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Is English a “creole Language”?

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#101

Post by rectang »

blueyes wrote: post #75
mise_en_place wrote: post #63

It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud . Exit is uitgang , literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang , ingoing.

And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allow…

Fantastic summation — much easier to understand than the article itself or the referenced Wikipedia pages.

In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.

I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#102

Post by agumonkey »

mauvehaus wrote: post #80
agumonkey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bit about non rhyming poetry forms makes me wonder how brit-pop would have sounded without those "french" structures.

Old English poetry tends to have commonality at the beginnings of words (e.g. alliteration) rather than rhyming at the ends of words. Or so I remember from The History of English Podcast. It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine. As with many others posting here IANALinguist.

thanks

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#103

Post by nicole_express »

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…

This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized.

In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#104

Post by trealira »

tremon wrote: post #96
indigo945 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction bet…

English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played . Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you…

I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle.

And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games."

I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#105

Post by danans »

BurningFrog wrote: post #67
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…

> It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages OK, but this is not a scientific definition. Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.

> OK, but this is not a scientific definition.

> Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful

Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions.

The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#106

Post by empath75 »

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…

It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense.

Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#107

Post by empath75 »

imbnwa wrote: post #69
pessimizer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation." It's like the perfect…

>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term t…

They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin. Certainly the Norman conquerers only bothered to learn the minimum amount of English they had to to talk to the locals. That's why there are so many French words in English.

I think the status of a "creole" language is sort of time limited. After enough people are born speaking it and it's diverged enough from it's origin languages, it's just a language. English probably was very much like a creole language in particular places and times (particularly in northern england after the viking invasions for example).

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#108

Post by jachee »

jonstewart wrote: post #90
secretmark wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.

> quotidian iswydt

Don’t bring Welsh into this. ;)

Re: Is English a “creole Language”?

#109

Post by trealira »

cryptonector wrote: post #77
teleforce wrote: post #14

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

French is just badly pronounced Latin/Italian. Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him. Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see…

You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word oui comes from oïl, which was the way to say "yes" in a family of languages called the langues d'oïl.[1] The word oïl is a shortened form of hoc ille in Latin.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl

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