Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

In a message dated 2000/05/25 04:15:20 AM, DaW.  (P.S. You can call me Danny
;) wrote:

>Oh yeah, SIL lists pidgins and creoles too I think.  You could split some
>major hairs on these.  The name "Police Motu" for some reason struck my
>fancy.  (You know, Hawai'i, the American State, has two official languages:
>English and Hawaiian.  But WHICH Hawaiian?  The true Remote East Polynesian
>language Olelo Hawai'i or Hawaiian Pidgin?)
>
    Police Motu (= Polis Motu, Hiri Motu), localized pidgin in Port Moresby
area of PNG =)....  both "Hawai'ians" IMHO; I am all for linguistic "ecology"
& diversity... anything to slow the imperialistic goosestep of Globalist Pop
Culture English ;)

>Whoops, another form of English is spoken in Singapore and maybe Taiwan and
>PRC as well.  It's the CPE you mentioned.
>
    nope CPE is separate from & distinct from Singlish (CPE is _Ham Soi_). &
the Taiwanese English is more of a jargon around the tourist trade & foreign
student circles (it may have a chance to develop into a full-fledge pidgin in
the next decade or less due to foreign student factors & increased tourism -
a good laboratory for anyone interested in doing pidgin language research).

>Another question comes to mind -- could one consider a creole or pidgin
>another form or even dialect of the "pure" language?
    I wouldn't. Neither do a lotta pidgin & creole scholars.

><SNIP> what I think is called "African-American English" or "Black
Vernacular >Englsh" (which was >once called Ebonics).  (The last is
definitely an ethnolect of >American English, not a pidgin or creole).

    I agree with you that "ghetto talk" (tha's what I heard it call'd in
Houston TX; also "Ward Talk" after the fact that Houston has wards, not
"ghettoes") is an ethnolect. & one of the best examples of an ethnolect.

>I'd list them in the chart with a footnote marking
>them as whatever type of pidgin/creole the language is.
>But how would you classify Papiamentu?
>
    Papiamentu (also Papiamento) = Spanish-lexifier creole (according to
Arends, Muysken, & Smith, 1995); mixed Spanish/Portuguese creole with
extensive Dutch & English influence on current lexicon.

>>     this of course puts more of a burden on the researcher(s) & printer,
>>but
>>reduces some of the confusion IMHO due to the proliferation of language
>>names... till we can all agree to use the most common native names, i.e.
>>Ham
>>Soi, Tok Pisin, etc..
>
>Researchers obsess with details; they can handle the burden.  I myself would
>be pretty specific with describing languages.  Saying something like
>Croatian Serbo-Croatian or Hindi Hindustani would be a bit silly though.
>
    Croatian Serbo-Croatian = Russo-Croatian =}  hehe
    Hindi Hindustani =  Hindistani  *gigglefit*

    zHANg