LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.19 (02) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 19 November 2005 * Volume 02
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From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.19 (01) [E/Papiamentu]

I think Papiamento "warda" is from Pt/Sp "guardar", Dutch has "wachten" =
to wait, there is no Dutch equivalent *waarden or so for German "warten",
which could have given Pap. "warda". But the resemblance in sound may have
influenced the meaning of this verb.
And Pap. "ènvelop" will be from Dutch envelop(pe) rather than from English.
Another interesting English loan, because it is such a common word, is Pap.
"bèk" from back.
The language name ending in -o is the Arubian, and also the Dutch form.
People from Curaçao and Bonaire say Papiamentu, with the Portuguese
pronunciation. In Dutch it is also called Papiaments, especially by people
from the Dutch Antilles themselves.
What I found paticularly fascinating in Papiamento when I first "met" it,
was to see how much Portuguese stock is still hidden under the Spanish
front, and also how African, how non-Romance, non-European, the grammar is.
The latter is even more so the case in English/Dutch based Sranan Tongo,
but the ressemblance between those two Creoles in grammar, and even in
base vocabulary from Portuguese, is really striking. And that has little
to nothing to do with the facts they were both Dutch Colonies, there were
not so much close contacts between the two linguistically, and the
distance between them is more than a thousand kilometres -over the ocean.

Ingmar

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Thanks for the tweaking, Ingchi, and for the added info.

> The latter is even more so the case in English/Dutch based Sranan Tongo,
> but the ressemblance between those two Creoles in grammar, and even in
> base vocabulary from Portuguese, is really striking. And that has little
> to nothing to do with the facts they were both Dutch Colonies, there were
> not so much close contacts between the two linguistically, and the
> distance between them is more than a thousand kilometres -over the ocean.

Well. I've pondered this sort of phenomenon for quite some time now, have 
been waffling with my opinion.  Lately I've come to suspect that distance is 
no serious obstacle to spread as long is there is *some* connection.  You 
may suspect two main agents:

(1) slaves (or their descendants) or other contact variety speakers
     that relocated to other colonies (which in most cases are colonies
     held by the same power)

(2) slaver traders, slave owners or colonists that relocate or, in the
     case of slaver traders or slave wardens, serve more than one colony.

I am now tending to suspect that in the case of the genesis of pidgins and 
creoles too much of the focus has been on the people that ultimately adopted 
and developed them.  In other words, I believe we mustn't underestimate the 
roles of the (usually European) power elites and their agents in the genesis 
of such language varieties.  The "seeds," namely the basic vocabulary and 
grammatical structure, of such varieties are quite likely to have been 
carried from colony to colony by Europeans (or people of European descent) 
with or without the aid of relocated slaves or relocated non-Europeans that 
were conversant in another contact variety.

A compelling case is that of the striking lexical and structural 
similarities between Oceanian pidgins and creoles, Australian pidgins and 
China Coast Pidgin, where you would not expect such similarities to exist 
between China Coast Pidgin and the others, at the very least.  We certainly 
ought not totally disregard a possible role played by Chinese laborers and 
tradesmen that tended to follow European colonists or were actually 
transported there by them. However, I believe that the Europeans involved 
had a definite role in spreading the seeds for such types of varieties.

As one of my undergraduate research projects in my Southeast Asian minor 
degree I compared certain historical developments that led up to the 
creation of the Sino-Indigenous ethnicities of British-held Malaya, 
Dutch-held Indonesia and the Spanish-held Philippines: the Baba (Chinese), 
the Peranakan and the Mestizos respectively.  For this purpose I had to go 
through stacks and stacks of relevant 18th- and 19th-century books, letters 
and other types of documents in English, Dutch and Spanish, as well as 
through mostly 20th-century Asian documents.  (I also had an eye on German 
colonization of Papua.)  Of particular interest to me (coming from the 
language side of things) were diary-type portions and anything else that 
contained direct speech quotes.  It became clear to me that in the "good" 
old days of European supremacy (real and imagined) colonists and their 
helpers, most of whom had little or no education and little or no incentive 
to regard indigenous people as being real human beings (in part to protect 
themselves from compassion), either believed that all "Kanakas" anywhere in 
the world had one type of "primitive" language, or they believed that 
"primitive," "childish" linguae francae were all they deserved or could be 
expected to learn.  Lots and lots of descriptions of ethnic "mentalities" 
and "characters" (ranging between patronizing and disparaging) lead me to 
this conclusion.  In other words, I am suspecting that Europeans taught each 
other general types of pidgins and, directly or indirectly, took these from 
colony to colony.  Once established, the "native" population developed their 
varieties on those fundations and, with the loss of their ancestral 
languages adopted them as native languages (thus creating creoles).

I wonder what your and my other Lowlands friends' thoughts on this are.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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