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

[Mike Cleven]

>From: Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU>
>Reply-To: Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU>
>To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Subject: Re: On Haitian Creole borrowing /plat/ , on reanalysis, etc
>Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:35:48 -0400
>
>The kind of reanalysis that Michel is talking about is, as he
>suggests, very common indeed in shift-induced interference,
>even in not-very-intense contact situations.  But I don't see
>how it can have anything to do with the question of a "radical
>break in transmission" as far as CJ is concerned, given that
>NO one has (to the best of my knowledge) ever suggested that
>CJ is the product of any kind of direct transmission from
>French, radical or otherwise.  It merely has a bunch of words
>borrowed from French, and few of those show up in the earliest
>documentation -- I believe (and I doubt if I'm idiosyncratic
>in this belief) that they're later borrowings (i.e. not even
>shift-induced interference, though they certainly reflect
>imperfect learnign of French), words that entered CJ years or
>even decades after CJ was a fully crystallized pidgin (not
>creole) language.
>
>This doesn't, of course, mean that Haitian Creole arose by
>a radical break in the transmission of French.  Like Michel,
>I find Chaudenson's approach very appealing for the kinds of
>creoles he's talking about -- that is, creoles for which the
>early contact period can reasonably be presumed to have promoted
>the learning of French (or some other European language), with
>later-arriving waves of slaves or other immigrants learning
>increasingly un-French-y varieties of a target language.
>I'm not wowed by Chaudenson's apparent assumption that his
>scenario applies to *all* creoles (much less pidgins), though:
>sometimes the demographics won't fit his picture.
>
>The crucial point, it seems to me, is that different routes
>to pidginization and creolization can and do sometimes produce
>(partly) similar linguistic results.  The interpretation of
>French articles as part of the stem rather than as separate
>morphemes is just one of many examples of similar results
>from different developmental processes: you find it in CJ,
>which started as a classic trade pidgin; in Haitian Creole, which
>(here I certainly accept Michel's expert opinion!) developed by
>gradual divergence from French through successive waves of
>learners; and in (for instance) some Athabaskan languages of
>interior Canada, which certainly borrowed the words directly
>from French, not via CJ.

And as noted before, from a specialized and especially native-influenced
dialect of French, and a rather archaic one at that, representative of its
origin in the days of the ancien regime's farther wilderness frontier and
its inroads into ostensibly British (actually native) territory, far from
the influence of the seminary and the seigneurie; the French that came to
the Columbia and the Canyon was not that even of Mount Royal, much less that
of Montmartre....

I'm curious about one part of this discussion concerning Caribbean French
creole(s); is there any evidence of surviving influence or elements from
Arawak or Caribe or Taino or other Caribbean native tongues; you comment on
the slave population adaption of French; was there any adaption of the older
native tongues _into_ the developing French creole?

MC
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