Talk:Hawaiian Pidgin

message: The most interesting part of pidgin to me is the word origins (etymology) of pidgin. Hopefully someone that has studied pidgin can contribute to this part of the page because people are going to find it to be the most interesting part of the article. Aloha  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joe82493 (talk • contribs) 05:44, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History/Etymology

message: If you can't actually speak Hawaiian Pidgin, do not edit this article.  You'll just introduce errors into it. 
Unsigned comment by User:198.148.166.5 at 02:06, February 4, 2006
True, dat!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.130.227.252 (talk) 01:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Malcontributions

message: Well, I don't want an edit war either, so I surrender.  I suppose I'm  interpreting the definitions of dialect pidgin and creole language to mean that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of English, not a separate language, so therefore it couldn't be considered a Creole language.  I was going to prove my point by pointing out that if you want to hear unintelligible versions of English, then go to Scotland.  (I lived there for a few months) But then I looked up scots language and the article acknowledges the dispute between calling it a dialect or a language.  And they fall on the side of calling it a separate language.  
Here's what they said about the dispute:
Whether the varieties of Lowland Scots are dialects of English or constitute a separate language in their own right is often disputed. There is little doubt that, had Scotland remained independent, Lowland Scots would be regarded as a separate language from English. This has happened in Norway with Norwegian. Norwegian, once regarded as a dialect of Danish, has been regarded as a language in its own right since Norwegian independence in the 19th century. All the same, the British government now accepts Lowland Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
--Frogcat 01:31, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure how much you mean by invoking Norwegian for comparison.  Are you alluding to a Scottish language struggle?   Randall Bart    Talk   20:25, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: try scots for unintelligible dialects

message: I would agree with those who dispute its status as a creole. As has been said, when compared to other creoles like Sranan Tongo or Tok Pisin, its grammatical structure is very much like any other English dialect. It might have been a creole in the past, but if so it seems to have gone through enough "decreolization" (by increased contact with standard American English) so that its creole origins are not apparent anymore.
:Why not avoid the issue entirely and use the term polyglot? the grammar is substantially different, I think the point people are trying to make is that much of the vocabulary is similar. "Jesus wen go down" doesn't make any sense in a traditional english (grammar) sense, but the meaning can (almost) be derived from context and vocabulary. Avriette 05:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess you have to decide if it is "English" spoken in a different way than the standard (a dialect), or if it is a composite of many languages that start as a pidgin then stabilized (a creole).  If you only hear downtown Honolulu Pidgin you might feel that Hawaiian Pidgin has incorporated way more English than the other languages so must have lost its "creole" status, and has morphed into an English dialect.  If you get the chance to leave townside and make it to the smaller towns or even to the boonies of the outer islands you might have a harder time convincing some that it is just English with a weird accent and a few non-English words thrown in for style.  As long as your argument acknowledges that Pidgin developed as a way for the workers to communicate between themselves and not an attempt at speaking English (not an official language of Hawai`i back then, and absolutely not the language spoken by the majority) you might still have a case.  The sentence structure looks a lot more like Asian/Polynesian that it does English and that is something that must be addressed, because no matter how many English words get incorporated into Pidgin, the grammar seems to stay, no matter where you live.  --Billy Nair (talk) 09:21, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Creole or dialect?

message: Though I feel it is valid to say that Portuguese has had an impact on HCE, I do not care for the examples cited.
To say that "You no can do dat" results from Portuguese syntax is making a massive assumption. In many languages the negation of phrases results from using the word for no before the verb (English is a rarity because of our modal verbs, auxiliary verbs and syntax reflecting them). Wo bu shi meiguoren (Mandarin - without tone markers - Chinese for "I'm not American.) -- the order would be seen literally as "I no am American." Now the Portuguese: Eu nao sou (norte)americano. "I no am American."
What can you draw from this? Both Chinese and Portuguese are purported to be contributing languages to the formation of the pidgin and subsequent creole in Hawai'i.
Also, the "dis-dat-dem" construction is referenced as following Spanish/Portuguese form - I assume the writer means phonetically speaking. In reality, the sounds of [theta] and [edh] (both written as "th" in English and respectively illustrated in the Standard American English words: think and leather) are both infrequent in contemporary languages across the globe. In Europe, the sounds are most common in English, Spanish (central Iberian variety), and Greek - though they are not limited to those languages worldwide, nor are they both necessarily present in any given language's soundstock just because one is present. I follow from this by saying that depending on the proximity of the sound to a more familiar sound in any other language (French, Portuguese, or Chinese for example), a given speaker of one of these languages will try to approximate the sounds that they cannot make when speaking English. So, let's say you're German, perhaps /s/ and /z/ respectively come closer to the sounds of [theta] and [edh]. In many Spanish speakers' versions, /t/ and /d/ (respectively may come closer. So, again, to say that only a Portuguese speaker would make these approximations is a fallacy of logic.
The last I will mention is familiar: the comparison of the "-da" ending and its frequency in English. What you have here is the coincidental and totally superficial link of modern Portuguese's tendency to pronounce an unstressed final "a" as a [schwa] and the fact that in several dialects of English, the ending "-er" is often pronounced without rhoticity - that is to say that the final vowel will be made often as a [schwa] and the final "r" will not be pronounced (other dialects of English modify this final cluster of "er" differently). Also, the examples cited do not have a -da ending in the Portuguese translation, nor related words. Brada (brother) is "irmao" in Portuguese, for example.
I'm just a former student of Anthro. Linguistics and a Portuguese speaker - and, therefore, I do not think my research and contribution would be apt for this section, but I urge someone with better knowledge on this subject to post something more empirical. I'm not trying to berate the contributer(s), but the evidence used to support the Portuguese connection is weak and often a popular convention in several languages.
13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with what you have said.  Although I was surprised of the example of ficar.  I'm not sure if that was mentioned in the book "Da Kine Talk" or if that was taken from my own website.  There were no sources cited.  I wrote about "ficar" on my website because I learned Portuguese and realized the connection. Mamoahina (talk) 02:54, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

text: That may well be so, but our Portuguese friend acknowledged right away that they did not deny the Portuguese contribution, they just pointed out poorly chosen examples. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 09:51, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Portuguese connection

message: I have to wonder whether it's a good idea to call "Hawaiian English" one of the official languages of Hawai'i, when the  State Constitution at http://www.hawaii.gov/lrb/con/conart15.html just calls it English. I think it is reasonable to make the point that it may constitute its own dialect, but until that dialect is named by the state government in its constitution, it's probably unwise to say it's an "official" language. Bugmuncher 03:33, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Huh?

message: The relevant text is quoted here:
"OFFICIAL LANGUAGES
Section 4. English and Hawaiian shall be the official languages of Hawaii,
except that Hawaiian shall be required for public acts and transactions
only as provided by law. [Add Const Con 1978 and election Nov 7, 1978]"
(italic added for emphasis)
1. As correctly noted above by Bugmuncher, there is NO SUCH THING as "Hawaiian English" in "The Constitution of the State of Hawaii". It is "English", NOT "Hawaiian English", that is an official language of the State of Hawaii. The stub/article makes a FALSE statement and misrepresents the law.
2. Hawaiian language is NEVER REQUIRED in any State of Hawaii activities UNLESS specifically "provided by law". There are NO STATE LAWS requiring the use of Hawaiian language. The stub/article makes another FALSE statement, and again misrepresents the law.
3. The mere optional use of a macron and an opening single quote (so-called `okina), by certain enthusiasts (zealots), does NOT create a "dialect" of English.
4. The claim that use of the two marks is preferred by the majority of Hawaii's people is the DELUSION of an "okina lunatic".
5. The stub/article uses the word "Standard" to describe "Hawaiian English". There is NO SUCH THING as "Standard Hawaiian English". Where are the alleged "standards"? Where are they published? Who has the authority to fabricate such "standards"?
6. The stub/article has NOT ONE reference, and NOT ONE citation.
According to Wikipedia:Citing Sources,
"any material that is challenged and has no source may be removed by any editor".
According to Wikipedia:Verifiability,
"The obligation to provide a reputable source
lies with the editors wishing to keep the material,
not on those seeking to remove it."
Agent X 09:11, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Constitution of the state of Hawaii, Article XV, Section 4

message: I checked a few of the resources that were helpfully added to the Further Reading section a few days ago. The ones I was able to find with my university library access were talking about Hawaiian Creole English or a Pidgin dialect, rather than the subject of this article, which supposedly differs in only a few minor ways (accent when speaking and use of native phonic symbols when writing) from standard American English. Because of this, I have removed those citations and will now add them to the appropriate article, where they may be more useful. I suggest that the rest of the Further Reading be checked by those with access to resources I do not have. Andrew Levine 23:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Citecheck needed for Further Reading section

message: The policy states:
; 1. Articles should contain only material that has been published by reputable sources.
; 2. Editors adding new material to an article should cite a reputable source, or it may be removed by any editor.
; 3. The obligation to provide a reputable source lies with the editors wishing to include the material, not on those seeking to remove it.
In accordance with Wikipedia policy, I am challenging and removing content from this stub/article which lacks citations to reputable published sources. Agent X 13:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia policy and justification for removing content

message: Words ending in "da", for instance the words "brada" or "wada" which mean "brother" and "water" were contributed by the Spanish and the Portuguese; which are actually the only languages that have words ending with "da" at the end of them.
I thought of "soda" and "agenda".. probably many others exist. Can someone clarify?
69.84.125.242 05:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a ridiculous claim. I've removed it from the article. --Ptcamn 07:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

text: It is not a contribution of any Romance languages where nouns are either masculine or feminine.  Rather, it is the result of the New England pronunciation where the final R and the R before consonants are absent. Mamoahina (talk) 02:50, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Wrong?

message: At first glance this article appears to be professionally written.  But after taking time to read through more carefully I decided to tag this article as being original research.  My reason for doing so is that, as has been previously cited, the author has made many unreferenced assertions, which makes it difficult for readers and editors to determine if the author's assertions are fact or just the author's opinions.  For example, the author's claim that the "da" endings are derived from Portugues/Spanish is just one case in point.  If the author can't prove that particular assertion with an accurate reference, then that assertion certainly should be deleted — as should any other assertions in the article that the author can't provide "da kine" (an acceptable reference) for.
I'm sure the author was (and is) means well, and has personal experience with Hawaiian pijin.  But the bottom line is that criticism has been leveled about the lack of references in the author's assertions, and the author appears not to have done anything at all to correct the problem.  I gather from the discussions on this talk page that AgentX (whoever that is) apparently (and if so, correctly) added the "fact" template tag to several of the author's questionable assertions, which an editor subsequently (and unfortunately) deleted.
Without adequate and appropriate references and footnotes to the author's assertions, I believe this article can be classifed as "original research", and if not corrected within a reasonable period of time, then I think the article certainly should be renominated as an article for deletion.   K. Kellogg-Smith 14:31, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It needn't be nominated for deletion, just rewritten. --Ptcamn 09:33, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have seen Hawaiian Pidgin/Creole cited as a pidgin that has become a creole.  It only takes one generation raised with a pidgin as their primary language for a creole to emerge.  The lines are fuzzy of course, but I understand Hawaiian Creole has a distinct grammar.   Randall Bart    Talk   20:25, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Original research

message: No doubt there are/will be more of these.  I'm noting this here so that there can be awareness of activity. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion of pidgin word articles

message: I'm surprised no one decided to put the complex negatives of Pidgin here for the past, present and future tenses.  Mamoahina (talk) 03:27, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: like "nevah wen go" and "neva going go"? They have a small grammar section, I think the negatives are a pretty easy way to demonstrate the differences between standard English and Pidgin, but unless it is presented by a linguist, it has the potential of looking kind of silly.--Billy Nair (talk) 20:41, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Where do they use those forms?  Is that used by the older people?  It's good to know that there are dialectal varieties too.  But I was referring to the common NO, NOT and NEVA.  I grew up on a small island (just under 7,000) and grew up on a pineapple plantation and the island consists about 50% kanaka so not sure if that's a good or bad thing as far as not being exposed to "neva wen go", etc.  If it matters, I grew up in the 70s up to the mid 80s. Mamoahina (talk) 02:09, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: NEGATIVES

message: Why is there a white space between the top of the article and the first line in the lead?  Remove, if not possible, report to bugzilla.70.73.145.207 (talk) 10:51, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: White Space

message: Currently, the article makes reference to the word "wikiwiki," which is from Hawaiian, stating that it comes from the English word "quick." While wikiwiki does mean quick, it is a word from the Hawaiian language with cognates in other Polynesian languages. Reduplication is definitely a feature in the Hawaiian language and other Polynesian languages. I'm not sure if reduplication occurs in HCE for words not borrowed from Hawaiian.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zzsnow3ater (talk • contribs) 09:32, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Reduplications as a feature of HCE

message: " "Faka wat? False crack?" = "as soon as you're not looking I'm going to punch you in the head" "  -- I think that's most likely complete rubbish. Remove? Sparkstarthunderhawk (talk) 13:54, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: not complete rubbish, it is pretty close to what it means. They didnt translate the "faka wot" part, maybe could have said "Hey, Jerk! Do we have a problem?" and put a comma after the faka part. as for the "false crack" part, that is what it means, to punch someone, usually in the side of the face or head, when they are not looking. I dont have a problem with it being removed, just saying it wasnt a horrible translation.--Billy Nair (talk) 20:51, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You got beef brah? You talk story yah? Dis small kine. 24.214.238.86 (talk) 04:53, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Erm..

message: I read the article and got stuck on the examples cited for Portuguese and Chinese influence - just like some of the previous posters I'm sorry to say that most did not look very convincing ... so, after some thought (also considering the old 'citation needed' tag), I decided to trim down the section. 
As remarked by others, the negative construction could come from a wide variety of different languages and the same holds true for the 'one' for 'a' substitution - Portuguese is one possible source, but it might just as well have been Spanish, Italian, French or German :-) Now, maybe all these latter options can be excluded due to historical reasons, but then the argument has to be made that way, rather than just stating: construction X is like in (pick your language), ergo this must have come from (pick your language). In the case of Chinese we had 'haa' (which could be several different languages), chop suey (pardon?) and li'dat. If it had been the final particles 'lor' or 'meh', or the universal Malaysian Chinese 'lah' that would be pretty convincing (assuming the usage is similar), but haa? seems pretty universal to me ...
Please feel free to reverse my edit, but please do also provide some stronger reasons for the connections made - otherwise, the article is weaker, it seems to me ...
Hakseng (talk) 04:18, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Portuguese/Chinese examples again

message: Pidgin (or Hawaiʻi Creole) originated as a form of communication used between English speaking residents and non-English speaking immigrants in Hawaiʻi.[4]
This sounds a lot like they are trying to say most of the people in Hawaii back in the 1800s spoke English and then when the immigrants came they started speaking Pidgin. From what I know about Hawaiian history, a lot of the residents at the time that the plantations started bringing in workers spoke Hawaiian. The plantation owners spoke English, but few would consider these people to be Hawaiian "residents". Wouldnt it be better to word it so it sounded more like what really happened? The workers were all placed in large camps and had to try and communicate with each other, and since there was no official language (Hawaii was not part of the US in any stretch of the term back then and the Hawaiians were not a large percentage of the population in these camps) they developed a pidgin to communicate.
Plus, the [4] link is broken, there is nothing there to read to see what they were trying to say in that statement. I dont know how to show that this citation needs to be updated.
--Billy Nair (talk) 00:25, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: See WP:DEADLINK. I've put a tag there. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:08, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: History

message: "Even today, Pidgin retains some influences from these languages. For example, the word "stay" in Pidgin has a form and use similar to the Portuguese or Spanish verb "estar", which means "to be" but is used when referring to a temporary state or location."
Anyone who is farmiliar with the Portuguese language would find that the word "estar" in the Portuguese and Spanish language is not used like it is used in Pidgin from Hawaii. But the word "Fica" in Portuguese is used EXACTLY like how Pidgin is used in Hawaii. Example: Portuguese: "Ele fica?" English: "Is he here?" Pidgin English: "He stay?" and the answer in Hawaii Pidgin is EXACTLY the way it is in Portuguese; Example: "Ele nao fica." English: "Hes not here." Pidgin English: "He no stay." I'm no linguist but I know this IS Portuguese grammar and a DIRECT translation from Portuguese to English. Ben986876 (talk) 23:42, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: This Part Of The Article Seems Flawed

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I found numerous back issues of the scholarly journal The Carrier Pidgin here in case someone is interested. Veverve (talk) 00:51, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Back issues of ''The Carrier Pidgin'' 

message: Does anyone have a citation that specifically says the coronal stops in Pidgin are linguolabial? I can't find it in the sources cited for the consonant table, and from personal experience, I don't think it's true. I grew up in Hawaii, and [b̺ə kajn] sounds ridiculous to me.
Justin Kunimune (talk) 15:54, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linguolabial stops? 

message: I know we prefer "natural" disambiguation to parenthetical disambiguation, but since it is not technically a pidgin but rather is something that local people call "Pidgin" while scholars elsewhere call it "Hawaiian Creole English", shouldn't it be either Hawaiian Creole English or Pidgin (Hawaii)? "Hawaiian Pidgin" sounds like something scholars would call it if it were an actual pidgin -- is it what popular media outside Hawaii call it? Because if that's the case, I think such sources should probably be given less weight, since they are more likely than not produced by and for people who both never think about this language and don't know the difference between a creole and a pidgin. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:06, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: did you see this Pidgin Hawaiian? --The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 12:34, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not sure. The way this article's subject, the creole language called "Pidgin", is described in the Great Courses series "The Story of Human Language", it seems to be a development from a pidgin spoken by Japanese, Filipino, etc. immigrants, not native Hawaiians like that article says, but are these referring to the same thing? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:29, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  To me, it seems the articles describe the same thing. I don't know.--The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 16:04, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, this article (despite its title) is about a living creole language, while the other is about a dead pidgin language. I would assume based on the title and the aforementioned lecture that the latter was the "ancestor" of the former, but that's not what it says. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:56, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I see. Thanks for explaining that. Yes, the other article maybe is an ancestor of this Hawai‘i Creole English. The University of Hawaii calls it Hawai‘i Creole. The University of Hawaii Sato Center calls it Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect... and the center's founder called it Hawai‘i Creole (aka: Pidgin). Here also... https://apics-online.info/surveys/26 it's Hawai‘i Creole. For this reason, shouldn't the article be named Hawai‘i Creole (of course mentioning "Pidgin" in the lead? Thanks.--The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 01:46, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

text:  Or the article can be named Hawai‘i Creole English.--The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 02:22, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title?