Re: Creole vs. Pidgin

Daniel Andreasson wrote:
> Where is Bislama spoken?
The Republic of Vanuata, in fact, it is an official language.

> My question is thus: how alike are creoles? I guess it doesn't
> have anything to do with where they are spoken. More likely
> it has something to do with the two 'merging' languages.
Well, English-lexified creoles have certain words in common, for
instance, nearly ever one has a variant of _pikini_ for "child",
believed to come from Portuguese _pequenho_ (small).  It seems that most
are descended from a pidgin used by crews of ships in the Mediterranean,
known as _Sabir_ or _Lingua Franca_.

> Every creole with English as the lexifier probably looks
> something like 'mitupela'. But what about the grammar?
That has quite a bit of variation, generally, the creole will have
features that exist in the substrate language.  For instance, the
substrate of Bislama are austronesian languages, which have singular,
dual, trial, and plural, at least in the pronouns, and an
inclusive/exclusive distinction, for instance, Tangoa (one of the
substrate langs) has:
         Singular  Dual      Trial       Plural
1st excl enau      kamamrua  kamamtolu   kamam
1st incl           enrarua   enratolu    enra
2        egko      kamimrua  kamimtolu   kamim
3        enia      enrarua   enratolu    en(i)ra

Apparently, -rua and -tolu are dual and trial suffixes
So, basically, Bislama uses English words to copy its pronominal
system.  If it had no trial, there'd by no trial in Bislama.
Incidentally, Bislama also uses _ol_ (<all) as a plural marker for nouns
(I think there may also be dual and perhaps trial markers for nouns)

> Or does it have something to do with the 'grammarlanguage'
> (don't know the term)?
Probably a combination.  There seem to be some universals, like SVO word
order in creoles, but I think that it's not an inherent preference for
that, but rather pragmatics - SVO naturally marks subject and object
quite clearly.

> Does a creole with English and a bantulanguage as lexifier
> and grammifier look different from an English/Chinese creole
> regarding the grammar?
Yeah.  For one, an English/Chinese creole has no number, while an
English/Bantu creole probably would.  My guess would be that an
English/Bantu creole would copy the gender system of Bantu in some way,
perhaps using generic words like "man" to mark the genders.  Most
creoles have some sort of aspect system, which resembles the substrate.

--
"[H]e axed after eggys: And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude not
speke no Frenshe ... And then at last a nother sayd that he woulde haue
hadde eyren: then the goode wyf sayd that she vnderstood hym wel." --
William Caxton
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