Talk:Pidgin/Archive 1

message: :Babyish is a pidgin of Cantonese and English.
Babyish seems to be a fictional pidgin, a personal rather than a community conlang. Is that correct? Marnanel 16:45, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
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"The word pidgin was used in John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden."
: So what? Was it first used there? If so, the article should say so, otherwise I don't see why it matters. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 02:30, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it wasn't first used there.  I included that sentence to give an example of a promiment literary work that actually uses this unusual word. Cluster 02:46, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I had the same question about why there was a reference to East of Eden.  I understand the intention, but it seems unnecessary to validate this word with a literary citation. --Macchiato 20:09, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Babyish

message: Hi, 
Is the mixed language spoken in what is known "Mexamerica", in Southwest USA a new pidgin ?
:No. See: Spanglish - FrancisTyers 10:28, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spanglish 

message: I added the Cantonese/Mandarin section to clarify to perhaps students or native-speakers of Chinese why they would also be terribly confused to see that Pidgin is a transliteration of "business." Certainly the jumbled nature of a pidgin's emergence probably made its own dictionary term just as confusing. The pid-gin sound can come from anywhere from any of the five languages Canton pidgin is said to evolved from. For me, I just want to slap any dictionary or encyclopedia out there who states with certainty that pidgin is from Chinese word for business (cringe). 
History has been changed to a link for copyright reasons.
Eric
Just as a data point: the OED's earliest cite for pidgin is from 1826, and in fact refers explicitly to the explanation that the word is a corruption of the English word business.  Are there any citations to back any of the Chinese etymologies?  64.119.154.226 05:36, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Spanish-speakers might benefit from the impressively detailed etymological analysis here. It severely questions the Chinese origin hypothesis. Taragüí @ 09:15, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etymology and History 

message: Currently we have one of the conditions for the creation of a pidgin being "An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible lingua franca."  Isn't this a rather awkward way of phrasing it, given that the Lingua Franca was, well, a pidgin? This seems unncessarily confusing. john k 6 July 2005 23:41 (UTC)
:Nope. Lingua franca (as employed here) does not mean the original Frankish pidgin, but a language spoken across different communities and employed for intercultural communication, even if it's not native to either of the speakers. It's the most frequent (even if conceptually secondary to the etymological origin) usage of the term. See lingua franca#Languages which have served as a lingua franca. Taragüí @ 09:09, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awkwardness. 

message: Should something be mentioned concerning Universal Grammar?  I've read that the pidgins and Creoles around the world share the same grammatical characteristics, like SVO, and aggulantating tenses, so perhaps this should be mentioned, and this article needs more information about how pidgins are formed and transform into creoles.  Most language books I've read state that pidgins and creoles are the closest thing we have to the world's first languages.--Ikiroid 17:21, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Universal Grammar Mention, Pidgin Evolution 

message: can someone with experience on this page please add some of this info?  this is first-hand information, I have lived in Cameroon and visited Sierra Leone.
Across formerly brtish-colonized West Africa (and probably other parts of Africa) Pidgin is the most widely used language between people who don't share a native tongue.  Almost identical languages are known as "Creole" or "Krio" in Sierra Leone and as "Pidgin" in Nigeria and Cameroon, although they would both technically be considered "creoles" according to this article.  The majority of the vocabulary is English-based.
* This certainly needs to be addressed -- I've actually been looking for info on West African Pidgin(s), and am a bit unsure about the relationship between Krio, Kamtok, and Nigerian Pidgin.  Can anyone add to this?  thanks.  bikeable (talk) 07:21, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  African Pidgins 

message: I just took all the info above the table of contents in the article and edited it and categorized it. We need to outline what still needs to be fixed the article. Feel free to respond below with some ideas.--ikiroid 00:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup Time 

message: I thought, and I guess I was wrong, that a pidgin linguistically had a wider reach and could be significantly more sophisticated than has been made clear in this article, I thought, for example, that Afrikaans was technically a pidgin because of it's origins from people speaking different languages in a new country needing to communicate with each other and make up new words for objects or experiences they didn't need back in their native countries.  How far off the mark am I here? •Elomis• 03:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If anything, Afrikaans is a creole language.  See that article for the way in which a pidgin may become a creole.  Pidgins are very limited languages while creoles are fleshed out "full languages."  Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 04:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eh?