George Boeree | Re: [europidgin] Prepositions. k and s
- Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
- Tema: Re: [europidgin] Prepositions. k and s
- Data: 2002-09-12 20:08
- Mesaje: 23 (a supra, presedente, seguente)
Hi, all. So many emails! I feel like I suddenly got a lot of friends! Here is a lengthy collection of comments in response to several of your comments: > Paul: I am an American of middle age, and I seem to be > one of those adults with little proficiency in learning languages at > my > age, even though I am fascinated by languages in general. I am in very much the same state! > Paul: So why create a new one? Why indeed! There have been many worthy efforts, and over 100 years of them no less! But why not? I started it for fun (and a little misguided ego) and I wanted to start from scratch. My principles were simple: strict phonetics, highly reduced grammar. I have a good background in linguistics, and have always had an interest in pidgins and creoles, so that gave me considerable guidance in the grammar department. I should note that, contrary to many people's beliefs, creoles are usually more, not less, compicated than LFN! Even pidgins have some pretty complex word-order rules that take a learner quite some time to sort out. Everyone seems to think that an analytic (isolating) language has to be simpler than a more agglutinating one, but that is mistaken to say the least. Chinese kids have a hard time learning the many ambiguous particles they need, whereas Turkish kids learn their consistent suffixes early and well. Why the Romance language vocabulary base? "Because it is there!" You add up all those languages, and you get the largest speaking population in the world. It is western enough to absorb scientific language easily, yet not so western as to be culturally threatening (as English can be). Of course the vocab could be anything at all -- I even thought Pali might be a good source at one time -- but why not from a large population? > > Paul: Why not give at least a nod to another major language group > in Europe, the Germanic tongues? One reason is that the Germanic languages (other than English, of course) are essentially restricted to Europe. English vocab is so Romance influenced that adding a few German words would hardly help. Plus I have found that northern Europeans simply love the Mediterranean, and many pick up considerable Romance vocabulary! The most important reason, I think, is that Romance languages have little in the way of a threatening nature to others, as English and German (and other languages around the world, of course) have. Spanish and Portuguese have their own colonial histories, of course, but their former empires have made those languages their own. > Jay: Another instance of simplification in this vein > may be using "Z" and "S" to stand for the same sound. > I thought a lot about that one, as well as the contrasts F and V and X and J. The reason for keeping Z (and the F-V and X-J contrasts) is simple: It allows us to keep a number of words in a state more closely resembling their original look. Z and X are not frequently used, it is true, and we could do without. But the thought of SERO instead of zero, and all those greek words... Or drinking SAMPANIA! There is a compromise to make, though, and that is to allow Z to be pronounced as TS (as in many languages) or even DZ. X and J already allow for some variation (X can be pronounced as sh or ch in English, and J as zh or j). > James: I was intrigued by the name 'europidgin', so I > decided to join. However, I think that what we need is not so much > a euro pidgin as a euro creole. "Eurocreole" sounds rather nice, I think -- or even just Criol. There may be a bit of confusion over the differences between pidgins and creoles: A pidgin (strictly speaking) is one exclusively used as an easy form of communication between two language populations. It tends to involve highly simplified grammar, usually very isolating, and tends to involve the vocab of the "invading" merchant language. Melanesian Pidgin and Lingua Franca are two examples. The first has a largely English vocab, the second a largely Italian vocab. A creole is a descendent of a pidgin OR a partially learned colonial language that has a native speaking population. Because it is a full language, it is typically more complex with a richer vocabulary. In that sense then, LFN was never intended to be anyone's native language, yet it was intended to be more than a merchant's pidgin. It's a different kinda bird -- an IAL, I guess. > James: I wonder whether we could consider conforming > to the IAL Basis in europidgin. Please correct me if I am mistaken, but I think LFN already conforms, except it does not have an interrogatory particle, using intonation (? in writing) instead -- common among pidgins and creoles. > Alexandre: But if Chinese, Turkish, Quechua, Gambian > and such users of Europidgin prefer entering much non-Occidental vocabulary, > no problem. I hope that it is clear that, whenever culturally specific items enter into Europidgin's vocabulary, they can be in that culture's language (much as English is very accepting of such words), with only one caveat: Spelling should be phonetic. > James: Some creoles have a general locative preposition > 'na' (the form of which is > of Port. origin). > I gave the problem of idiomatic preposition use a great deal of thought. If you notice, there are only 20 of them, nine of which serve double-duty as spatial and temporal or spatial and relational. Each has a fairly broad application, yet clearly delineated from each other. I don't think we have any need for generic prepositions, especially with DE meaning "of, about, or concerning!" Incidently, NA is actually from "in the" in Portuguese. English has a general locative (at) as does LFN (a). I disagree with James on one important issue (although please understand, he may be right and me wrong!): I do not agree with Bickerton regarding creoles reflecting an "ultimate" linguistic structure. What we are really seeing, I think, is the coincidental effect of European language structure (SVO, prepositional, etc.) combining with the structures of the particular Asian, Polynesian, and African languages that met those colonial languages (again SVO, prepositional, etc.!). I believe it is quite possible that there are other unrecorded creoles that arose, for example, in the contact between Mongolian or Turkish tribes and Finno-Ugric tribes that would have maintained the SOV, postpositional structures of those languages. I would love to find a description of the Basque-Amerindian pidgin! Anyone know where? If that has a Basque-Algonquin structure it would prove my case -- if it has an isolating SVO structure, then Bickerton has the lead! Of course, regarding LFN, the disagreement is moot anyway, since LFN follows Bickerton's structure fairly closely! Well, that's all. I am having fun -- I hope everyone is as well. George -- C. George Boeree, PhD cgboeree@... www.ship.edu/~cgboeree "I like reality. It tastes of bread." -- Jean Anouilh "Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak." -- Woody Allen