creole

[Salikoko Mufwene]

At 07:24 AM 2/26/2001 -0500, Bethany Dumas wrote:
>
>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.
>
      I read that too when I trained myself about creoles, but the relevant
socioeconomic histories of the territories where creoles developed does not
support the above scenario. Somebody must have confused "interlanguage" with
"pidgin" and many have not bothered to question this confusion.

>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.
>
       A couple of people cited Thomason & Kaufman in earlier postings. One of
the things they highlight is that the extent of restructuring is in part a
function of the structural kinship among the languages in contact. One thing
they omitted to mention is that is very misguided to compare the structures of
creoles with those of the standard varieties of their lexifiers. History
suggests that creoles' structures should be compared with those of the
nonstandard vernaculars/koines of their colonial lexifiers. Because such
analyses are scant, we just do not know much and should basically suspend most
conclusions based on previous analyses.

>Still others seem to depend upon the extent to which a wholesale
>replacement has taken place.
>
      I am still curious what wholesale replacement. Here linguists sound like
the average American who thinks that White Americans have inherited English
more or less intact from the British Isles but African Americans remade it in
their own way.

>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?
>
Why is having a term so critical, and why wouldn't one be happy with something
like "massive influence" on English? By the way, is that influence true of all
English dialects?

Sali.


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Salikoko S. Mufwene                        s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                      773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
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