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Is English a “creole Language”?

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#31

Post by ithkuil »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #12
ycombinete wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously. Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be. Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English…

> The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans That never happened; it was the other way around.

Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage.

Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language.

Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and complex

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#32

Post by bonzini »

theodric wrote: post #27
teleforce wrote: post #14

Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393

With 40%+ Germanic vocabulary (per Braudel), is French rather a Germanic creole?

Is that the vocabulary of Germanic origin and imported from Germanic, or is it just the part of PIE that has not diverged between Latin and Germanic languages?

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#34

Post by throw__away7391 »

throwup238 wrote: post #4
39896880 wrote: post #2

Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…

> we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! What's your best attempt? :-)

It depends on the architecture of your CPU.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#35

Post by LeonB »

teleforce wrote: post #14

Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393

Here is a different video by the same person (the `robWords` channel)

“How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks)”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ

I learned a lot from this and continue to find words that these lessons apply to.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#36

Post by tsimionescu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #11
39896880 wrote: post #2

Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…

> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language. However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring. Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot b…

This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant.

Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word.

Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#37

Post by nine_k »

koito17 wrote: post #22
flir wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

\s\w+\s ;)

cljs.user> (re-seq #"\s\w+\s" "やり直して") nil Joking aside, is it common to use regular expressions? Seems like the method only works for languages with spaces. I think a more sophisticated lexer may be necessary, but are there are non-regex, "fast approximations" that work across most languages? This is a problem that I have not tried solving before.

すみません! It's because you have no space around. A more correct regexp would be \b\w+\b, with zero-width "word boundary" psttetbs instead of spaces.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#38

Post by nkrisc »

39896880 wrote: post #2

Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…

My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that.

Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ithkuil wrote: post #25
k__ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't just define a new word? I mean you're linguists! :D Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context. I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.

Post-creole I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages. I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute

[deleted]

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#40

Post by 082349872349872 »

k__ wrote: post #6
39896880 wrote: post #2

Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…

Why don't just define a new word? I mean you're linguists! :D Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context. I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.

Do pseudocreoles include concreoles, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole ?

Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?

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