pEshaq-na uk Jar-Jar Binks?!

[Mike Cleven]

At 03:07 PM 6/20/99 -0700, Jeffrey Kopp wrote:
>Hi, Dave.  I remain quite unaware of the new Star Wars movie, but I
>am interested to see that a pidgin comes up in it.  Perhaps with this
>mention of pidgin in this mass culture bombshell (plus the little
>controversy) will come some popular interest or curiosity about
>pidgins.

I don't think it's exactly a pidgin.  More like a (deliberately) Jamaican
creole; an English-lexicon-based tongue with its own unique grammar and
ideoms and cadence, much like the variant forms of English and French found
in the Caribbean.  Articulate, even, and quite expressive.

I disagree with the contention that Jar Jar's people were a "racist"
caricature.  Should all aliens speak with standard British or American
English (as tends to be the case on Star Trek series and movies)?  Or
should the unique logical flows and thought processes of their own cultures
be reflected in the grammatical curiosities that a translating device might
render them into?  Nobody complained when Yoda talked funny; so what's the
problem with Jar-Jar and his people?  I also think that it is eminently
plausible that an alien society might have a dance-based culture just as
African and neo-African peoples do.  Jar Jar's people move with a
distinctly "non-white" manner; not stiff and upright and X-filish; why is
this a bad thing?