creole

[Bethany K. Dumas]

Thanks for all the refs re English and creolization. I shall read
these. Right now, it seems to me that we are using the terms creole and
creolization in at least three ways.

Some definitions of creole depend on the history of the language; the
Brittanica suggests that a present creole must have begun as a
pidgin, and that is what I was taught in graduate scdhool.

Other definitions apparently depend upon rates of change in the language
at certain past times. For creolization to have occurred, there must have
been a rate of change markedly greater than at other times.

Still others seem to depend upon the extent to which a wholesale
replacement has taken place.

So -- if we do not want to talk about the influence of French on English
as a creolization process, do we have a terms for the kind of major impact
on a language that French seems to have had on English? Or do we just talk
about language contact? And degress of it?

Bethany