Re: Creole/mixed language question

J Y S Czhang 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:
>
>    1 lexifier-language (i.e. the colonial language) + 1 substrate
language
>(the native language) = a 3rd language
>
>> Or is this an situation where the new language would likely
>>end up being simplified as the source languages mixed and the
>>speakers of those languages, the ancestors of the speakers of
>>the new language, had to try to cross linguistic boundaries to
>>communicate with each other?
>
>    Yepyep, this is usually the case.
______________________
Then there is the unique (as far as I know) case of how American Black
English, or "Ebonics" arose.  Until the mid- to late 1970s, the usual way
of explaining American Black English was more or less via the standard
creolist paradigm.  But in fact (and this is the part most education
specialists and politicians still don't understand), Ebonics (in its
original form prior to influence by Standard American English due to
increased educational opportunities for poor rural and inner-city African-
Americans) can be analytically shown to be a generic West-African syntax
(mostly traceable to the Mande and West Atlantic subgroups of the Niger-
Congo group of Niger-Kordofanian languages) which has been almost
completely relexified by English.  Mande and Western Atlantic
phonotactical patterns are also quite evident in Ebonics phonology.  Such
a pattern of language "mixing" makes sense if one studies the demographic
specifics of the African-U.S. slave trade.  Generally, each trade ship
carried slaves coming from many mutually unintelligible (but genetically
similar) language groups, so that no lingua franca could develop among the
slaves themselves.  Instead, upon arriving in the U.S., all found
themselves forcibly exposed to a single alien lexicon which they readily
adapted to their already shared common syntax and phonotaxis.  Of course
this did not happen consciously, rather individual slaves each learned
English words (the most consciously assimilable component of a foreign
language, of course), but receiving no formal education in English,
naturally applied it to their native Mande/W.Atlantic syntax (just as
monolingual English speakers learning beginning French might utter mangled
sentences like "Je faire non vouloir a manger" assuming the syntax of "I
do not want to eat" is simply universal for all languages).  Since the
slaves (who were kept more or less isolated from their white owners) could
all understand this relexified West African syntax, it proved viable and
was passed on to the next generations.  This explains why Ebonics
sentences like "Da' woman, she mean mean mean!" (= That woman is very
mean) show a nearly one-to-one morpho-syntactical correspondence with
their counterparts in the Mande/W.Atlantic languages.  Indeed, as is
generally well known, Ebonics verbs are capable of aspectual distinctions
which do not exist in Standard English, but match W. African aspectual
systems nicely (e.g., 'she gone', 'she done gone', 'she been gone'.)

--John Quijada