Re: Creole/mixed language question

CZhang said:
> 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
This is a myth about creole-genesis that really ought
to die, but it's amazingly persistent.  Read up on
stuff by Michel DeGraff or Salikoko Mufwene.  Their
work shows that no clear definition exists distinguishing
creoles and pidgins based on actual historical data,
and that the particular structure of these languages
is deeply related to the particular social circumstances
surrounding their birth. (In the West Indies, one major
factor is the demographic ratio of African languages
spoken in a given slave plantation in the West Indies
wrt. the particular nonstandard variety of the colonial
language used there.)

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