat, you say |fui|

/'fu?i/


a peculiarity is that nouns are reduplicated, whilst

verbs aren't. so food is |iifu| /'?i?ifu/


once a context has been established you can use

uncompounded forms of a word, so once it's clear we're

talking about |iifu| we can refer to it as |fu|>>

    Very interesting solution, and it seems to work.  One question: Why are
all nouns reduplicated?  I've seen it for plural and for other things, but
why all?

<<i haven't decided how to form plurals yet, but i'm

considering using either |me| ( many ) or |lo| ( lot )

as in |me mi| |mi lo|, we>>

    Can I suggest "all", which would either surface as |a| or |aw|?  So you
get |mia| or |miaw|?  That's always been my favorite plural.

<<mi go go mi ge lilihaw fuku iifu

me go go me get livelivehause foodcook eateatfood

i will go home to cook food>>

    Depending on what kind of English this pidgin was based on, may I suggest
|na| or |a| for the future?  We do it in English: "I'm'a go eat" and "You'na
go eat now?"

    Last, let me say that if you want to preserve CV, you can always tack on
a vowel to words, so "talk" can become |toko| or |toku| instead of |to|.

<<nothing's frantically regularised at the moment, and

i'm considering using it as a test bed for various

word formations etc, rather than developing it as a

proper language>>

    And, of course, if it's going to be a pidgin, it doesn't need to be
regularized--a creole does.
    I've always been interested in plurals.  See, I ran this pidgin
experiment last year, and I'm running it again this year on a much larger
scale, and a plural never really developed; never really was needed.  I'll
have to see what they all do this time around.  I'll try to invent contexts
where they'll have to use a plural, and can't use a specific number.
    Anyway, I know I had one more thing to say, but I forgot what that was...
 If I remember, I'll re-mail.  Good work!

-David

"imDeziZejDekp2wilez ZejDekkinel..."
"You can celebrate anything you want..."
            -John Lennon