Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

Steve Long wrote:

> Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.

-- there is no such thing as a "West African speaker"; that would be like an
"Asian speaker" or a  "European speaker" or an "American speaker".

If you're going to try to use Haitian Creole as an example to support your
argument, first you have to get the facts about it right, or nobody is going
to take you very seriously.

The slaves imported to French Santo Domingo were speakers of many language
families and quite literally scores of different, often mutually
incomprehensible, languages.  A monoglot Fon speaker can no more understand a
Hausa or baKongo than a monoglot English-speaker can understand Chinese.

That's why they ended up speaking pidgin French to each other, as well as to
their French-speaking overlords.  They had no common language.

> Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.

-- ah... this is not an accurate description of Haitian Creole, most of the
lexicon of which is and always was French, with substantial amounts of
vocabulary from Fon and a number of other (often unrelated) West African
languages.

> What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?

"Accuracy", among other things.  For example, "French" is a linguistic term,
and "African" a geographical one.

Simply asking your question in these terms shows that it's devoid of meaning.

You would have to say something like "What is the possible usefulness of
calling it French-based and not Fon-based?"

(Or Yoruba-based or Peul-based or baKongo-based, or whatever.)

Once rephrased in those more accurate terms, the answer is obvious:  because
it's not based on Fon, or Peul, or baKongo.

Take a little Haitian Creole:

"Bas 'genoux, fi' de malheu'!  Fai'e moa honneu!
 Li es' royaume moan --
 Li est moa qui 'regne 'ci!
 Ne pas passer par' li
 Sans hommage 'rendu --"

Or:

"Ogoun vini caille nous!
 Li gran'gout, li grangran soif!
 Grand me'ci, Ogoun Badagris!
 Manger! Bueh! Sat'!"

Note the characteristic pidgin-derived Creole features:  reduplication for
emphasis, for example:  "grangran" instead of "tres grande".  English-based
pidgins use exactly the same feature -- "big-big" instead of "very big".  And
simplification of the pronouns, etc.  English-based pidgins generally use
"him" uniformly instead of forms like "he"; "him bigbig man".

Anyone looking at the above text, with no knowledge of the history involved,
could say:  "This is a form of creolized pidgin French."   With a little more
text, you could go on to say:  "The contact languages involved in the
creation of the pidgin from which the creole developed were mostly West
African."

Note that both "creolized" and "pidgin" have rather precise meanings, and
that pidgins and creoles have similar structural characteristics irregardless
of the languages which go into their creation.

In fact, someone with a general knowledge of Indo-European linguistics but
who didn't know there was such a thing as a French language could also look
at a Haitian Creole text and say "and it's an Indo-European language", thus
neatly tying up its ultimate "genetic" origins.

> What did those speakers of African descent do exactly?  Learn French,
> temporarily forget West African and then later borrow West African words from
> themselves?

-- what they did -- exactly -- was (in cooperation with native
French-speakers) learn pidgin French, speak that to each other and their
children, and then (as the children grew up speaking it) it developed into a
creole language.  With some vocabulary and features due to the -- various,
different -- languages the slaves spoke originally, as a sort of multiple
substrate.

A pidgin, one should note, is a _lingua franca_ language which is not spoken
by anyone as their native tongue.

This later became a creole language, as new generations grew up speaking it
as their native tongue.  It therefore underwent certain -- highly distinctive
-- developments common to creoles.

> The older source among the generations of speakers who passed on the
> language was West African.

-- no.   The input of (various, different) West African languages and French
was simultaneous, and French was the linguistic scaffolding on which the
pidgin rested from the first.

It was pidgin _French_, not pidgin Fon or pidgin Yoruba.

Simplifying the grammar of French and tacking on some Fon words does not make
a language any less French-derived, any more than discarding inflection and
tacking on a lot of Romance vocabulary makes English a form of French.

A native French speaker could make the pidgin out, more or less, with a
little trial and effort.  Like all pidgins, it had a restricted vocabulary
and a radically simplified grammar.

A native Fon or Yoruba speaker could not understand it at once, despite
lexical borrowings from those languages.  They had to learn it.  It would be
easier for them to learn than standard French, of course -- partly because of
lexical borrowings from their languages, but mostly because of the features
all pidgins share.  Not many words, radically simplified grammar.

This is all quite natural, since the primary purpose of the pidgin was
communication between French speakers and speakers of various (different,
mutually incomprehensible) West African languages.