On Haitian Creole borrowing /plat/ , on reanalysis, etc

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm,

Michel, hayash mersi <grand merci> for your reply.  Your suggestion about
dialectal French having played an important role is a highly appropriate
reminder.  Though the language is not one of my specialties, I ought to
have realized that French wasn't standardized into the variant I'm using
for comparison until perhaps 1800 or later, viz. Slavic languages, whose
history I know better.

I suspect that there will nonetheless remain interesting etymological
problems of the sort I've hinted at.

Can you provide the cite for Chaudenson, for those interested?

Best,
Dave




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On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, Michel DeGraff wrote:

> RE:
>
> > Haitian Creole also has a word /plat/ "plate, dish" from French <plat>.
> > Again, we would expect H.C. to have /pla/ instead of a form with a
> > pronounced final consonant.
>
> Unless the relevant 17th-18th century French dialects also had /plat/
> instead of /pla/ --- which is quite likely (check Robert Chaudenson's work
> for bibliographical pointers). Recall that the European input to CJ and HC
> genesis was quite different from `Standard' French as we know it today.
> (Also check Quebec French for similar variants.)
>
> > Consider CJ /lisash/ "angel(s)" < ("from") French <les anges>;
> > 	    /lipwa/ "peas" < Fr. <les pois>;
> > 	    /lida/ "tooth; teeth" < Fr. <le(s) dent(s)>;
> > 	    /lilu/ "wolf" < Fr. <le loup>
>
> We find parallel cases in HC.  More generally, these agglutination cases
> are quite common in language contact/change scenarios.  Witness French
> "aujourd'hui" (from "au jour d'hui"), "toujours" (from "tous jours"),
> etc...  Also consider English "(an) apron" from French "napperon" then
> earlier English "a napron".  Closer to us: English "a (whole) nother" from
> "another" (via "a nother").  Saussure's _Course in General Linguistics_,
> for one, has an interesting chapter on such processes of "reanalysis".
>
> Side note plus advert: Interestingly, the above examples of reanalysis in
> CJ (and in HC) alongside their non-creole analogues argue against
> "creolization as radical break in transmission" scenarios favored by many
> creolists in the past two centuries.  In these radical-break scenarios,
> creolization is a *qualitatively* radical (often viewed as "abnormal")
> departure from the (so called) "normal" cases of language transmission.
> The HC reanalysis examples show systematic reanalysis of (some of) the
> relevant French input, probably via the sort of `L2A' that obtains in
> situations of (heavy) language contact, with subsequent UG-guided L1A and
> its concomitant innovations.  Other domains of HC grammar seem amenable to
> similar analyses.
>
> (Alleyne 1971 in the Hymes volume _Pidginization and Creolization of
> Languages_ makes similar observations, questioning received notions about
> creole genesis.  In later work, Alleyne connects these received notions to
> the still stigmatized status of Creole languages.  I also have a manuscript
> in a related vein which I'll be happy to send around to those interested.)
>
>                                  -michel.
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