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Re: Creole/mixed language question

From:John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...>
Date:Sunday, April 11, 2004, 1:36
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