Re: Creolization (was Zhyler & Kele Babel Texts)

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 08:33:15AM -0700, Stone Gordonssen wrote:
> It is my understanding that pidgins become creoles when they move from being
> only an auxiliary language to being a 1st language for some body of
> speakers.
That's correct.

First language acquisition is fundamentally different adult or even
late-childhood language acquisition.  The child isn't memorizing
the grammar, but inferring it, and since they have incomplete
information to work with, they can only infer languages that fit
the universal pattern followed by all human natlangs.

> Pidgins arise from languages becuase of a need for
> trade/communication between speakers of two or more dissimilar languages,
> one of which takes something of a role of dominance.
> Intial vocabularies are "basic", as David stated, and the pronunciation of
> words becomes contorted to fit what is considered normal by the primary
> speaking group. Verb forms, tenses and aspects are minimized.
Yes.  As a result, pidgins are somewhat self-conscious constructs
with grammar that sometimes doesn't fit the universal grammar.
For instance, there are certain universal implications in natlangs:
given that the grammar requires A in situation B, it must also
require X in situation Y.  When the two languages merged in the
pidgin have different values for these parameters, you might end up
with one language's version of one feature and the other language's
version for the other, in violation of the universal grammar.
(Though usually one of the languages dominates throughout.)
When children are exposed to the pidgin as a first language, they
"clean up" these grammatical inconsistencies and thereby create a
new natlang based on the pidgin, which is called a creole.

> E.g. in New Guinea Tok Pisin (and I'm pullig this from memory, so pardon
> mistakes)
But New Guinea Tok Pisin is already a creole, yes?  It's been around a while.

-Mark

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