Re: New to the list

> Date:         Thu, 15 Jun 2000 13:46:36 -0400
> From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > > For speakers of Austronesian languages, Tok Pisin. For anglophones, BI.
> >
> > Is that something that has actually been measured?
>
> Probably not.  But our own Jacques Guy (still on this list, frogguy?)
> described Bislama, which is closely related to TP, as "an Austronesian
> language with English lexemes", which suggests that using it fluently
> will be easy for Austro-speakers and hard for anglophones.
So you're just guessing like the rest of us, right?

I really think it would be interesting if someone had measured it,
both for first- and second-language acquisition. (However, I'm not
even aware if language acquisition researchers have a metric for
acquisition speed that they agree on).

And why did I ask about precisely those two languages (apart from the
fact that they were mentioned in the list recently)?

Well, since PNG and Indonesia share a border, there are probably lots
of people with both as first language --- and for people who learn
only one of them, the socioeconomic factors are probably similar.

And BI is a conlang --- or a regularized natlang, if you prefer. Not
so dissimilar from a lot of IAL projects. Whereas Tok Pisin is (or
used to be) a creole, by some accounts the very simplest type of
natlang that can exist.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)