creoles

[bryllars at concentric.net]

>Why not study creole genesis as it is going on? Is anyone doing that?
>One needs to go to a place where there are lots of people brought
>together from a range of language communities, who have to
>communicate, and who have minimal access to any dominant variety
>and do not have a shared lingua franca. Does this happen now in our
>world full of global workers and refugees?


Study of transitions from Pacific Pidgin to Creole  was done excellently
for New
Guinea by Gillian Sankoff.
(Roger Keesing's excellent study Melanesian and the Oceanic Substrate is
also very helpful.)
  Rickford and Mcwhorter have put the Atlantic situation on the beginnings
of an
objective basis.  -- There has otherwise been little objectivity in this
field. Stabs of
greatness followed by neglect or ignorance. And lots of bias.

    The problem is Is there any basis for a "universal" theory of pidgins
and creoles?.
And I at least can't agree with Sankoff or Hymes in this.area.
    If, and logically there must have been, there was a pidginization stage
(only one?)
in the development of Atlantic Creoles then it must have been for the most
part before
1640 and more like during original Portuguese contact.. And it is pretty
much unrecoverable
 - as is a lot of what went on in the African coast holding stations -
although we know a
lot more now than we used to.
   But the Creoles have been going on for centuries as languages in the
niches in which
they functioned.  And Pidginization does not seem to explain much about
their character.

      So I am not sure that a study of pidginization would be of great help
in that area.
If the problem is the general conditions of pidginization - I think the
categories generally
used cover a multitude of sins.   Africans are generally fairly
multi-lingual and quick at
picking up other African languages - so that enforced contact of the early
slave trade would
be hard to duplicate in other language situations even if you found a case
that seemed
ideal for your general purposes.

Karl Reisman










At 10:21 AM 3/23/01 -0800, you wrote:
>I just monitored a local debaate on theories of creole genesis
>between John McWhorter and Claire Lefebvre. It struck me that
>most of the work on creoles is done on fully mature creoles which
>are undergoing normal language evolution. The past of these
>languages seems to require reconstruction by inference, history,
>demographic records and so on.
>
>Why not study creole genesis as it is going on? Is anyone doing that?
>One needs to go to a place where there are lots of people brought
>together from a range of language communities, who have to
>communicate, and who have minimal access to any dominant variety
>and do not have a shared lingua franca. Does this happen now in our
>world full of global workers and refugees?
>
>One theory says that in these conditions the first thing to happen is
>use of a kind of learner variety which lexicalizes from phonetic material in
>the lingua franca /superstrate using the structural apparatus of
>the speakers' mother tongues.  Then, as they talk with each other,
>levelling occurs and certain features become dominant in the new
>shared variety.  Which features dominate is an empirical question.
>This kind of process could be fairly rapid. Is anyone
>studying such conditions?
>
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>Susan M. Ervin-Tripp                 tel (510) 642-5292
>Psychology Department             FAX (510) 642-5293
>University of California            ervintrp at socrates.berkeley.edu
>Berkeley CA 94720
>http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ervintrp/
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