Creole languages (was Who is Eddy Peters?)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

 From Jim Landau:

>In order to be accepted into a new language, a would-be "loanword" has to
>jump several hurdles.
>
>- Phonetic. ....
>- Grammatical. ....
>- Cultural/political. ....
>- Need. ....
>So English simply has low hurdles for a candidate loanword to jump. ... Is
>there a reason for these low hurdles? ... The reason has to do with
>pidgins and creoles and the like. ... English acquired its openness to new
>loanwords by having been forced to accept a large number of loanwords
>during the Norman period.

In practice the phonetic and grammatical hurdles are more or less ignored.
Some Thais pronounce "tennis" with the alien terminal sibilant /tEnIs/, the
rest say /tEnIt/; either way it's the Thai word for the game. "Thinner"
[for paint] and "golf" are much harder, so the Thai words are /tIna/ and
/gOp/ or so.

I think the phonetic limitation in Chinese is less severe than in Japanese,
and the limitation in Cantonese is less severe still -- to little if any
effect. The phonetic hurdle for Spanish loans to Japanese is very much
lower than for English loans -- to no effect. Grammatically, Chinese and
English are fairly compatible while neither is compatible with Japanese --
but Japanese has borrowed very heavily from both, even in the absence of
apparent need, while Chinese and English have relatively little influence
on each other.

I think French (etc.) cultural resistance to English words is more
theoretical than real, and that to the extent that it is real it is a
defensive posture, not necessarily reflecting a basic conservatism. Some
years ago, I had occasion to read some "Increase Your Word Power" type
quizzes in German (maybe in the German "Reader's Digest"?). The words
introduced were mostly of Latin origin and trivially obvious to a literate
English-speaker (although I had trouble reading the definitions sometimes)
... indicating (I think) that although these words of "foreign" origin were
less fully adopted in German they were nonetheless considered good words to
use.

I think there is some truth to the assertion that certain languages are
more friendly to loan-words because they have been subjected to heavy
admixture of foreign words in the past. This was "forced" in some cases,
but not all: the very large Sino-Japanese lexicon was apparently adopted
because of the relatively advanced state of Chinese culture and literacy
centuries ago, and the large Latin and French elements in German, etc., are
probably on a similar basis. Religious influence presumably accounts for
the large Pali/Sanskrit element in Thai. Chinese historically had little
reason or inclination to adopt foreign terminology; foreign names (such as
"Lan-Dao" or "Wei-Er-Sun") have been routinely transcribed phonetically
into Chinese for millennia but presumably they usually stand out -- in
writing especially -- as "alien" (recently I think the Chinese tendency is
to leave Western names in the Latin alphabet even within Chinese text). In
a language such as English or Thai or Japanese, maybe the long-standing
presence of a huge loan-word inventory makes just about anything which is
phonetically tractable seem OK as a "native" word. Thus Chinese prefers a
calque, while Japanese is friendly to a phonetically-adapted direct loan,
as in Crystal's example: English "boyfriend"/"girlfriend" > Chinese "nan
pengyu"/"nu pengyu", but > Japanese "booifurendo"/"gaarufurendo".

In some cases, English adopts a calque: apparently "the mother of [all]
[battles, etc.]" popular since the Gulf War is an inept one from Arabic. I
suppose calque is more usual when the source language is relatively
unfamiliar. Is "lose face" a calque from Chinese?

-- Doug Wilson