Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

[ moderator edited ]

In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:09:04 PM, parkvall at ling.su.se writes:
<< To the best of my knowledge, no variety of Haitian Creole has ever been
attested in which African words make up more than a couple of per cent (at
the very best) of the vocabulary. The lexicon of Haitian is normally
considered to be more than 80% (citing from memory, but I could probably
come up with references if neccessary) of French origin, regardless of
whether you consider the core lexicon or the whole vocab. Given that most
French affixes -- though they do exist -- have got lost on their way, it
would make more sense (which doesn't mean it would be correct) to describe
Haitian as French lexicon and no affixes rather than Afro lexicon and
french affixes. >>

You're quite right about the lexicon.  It is mainly French and I misread my
very old notes.

You should be aware however that you may find strong disagreement about your
"no affixes" statement in some quarters.  Michel DeGraff at MIT seemed to
find French affixes and even found their development and consistent with
genetic developments in French:

"[To identify Haitian Creole as non-genetic] these features must diverge when
 comparing the grammars of (colloquial) 17th-18th century French dialects to
 that of Haitian Creole, and such divergences must be *qualitatively*
 different than their counterparts in the ("genetic") course of French
 diachrony.

 So far, I have not be able to isolate such features. Whatever divergences
 exist between colloquial 17th-18th century French dialects and Haitian
 Creole (e.g., `loss' of verbal inflection, verb-placement differences, etc.)
 seem to have counterparts in the diachronic course of `genetic' languages.
 And what I find most intriguing is that such divergences in `genetic'
 diachrony also seem to coincide with the history of contact within these
 `genetic' diachronies."

There's a paper on HC by Michel DeGraff that should still be on the web at:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/hc-sketch.pdf

A completely different approach, and one that points to "genetic" continuity
with West African morphology was taken by Brousseau,  Filipovich & Lefebvre
at the University of Quebec :

"[Comparing] the productive morphology of Haitian with that of French (the
 lexifier language), and Fon, a contributive West African language, ... 1)
 productive affixes of Haitian creole pattern in a significant way with the
 model of contributing West African languages more so than with French; and 2)
 the presumed morphological simplicity of [HC] reduces to the selection of the
 unmarked option with respect to the position of morphological heads." (JPCL
 4:1 1989)

If any of the above is possibly accurate, then the multiple "genetic strains"
in Haitian Creole may still apply, despite my misstatement regarding the
lexical part.

What I was AMAZED by in your post was the following paragraph:

<<A deliberate oversimplification which would need to be taken by more than a
grain of salt, but which have some truth to it is that while a non-contact
language has one parent, an intertwiner has two, and a pidgin or creole
none.>>

The idea that any language can have TWO PARENTS - grain or salt or not - is a
significant enough step for me in this dialogue.  Following Russell and
Whitehead and the dictum that "qualitative differences are just large
quantitative differences," I would ask if there isn't a bit of "interwiner"
in most languages?

Regards,
Steve Long