Creole languages (was Who is Eddy Peters?)

[James A. Landau]

In order to be accepted into a new language, a would-be "loanword" has to
jump several hurdles.

- Phonetic.  The word must be easily mangled into something that can be
pronounced in the target language.  (Most loanwords have been mangled, e.g.
the Russians are probably still wondering why we pronounce "troika" as
"tschroika".)  English presents a low hurdle, since it has forty or so
phonemes, no limit on the number of syllables in a word, as many as half a
dozen consonants in a syllable, and some freedom in where to place the
accent.  Japanese offers a higher hurdle, since the word has to be broken
into open syllables, but there is no limit to the number of syllables and (if
I remember correctly) Japanese is unaccented.  (See douglas at NB.NET quoted
below on Japanese borrowing)
    On the other hand, Chinese has a very high hurdle, due to a very limited
repertoire of possible syllables and a strong sense of how many syllables are
allowed in a word.  Some foreign words end up as entire phrases in Chinese.

- Grammatical.  Again English has a low hurdle, due its very limited number
of inflections.  Noun?  Add -s or -es depending on the final phoneme.  Verb?
Form the past tense and past participle by adding -d or -ed as indicated.
    French has a higher hurdle.  If a noun, a consensus has to be reached on
whether it is masculine or feminine.  If a verb, then does it belong to the
1st, 2nd, or 3rd conjugation?
    (Is it my imagination, or does Franglais have a rule that all new nouns
belong to the masculine gender?)
    Semitic languages such as Hebrew have a much higher hurdle, since a word
in say Hebrew is supposed to have a three-consonant root.  However, this
hurdle does not seem to bother Israelis who wish to borrow a word or two.


- Cultural/political.  In the English-language culture it is not merely
permissible but sometimes praised to throw in French words and phrases, and
if your audience fails to understand, the fault is considered to be in the
audience and not you.  One can show one's savoir-faire by using the phrase
"savoir-faire".
    Compare French, where the use of an English word or phrase is immediately
damned as Franglais.

-Need.  Nobody bothers to object to a new word in English just because a
synonym already exists e.g. Khrushchev added "troika" to English despite the
existence of the (Latin loanword) "triumvirate".  Or another e.g., "wonton"
versus "kreplach".

So English simply has low hurdles for a candidate loanword to jump.  Have I
answered your question?

No, I haven't. [Pause while I climb on my soapbox.]

Is there a reason for these low hurdles?

Yes.

The reason has to do with pidgins and creoles and the like.

A pidgin is what sometimes emerges when two peoples speaking different
languages find themselves intimately mixed in a geographical territory.

(Note: a pidgin does not always emerge.  Sometimes one of the peoples lets
its language get assimilated out of common use, e.g. the Oscan-speaking plebs
of the Roman Republic eventually became assimilated into Latin-speaking
citizens of the Roman Empire.)

A pidgin which acquires a vocabulary large enough and sophisticated enough to
be worth writing Web pages in is called a "creole".

                   ******My thesis is that English is a creole and should be
                          analyzed and studied as such.*******

After the Norman Conquest England had a small French-speaking upper class
which owned the government and the courts and dominated all business above
the village level.  An Anglo-Saxon who was in a court case, or wanted to do
business, found himself in a world in which the vocabulary was French.  (The
classic example is the Saxon who called the animal he was raising a "cow" but
when he sold it for meat had to call it "boeuf".)

The height of the hurdles in the Anglo-Saxon tongue did not matter; the
Anglo-Saxons had to bring French words into their vocabulary just to carry on
everyday life.

Other linguistic processes were at work, too, to convert Anglo-Saxon into
what we recognize as English, but I strongly suspect that it was this very
forced pidginization (if I may be permitted the neologism) which had a lot to
do with this in-process English losing most of its inflections and otherwise
lowering the hurdles facing would-be loanwords.

That is to say, English acquired its openness to new loanwords by having been
forced to accept a large number of loanwords during the Norman period.
(Aside: "forced borrowing"?)

Another Indo-European language went through the same process, with similar
results.  Old Persian had a complicated inflectional system.  Then Persia was
conquered by the Arabs and the Persian people went through a similar
bilingual experience, with the language called "Farsi" (modern Iranian) as
the result.  (Note: the Persians/Iranians went through an additional
linguistic process---the forced conversion of the populace from
Zoroastrianism to Islam, which meant the introduction of many new religious
terms and the practice of reading from the Koran, which certainly added a
good deal to the new Farsi language.

Is this a case of similar inputs producing similar results?

      Jim Landau
      systems engineer (and therefore amateur at linguistics)
      FAA Technical Center (ACT-350/BCI)
      Atlantic City Airport NJ 08405 USA
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In a message dated 02/20/2001 11:20:01 PM Eastern Standard Time,
markodegard at HOTMAIL.COM writes:

> As I recall, my own contribution to the thread where I first saw this was
>  something to the extent that English was force-fed the whole French
lexicon.
>  It took English about 500 years to fully digest this, and ever since,
>  English has had a wantonly gluttonous appetite for other language's words.

In a message dated 02/21/2001 4:06:42 PM Eastern Standard Time,
douglas at NB.NET writes:

> Is English more aggressive in borrowing than other languages are? How does
>  the volume of Swedish loan-words in English compare with the volume of
>  English loan-words in Swedish? Maybe that's not a fair comparison; try it
>  with English vis-a-vis Spanish then. Chinese is considered conservative in
>  this respect, so the number of direct borrowings from English in Chinese is
>  relatively small -- but I think larger than the number transferred the
>  other way.
>
>  A better example of an aggressive borrower (and I don't intend any
>  negative/pejorative connotation at all) might be Japanese, with perhaps >
>  60% of the lexicon borrowed from Chinese, perhaps > 10% (and growing) from
>  English. The Chinese contribution is perhaps comparable to the contribution
>  of French to English ... but Chinese-speakers never ruled in Japan for a
>  moment. And note that Japanese phonetics is not favorable for borrowing
>  from English: e.g., it wouldn't 'make sense' to borrow English "bus" >
>  Japanese "basu" and also English "bath" > Japanese "basu", Japanese of
>  course having natural native terminology available for both -- but both
>  were in fact adopted and both homophones are now absolutely standard
>  Japanese, as are "OL" (so written, pronounced "oueru") = "office lady" and
>  thousands of other English-based words, including such pairs as "brake" and
>  "break". (Phonetic limitations were ignored in adoption of Chinese words
>  too, so that there are many Sino-Japanese homophones.) Other sources are
>  accepted too -- e.g., Japanese "furiitaa" = "freelance worker" apparently
>  is a contraction of "furii arubaitaa" < English "free" + German "Arbeit" +
>  (German and/or) English "-er".
>
    <snip>
>
>  I sometimes think English doesn't borrow aggressively enough. In the
>  subject line of this message is the Latin word "re", useful and succinct,
>  only marginally adopted into English. The Japanese topic marker "wa" could
>  replace clumsy English expressions, but it never does. The French word
>  "selon" would be handy. And so forth.
>