Talk:Creole language/Archive 1

message: I have read the insinuation that Middle English would be a creole of Norman French and Old English. Features like dropping cases and inflected grammar could be a sign. -- Error
:It is not considered to be, no. See the sci.lang newsgroup FAQ. --Brion 02:00 25 May 2003 (UTC)
** When compared to a Romance language and with a Creole of a Romance language, I'm not surprized that some people say it could be a Creole. But has far has I know English is more complex than creoles. The writing system surely is, I've many difficulties with it. But the language itself... -Pedro 22:34, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Middle English

message: <I>Hawaiian Pidgin never became a true creole, because English became the primary language of Hawaii after it became a U.S. state. </I>
???  I don't follow this one.  I'm not a linguist, but I've been doing some research on Hawaiian Pidgin to write the article.  First, I'd guess that standard American English (SAE) became an official language well before Hawaii became a U.S. state.  I make a distinction between official (used in formal governmental and business contexts) and primary (spoken and/or understood widely) here, because while SAE is official, I submit that it by no means supplanted Pidgin as primary.
The pidgin article points out that the point where pidgin becomes creole is when it becomes the primary language of a community.  The references I've consulted agree that this is what happened...that children learned it (unofficially) in school and at home, grew up with it and passed it on to future generations.  Even today in Hawaii, Pidgin is very much alive and well, and SAE and Pidgin coexist side by side.  Visit any public high school in Hawaii and you will find teenagers speaking Pidgin in the halls, while receiving instruction in SAE in the classroom.  Many professionals in downtown Honolulu, who would use SAE during the day in the business environment, would speak relaxed, full-on Pidgin when they get together with friends during happy hour at the nearby bar.
Like I said, I'm not a linguist, but I'd like to know what the rationale is behind Pidgin NOT being a creole, 'cause it seems like it fits the definition.  Thanks, KeithH 03:06, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right, Keith - as Google confirms. - Mustafaa 03:29, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Hawaiian Pidgin

message: "Some people consider kiSwahili to be an Arabic-based creole spoken in East Africa.  It is also an official language of Tanzania."  Some people?  Who exactly?  Are they linguists?  What's their argument?  And, irrespective of how many loanwords it contains, how on earth can they possibly describe a language as archetypally grammatically Bantu as that as "Arabic-based"? - Mustafaa 03:31, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: kiSwahili

message: What are the differences between mixed languages, creoles and pidgins? They are three different families at Ethnologue. ----
: For the difference between creoles and pidgins, see the first paragraph: a creole is what a pidgin becomes when people start speaking it natively, and add regular grammatical rules.  A mixed language is an entirely different matter, of which the best example is probably the Michif language of Canada, in which almost all the verbs and their grammar are from Cree, but almost all the nouns and their grammar from French. In normal creoles and pidgins, by contrast, the grammar is massively simplified and the vocabulary is mostly from a single source. - Mustafaa 11:14, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mixed Languages 

message: Australian English now has many additions in every day speech (as different from Strine which seems to be used mainly in movies). Is it a dialect? Is Strine a creole, seeing that it was originally oral and now has a grammar? While Strine probably has never been formally 'taught' in schools etc, it is widely understood.
anonymous
I'm sorry. What that has to do with a Creole Language? Duh! -Pedro 22:29, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australian English vs UK 

message: I think the romance languages should be in here as latin creole because that what it is.  I don't see how they are any more advanced than say Haitian creole.  They are both written and steal words from another language
::That's not quite how the Romance languages developed.  To create a creole, a process of pidginization must first occur, and this only happens in certain situations of cultural contact.  There really isn't any evidence of such an event.  Romance languages are simply the result of natural changes from Latin. AEuSoes1 10:35, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin Creole 

message: There are so many additions and repairs to this creole page, but the pidgin page has been oddly neglected. Can someone help me fix it? No one has done much with the Pidgin article recently, and it is in dire need of repair. Sorry to talk about a different article on this discussion page, but I'm not getting any responses or help from the Pidgin discussion page.--ikiroid 15:33, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The [[Pidgin]] article needs help too 

message: Would it be worth mentioning here the debate over whether the formal, standard English langauge itself was originally a creole language?  Some argue that English developed from an equal mix of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French and Scandanavian dialects, while others argue that the basic Old English language remained substantially intact and was enriched by contact with the other languages.  Here are some arguments:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361ryan.htm
http://calico.org/journalarticles/Volume10/vol10-3/Rendall.pdf
http://blackvoicenews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=929
I'm not a linguist so I don't think I could give this a fair summary, but I think this is very interesting. --38.112.184.20 22:43, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  English as a Creole Language 

message: What is the difference between mixed language and creole language? --Hello World! 16:14, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: mixed language

message: I had always been told that Creole was one specific mixed language, a mix of mostly French, a bit of English, and other languages spoken in parts of New Orleans, Haiti, and many other smaller Caribbean nations, rather than just a general term for any mixed language.  I've also seen the word referring to a style of cuisine from the same region.  From this article, it seems that it may just be a matter of a general term evolving into a more specific term in certain circles.  Is this particular mix sort of informally considered the one definitive "Creole" among other creoles?  Or were the people that taught me that just all wrong?  (It was in French class I first heard this term, so there was probably a bias towards that particular mix.)  --Lurlock 21:32, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a word that has multiple meanings.  I'm sure one of them was the original term and others stemmed from it.  It can be ambiguous sometimes but that's why this is creole language with a lowercase C.  AEuSoes1 04:23, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: One definitive "Creole"?

message: I'm proposing that creolization be merged into the Development section and redirected here. "Creolization" is really only a verbification of "Creole", and  the present article is scattered and needs a lot of work (citations, formatting, expansion, etc.). Merging would be more expedient and parsimonious, I think. Thoughts?
-Gsnixon 12:26, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I can go either way on this.  Creolization is a little bit more than just the verb form of a creole language and and the development of its study is somewhat separate from that of creole languages but the article on creolization is horribly underdeveloped.  Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 18:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from Creolization 

message: I removed the claim that Creole languages were `well-defined'. There is a lot of variation in creole lgs, and e.g. Belizean Creole as described in Lepage & Tabouret Keller (1985) is surely anything but well-defined.Jasy jatere 14:47, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  well-defined languages

message: You can say that Afrikaans went through creolisation periods,
i.e. the fact that it took on a diverse range of vocabulary..it changed grammar structure..it
became a lingua franca for the coloureds..why would the white settlers incorporate vocabulary from various sources and change the structure of the language?Domsta333 12:21, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Languages constantly borrow vocabulary from nearby languages and language structures always change over time.  To argue that it went through a period of creolization, you'd have to argue that it first was a pidgin.  Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 12:47, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Well yea, I've read about Afrikaans and Yiddish being described as 'creoloid', exhibiting several features of creolisation, I'll try and find it. It's indisputible that the development of Afrikaans is distinct from say Argentine Spanish, it is considered a different language.Domsta333 14:20, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Afrikaans 

message: Yes to merger Propose to merge the minor article Liberian Kreyol language which has a trivial content and is unsourced into the larger article here. Decoratrix 14:02, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No to merger Why merge? If the article is short, give it a few months, it will probably be expanded. Also, if it is unsourced, and the statements will reveal to be untrue it can always be deleted later.Ten Islands 14:53, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

text: No This article is about the concept and theory and lists only a few specific creole languages as needed as examples. See English-based creole languages for a complete list. --JWB 16:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

text: No per above two.  If the information is unsourced we either source it or delete it; we don't move it somewhere else.  Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 17:04, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger proposed

message: The section on "Historical Neglect" states that
:Because of the generally low status of the Creole people in the eyes of European colonial powers, creole languages have generally been regarded as "degenerate," or at best as rudimentary "dialects" of one of their parent languages. This view, incidentally, is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language," rather than a qualifier for it, so that one would say "a French creole" (rather than "a French-based creole language"), or "the Papiamentu creole" (rather than "the Papiamentu creole language")
There is a simple alternate explanation: "creole" is shorter than "creole language".  If one takes the view that a creole is a kind of language, then "creole language" is simply redundant.
Linguists seem to take this view, though perhaps not exclusively.  A quick search turns up citations like
:Larson, Richard K. 2003. "Event Descriptions in Fon and Haitian Creole." D. Adone (ed.), Development in Creole Studies. TÃ¼bingen: Niemeyer. Ms., 2001.
:McPhee, Helean. 2003. "The Grammatical Features of Tma Auxiliaries in Bahamian Creole." Michael Aceto and Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.), Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
:Youssef, Valerie. 2003. "How Perfect Is Perfective Marking?: an Analysis of Terminological Problems in the Description of Some Tense-Aspect Categories in Creoles." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18.1-105.
Note the titles of the journals.  On the one hand Development in Creole Studies. but on the other hand Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
As far as I can tell, "creole" and "creole language" are more or less interchangeable.  Certainly a linguist publishing an article on "Tense-Aspect Categories in Creoles" in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages acknowledges creoles as languages worthy of serious study.
-Dmh 08:03, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linguists use "creole" without any implication of inferior status 

message: Substituted at 14:35, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment