Creole languages (was Who is Eddy Peters?)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:22 PM -0800 2/24/01, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>  > -----Original Message-----
>>  From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On
>>  Behalf Of James A. Landau
>
>>      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?)
>
>Just as a point of clarification, I thought I was told in my beginning
>French class that in general new nouns are masculine and new verbs get set
>to a default conjugation (I don't remember which).

first (-er infinitive), as in "parler".  But my impression is that
it's indeed not as easy, and that often we get "faire un (coup de) X"
in French where we get "X" as a zero-derived verb in English.

Larry