Re: Creole vs. Pidgin

Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:
>=20
> Interesting. My friend Liz is fluent in Chavacano. She says that the ve=
rbs
> are all in the usted form (from what i see it seems to be that way with
> your examples). Anyway it's wonderful creole to hear (when Liz is on th=
e
> phone with her mother she speaks Chavacano). Since Spanish lexifies
> Chavacano, and the substrate is a Philippine language, it would seem to=
 me
> to be natural for the word order to be VSO (I wonder if a Tagalog-Engli=
sh
> creole will arise, and if it did would the word order be VSO too? :) )
Tagalog is VSO, right? (I remember Kristian's examples when he explained
the trigger system). That would make VSO natural in Chavacano. But also
remember that Spanish is often VSO (especially with certain verbs and whe=
n
one is emphasizing certain things). That would reinforce the VSO order.

Kristian Jensen wrote before:

>     ta     come usted ba
>     IMPERF eat  2sg   QP
>     'Are you eating?'
_Ta_ and _ba_ probably come from Spanish _est=E1_ y _va_.
In Spanish the word order would be esentially the same (in my dialect):
_=BFEst=E1 comiendo usted?_ (_=BFEst=E1 usted comiendo?_ would sound affe=
cted,
and _=BFUsted est=E1 comiendo?_ makes it look as if the speaker can't bel=
ieve
that I am really eating).


>     si, ta     come yo
>     yes IMPERF eat  1sg
>     'Yes, I am eating'
What I think is going on here is that (1) in Spanish the pronoun is dropp=
ed;
(2) in Chavacano, then, the verb loses the personal inflection; (3) the
pronoun *reappears* at the end. In Spanish I would normally say

        1. S=ED, estoy comiendo.
or      2. S=ED, yo estoy comiendo.     (very rarely)

but I could also say

        3. S=ED, estoy comiendo, yo.

In this last case, it would sound as if I was emphasizing the fact that
I'm eating (and something else, which I can't explain in words). In any
case, though [3] could not be an answer to the original question, it's
a grammatical and very common pattern in Spanish, so that could add
more strength to the tendency to place the verb first.


>     na      sabe el  mga chiquitos aquel como habla chavacano
>     PERFECT know the pl  boy-pl    there how  speak chavacano
>     'those boys already know how to speak chavacano,'
Where did _mga_ come from? It's fascinating how the speakers could
split the definite+plural morphemes in _los_ and make it _el mga_.

BTW do you know why the name is 'Chavacano'? And 'Cavite=F1o'?
I don't know where Spanish _chabacano_ comes from or what it used
to mean, but nowadays it means 'rude, grotesque, obscene'.


--Pablo Flores