Pidgins and Creoles

                    Pidgin

A pidgin is made when members of different speech communities need to communicate with each other and have no common language. It combines two or more languages. Pidgins are developed when two different languages are forced together due to trade, colonization, war etc.. A pidgin has no native speakers and grammatical structure and also have limited vocabulary. Like, during world war One and Two, so many pidgins were made.

According to R.L. Trask " A pidgin is nobody's mother tongue, and it is not a real language at all: it has no elaborate grammar, it is very limited in what it can convey, and different people speak it differently" (Taken from “Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2007”).

   Tok Pisin derived from “talk pidgin” can be said as the most studied. It was made in 19^th century and is spoken in Papua New Guinea.

Some Tok Pisin Words :-

Mi  = I,Me | Yu = You | Maus = Mouth | Dok = Dog 

                Creoles

 When new generations of pidgins speakers continue to speak this language, pidgins convert into creoles. Vocabulary of creoles majorly come from parent languages.

According to Wikipedia.org, “The English term creole comes from French créole, which is cognate with the Spanish term criollo and Portuguese crioulo, all descending from the verb criar ('to breed' or 'to raise'), all coming from Latin creare ('to produce, create').”

           

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Liabilities Of English Language

Troublesome Idioms:-

•         I’m not going to stand for that
•         Be here in nothing flat
•         Sitting in the dark
•         By and large
•         Piece of cake
•         Bark up the wrong tree
•         Beating around the bush

Verb Particles:-

•         Make out
•         Make up
•         Live up
•         Live down
•         Sleeping in
•         Sleeping out
•         Sleeping it off

English Spelling words in World:-

•       English spelling is only 60% phonemic
•       It is 40% non phonemic

  Example:-

             Ghoti =Fish (Gh from rough, O from women, T from nation )

Different Spellings of One Phoneme:-

             /i/ can be represented by following spellings:

•     Grieve 
•     Deceive 
•     Mean
•     Machine
•     He

Same spelling represented by different phonemes:-

• /i/  =  break
•  /e/ = break

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Assets Of The English Language

Worldwide Importance :-

• Mandarin Chinese with nearly billion speakers is numerically the first of the world’s tongues. While Chinese is concentrated in central Asia, English is spoken around the globe.
• Over a Billion people use English either as a first or second language.
• 70% of the world’s mail addressed in English.
• 100% of communication of world’s airports carried on in English.
• After 1962 when China expelled Soviet engineers. China’s second language became English.

Immense Cosmopolitan Vocabulary :-

• Anglo Saxon did not have over  100,000 words. While, most comprehensive dictionaries of Moern English place Vocabulary 1,000,000 words.
• Today some estimates place the total vocabulary at 5,000,000 words.

       Source of Vocabulary:-

•        Victorian Expansion-Australia-boomerang South Africa- Khaki.
•         Sceince and technology-download, interface.
•        War stockpile, escalate.
•        Invasion of Danes-sky, Invasion of Normans plaintiff.
•        Missionary activites of Pope Gregory-vespars

Three layers of Synonyms:-

• Nixon quits. (Anglo Saxon)
• Nixon resigns. (Norman French)
• Nixon abdicates. (Latin)

quit, resign, abdicate are synonyms.

• The Senate asks Haldemann. (Anglo-Saxon)
• The senate questions Haldemann.( French)
• The senate interrogates Haldemann. ( Latin)

ask, question, interrogates are synonyms.

Inflectional Simplicity:-

• Affixes or endings added to a stem word which changesthe meaning or form of that words. In latin, Puella Agricolam Amat. In English, Girl farmer love.

The ambiguilty can be cleared by adjusting the words order : Girl love farmer.

Natural Gender:-

• All Indo-European languages other than English arbitrarily divde words into Masculine, feminine and neuter.
• German-Der Bleistift (the pencil) (masculine) , Die Feder-(the pen) (feminine)
• Spanish- El Camino (the road) (masculine) , la mesa (the table) (feminine)

      Old English had Grammatical Gender:-

Old English  Se Mann (Masculine)	Modern English The man
Seo Hlaedige (Feminine)	The woman (or lady)
Saet Maegden (Neuter)	The girl (or maiden)

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