Re: Creole/mixed language question

John Chang wrote:

<<Pidgins and creoles overwhelming tend towards non-inflected forms and
simplicity, hence quite often pidgins are called perjoratives like "broken
language" or "baby talk." Pidgins and creoles are mutant offspring of both
the
lexifier-language and substrate languages, thus are totally new languages:>>

One bit of info you left out is that pidgins and creoles, statistically, have
IE languages as their lexifiers.   So while it looks like statistically
pidgins tend towards non-inflected forms, the real reason for that is only because
most of them have lexifiers that are moving towards isolationism.   If you
look at other pidgins and creoles that come from highly inflected languages, the
pidgins and creoles themselves also are highly inflected.   The generalization
that seems to be true, though, is that they inflect *less* than than either
the lexifier or the substrate.   However, if you look at Fanakalo (or Fanagalo)
and compare it to Tok Pisin, you'd probably come away with the opinion that
Fanakalo has a ton of inflection.   Compare Fanakalo to Zulu, though, and it's
got a tiny amount of inflection.   So, when you asked this question, Thomas:

<<Well, this is the situation I have: 1 base/substrate language +
2 lexifier languages. All three languages are morphologically
complex -- several noun genders and cases, person/tense/number
marking on verbs, etc. So my big question is, speaking as
"realistically" as possible, how morphologically complex is the
bastard offspring language likely to be?>>

I'd say that your pidgin/creole will have far more inflection than an
English-based creole, like Tok Pisin or Bislama.  One method you can use is see what
morphological categories your substrate and lexifiers have in common.   For
example, if all of them have an accusative case, and they all use it, you
wouldn't expect the accusative case to just disappear.   If your lexifier has no
accusative case, though (like English), then there's nothing to take away, so
even if the substrate has an accusative case, it won't show up in the pidgin,
because it's just not available.   This, combined with the fact that most
linguists look at pidgins and creoles superficially, and also mostly English-based
creoles, added to the whole "universal grammar" bent, is what produces the
untrue opinion that all pidgins and creoles will have as little inflection as
possible.   To give you a better idea of what the creole would/would not look like,
I'd have to look at all the languages, but the goal is to look at the average
of what all speakers consider to be important distinctions, and the most
unmarked of these will probably be retained, if not all.

John wrote:

<<Then there is the unique (as far as I know) case of how American Black
English, or "Ebonics" arose.>>

<<snip the rest>>

This is just not true.   I site John McWhorter as my source.   All these
claims were not researched well enough, and were based on a lot of assumptions
which should not have been made.   It was kind of like they had an idea of what
kind of answer they wanted in mind, and they took what they want from what
sources they wanted to look at to prove their point.   Since it was only the
popular media they had to contend with, and not real linguists, everyone believed
them.

John's rebuttal was his Afrogenesis hypothesis.   Basically, he went through
and actually did all the research, and looked at what records could be found,
etc.   In particular, he looked at who the slavers were.   By and large, they
were poor Englishmen from (I think) the south of England.   I'm not sure about
the exact region, but the point is they were all from the same place, and
they shared common speech patterns.   In West Africa, slaves were captured, but
weren't immediately taken to the new world.   Instead, they were brought to
"castles" on the coast, and kept there until a boat came.   The ones who ran the
castles took several slaves as servants, and this is where the English-based
pidgins were born.   Part of the reason, then, that all the English-based
pidgins sound the same is that what would happen is a particular plantation owner
would want to be able to communicate with his slaves.   So he would send for a
castle servant to basically teach the slaves the pidgin.   (John found actual
documents where plantation owners were requesting "teachers" in exactly this
way.)   What was known as "Ebonics" (anyone know the origin of this word?   It
sounds racists, to me), and is generally now referred to as AAVE, is a direct
descendent of this kind of "teaching".   And this is why AAVE has so much in
common with Southern English English (meaning English from the South of
England).   That it could accidentally have things in common with West African
languages shouldn't be difficult to see, since many West African languages are SVO
languages that tends towards isolationism--just like English.

This doesn't really have anything to do with Thomas's creole, though.   Just
couldn't resist throwing my two cents in.

-David
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