What's a "creole"?

[Jeffrey Kopp]

On Thu, 6 May 1999 21:48:48 -0700, "David Robertson"
<drobert at TINCAN.TINCAN.ORG> wrote:

>Khanawi lhaksta: lhush chxi pulakli, shiks,
>
>Michel's remarks are most welcome.  While "pidgins" might be more easily
>defined, and "contact languages" a less controversial label, "creoles" may
>well be at the receiving end of, may I say, an imperialist power
>relationship.  Not to get political or anything.  :-)

Hi, Dave.  I found Michael's and Sally's exchange interesting, too,
as I have been fuzzy on that distinction myself, and now I can see
that the scholars are, too.  I had composed a rambling reply putting
forth my naive point of view on the subject but felt shy about
sending it, so I was relieved to see you summarize the main points
for me (the first of which was that the question was difficult enough
for me without bringing culture into it).  I try to envision it from
a functional view, i.e., how is the language used and what for, as it
is simply beyond me to look much deeper into it.

Despite my difficulty grasping it, I am fascinated by the question of
what constitutes the creolization process and how is it distinguished
from the evolution of an established language.  To me, creolization
is a fairly rapid change occurring within but a few generations,
while language evolution occurs more slowly--so, when a creole
persists and begins to change more gradually, it must be
transitioning into an evolving language.

The key here might be to examine the changes in the tongue and the
rate of that change within the population of young children.  It has
been recently discovered that children transmit considerable
information directly among themselves as peers (including language
knowledge), perhaps as much or more so as from their parents.  This
has been documented in the persistence and consistency over many
generations of playground games and rhymes (though I think this is
only part of the picture).

A changing tongue would rapidly ferment and integrate in the ears and
minds of young children, to later crystallize into new language as
they carry it together into adulthood over a few generations.
Examining the magnitude of difference in speech structure, vocabulary
and grammar of a cohort of children from their parent's generation
might provide one way to distinguish the creolization process from
language evolution.

The question of how the Jargon relates to Old Chinook is even more
intriguing because it presents so many mysteries.  Looking again to
the inseparable processes of auditory development and language
acquisition in young children may help to explain it. 

As I understand it, Old Chinook disappeared fairly suddenly due to
the upheavals of disease and displacement, and the Jargon itself was
rapidly quite deformed by the infusion of nonnative words and heavy
usage by and with nonnative speakers.  On the other hand, we see in
some post-Chinookan speakers' Jargon significant remnants of Old
Chinook structure and pronunciation (such as Victoria Howard) which
somehow bridged this gap.  For want of a better analogy, it is almost
as if a ghost of the language made it through the upheaval somehow.
I believe she must have heard something as a young child in the
harmonics of her parents' Jargon that carried this to her.

Regards,

Jeffrey Kopp