[HN Gopher] Is English a "creole Language"?
___________________________________________________________________
Is English a "creole Language"?
Author : 082349872349872
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-09-28 11:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
| 39896880 wrote:
| 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
| before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly
| lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is
| inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism.
|
| Could you squint and call English a Creole? Sure. But you'd be
| doing the same disservice to "Creole" as you would by saying
| "technically we're all [in the US] African American because all
| humans originated in Africa." It's a disingenuous point, and one
| that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the
| legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to
| begin with.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> we won't even claim to tell you what the definition of
| "word" is!_
|
| What's your best attempt? :-)
| flir wrote:
| \s\w+\s
|
| ;)
| eesmith wrote:
| "Ain't ain't a word 'cause it don't match the regex."
|
| BTW, should be "\b\w+\b". The \b is a zero-width match for
| the start or end of a word. Your pattern requires a space
| before and after: >>> import re >>>
| re.compile(r"\b\w+\b").findall("What's the problem?")
| ['What', 's', 'the', 'problem'] >>>
| re.compile(r"\s\w+\s").findall("What's the problem?")
| [' the ']
| flir wrote:
| That makes sense. I was trying to translate "A word is a
| group of letters with whitespace on either side" into
| regex.
|
| I was being facetious, obviously, but you've already
| identified a serious problem with that definition (is
| "what's" two words or one?)
| koito17 wrote:
| cljs.user> (re-seq #"\s\w+\s" "yariZhi shite") 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| sumimasen! 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.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| That's just passing the problem onto how you define \b.
| Since Japanese uses no spaces, it would match entire
| phrases or sentences as "words", treating only
| punctuation as word boundaries.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some
| models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in
| everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host
| language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-
| European languages. However, in a more precise context, it
| breaks down because of edge cases.
|
| For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g.,
| Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's
| hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy
| way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a
| satisfactory definition!
|
| Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking,
| "How many characters are in a string?"
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries.
|
| Each character is a syllable, with a particular
| pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually
| closely related to one another. There are very common
| combinations of characters that appear together, which one
| could define as words. However, often, you could just as
| easily view the individual characters as words, or the
| combination as a word.
|
| In some cases, the combination of two characters means
| something totally different from what the characters alone
| would mean (e.g., Dong Xi , where the characters literally
| mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so
| the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the
| meaning of the combination is basically a combination of
| the words' meanings (e.g., Chi Fan , where the characters
| literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to
| eat, have a meal").
|
| Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it
| doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue
| just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I should note that typically discussions of language are
| more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather
| than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and
| as such sometimes has aspects which are much more
| socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which
| tends to evolve more freely.
|
| Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as
| applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer
| words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about
| "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its
| own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how
| about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can
| not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as
| well, even in this same meaning.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English,
| but to a far lesser extent.
|
| In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of
| meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some
| words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just
| arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a
| meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable"
| could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who
| spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble"
| individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for
| almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can
| almost all be decomposed into syllables that have
| individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from
| English.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the
| degree to which this applies to the language. I was just
| pointing out that none of these things should be alien to
| an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew
| English would have had similar struggles to define "word"
| because of these problems (though of course they could
| have decided to file them under "exceptions", which
| doesn't work for Chinese).
| mr_toad wrote:
| Some times the boundaries between words in English are
| clear, and sometimes they are a bit blurry.
| 3np wrote:
| (IANALinguist).
|
| I think it's obvious that there might not be one unifying
| definition that spans all human languages. "Word" is an
| English word refering to a specific of the English
| language. A class in JS is not the same as class in C++,
| big deal? ;)
|
| As for English, I'm happy defining it through written
| language and spacing. "Can't", "unmarried", and "walkie-
| talkie" all one word each.
|
| We might as well think of "word" in foreign enough
| languages as separate concepts. Doesn't seem meaningful to
| try to fit fundamentally different structures into the same
| conceptual molds. Which I guess ties back to your original
| point regarding if it's a useful excercise taxonimizing
| English as creole.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| It depends on the architecture of your CPU.
| nivertech wrote:
| There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but
| AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one
| or more LLM tokens ;)
|
| I'm not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a
| sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word
| boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by
| different methods in different languages, e.g. by using
| pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm,
| or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of
| learning a lexical vocabulary.
|
| A word is something that can be categorized as to which part
| of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)
|
| Depending on the languages it's not always clear whether
| prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate
| words.
|
| Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or
| multiple words?
|
| A short sentence in one language may enter another language
| as a single opaque word.
| ycombinete wrote:
| 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 mixture was formed.
|
| If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European,
| language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's
| language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I
| don't think that's how most people use the term creole
| colloquially.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans
|
| That never happened; it was the other way around.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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
| ycombinete wrote:
| I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast
| lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts.
|
| Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic
| practices were imported into the faith via converts. For
| example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a
| Zoroastrian practice.
| ithkuil wrote:
| The same thing happened to many Cristian practices.
|
| The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of
| Dionysus.
|
| Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears
| the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been
| merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition
| fch42 wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but for the Frankish/French/German
| evolution, this is usually considered a "marker":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg
|
| I'm not sure if any such "foundational" documents exist
| for English.
| defrost wrote:
| You're going to have to explain how fifth century Germanic
| settlers in Britain were colonised by the Romans who arrived
| in Britain four centuries earlier and were largely a spent
| force by the time the Germans rolled in ...
| ycombinete wrote:
| Thanks, I'd have a hard time doing that. I got the history
| reversed.
|
| Dang, and it's too late for me to add an edit now as well.
|
| I think the broad point still stands, in spite of that
| error.
| k__ wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Do pseudocreoles include concreoles, eg
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole ?
|
| _Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?_
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 be
| understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it
| needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from
| "fire".
|
| Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because
| the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's
| enough to know "catch" and "fire".
|
| Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in
| variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every
| elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not
| atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with
| "elephant".
|
| Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an
| elephant" _is_ atomic; the article cannot exist independently
| and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word
| is, you won 't know how the article is pronounced.
|
| Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist -
| lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are
| called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be
| phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson
| is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear,
| membership in the category varies according to what aspect of
| the language you're looking at.
| barrucadu wrote:
| By god you've done it, you've solved linguistics!
| gvx wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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
|
| If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that the
| semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when you
| catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
|
| > First, the article can very well be pronounced
| independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite
| article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'".
|
| This argument is predicated on forgetting the difference
| between use and mention. What part of speech would you say
| _an_ is in that sentence? Is it an article?
|
| > Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different
| ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a
| sentence
|
| Yes, problems arise when you need to place sentence-level
| stress on a feature that is too weak to bear stress. The
| same problem occurs for any English clitic, including _'
| s_, which in the general case doesn't even include a vowel.
| Most notably here, there's nothing about this specific to
| _a_ before consonants; the rules for placing stress don 't
| know what word you're following _a_ with. If you need to
| stress _an_ , the usual choice is /ae/. But also notably,
| when native speakers do this, they recognize it as a
| problem - it's just one they may not be able to work
| around.
|
| > 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
|
| This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way; intrusive R
| also occurs between syllables of a single word, as long as
| there's an appropriate vowel-vowel sequence. Placing one
| between _saw_ and _it_ would not normally be viewed as
| altering the pronunciation of either word (Which one do you
| think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic standards it would
| have to be _it_ ), but as the application of a general
| rule.
|
| Placing /n/ between _a_ and _elephant_ is not the
| application of a general rule, it 's the application of a
| rule specific to _a_.
|
| > Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is
| highly debatable, even in a particular context.
|
| You're saying that people argue over which items count as
| words, not that they argue over what it means to count as a
| word.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that
| the semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when
| you catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
|
| That is one of the meanings of catch, just like when you
| catch a cold, the cold takes hold of you, or when you
| catch your foot on something, that thing took hold of
| your foot.
|
| > This argument is predicated on forgetting the
| difference between use and mention. What part of speech
| would you say an is in that sentence? Is it an article?
|
| Fair enough, though I would still argue that being able
| to make a noun out of the article in this way relies on
| them having a stable, recognizable, individual
| pronunciation.
|
| > This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way;
| intrusive R also occurs between syllables of a single
| word, as long as there's an appropriate vowel-vowel
| sequence.
|
| Well, we are trying to define what a "word" even is, so
| you can't bring this distinction in. A priori, "saw it"
| could be a word, just as my whole comment could be a
| single word. We are trying to come up with a formal
| definition of what it means to be a word; if we want "an
| elephant" to be a single word and "saw-r-it" to be two
| words, we need to come up with a distinction between
| these that doesn't presuppose that "saw" and "it" are
| separate words.
|
| > Placing one between saw and it would not normally be
| viewed as altering the pronunciation of either word
| (Which one do you think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic
| standards it would have to be it), but as the application
| of a general rule.
|
| Depending on the exact accent, not all words follow this
| rule. In certain accents, at least, it is quite specific
| to words that have an 'r' in their spelling (well, to
| words that historically had an r sound that was lost, and
| is usually preserved in the spelling), so "four o'clock"
| would get a linking R, but "saw it" would not. So at
| least in these cases, by your definition, we'd have to
| say that "four" is not an individual word, phonetically
| speaking. Also note that linking/intrusive R doesn't
| appear inside morphemes, normally, only between
| morphemes, or between morphemes and suffixes. So you get
| [Kafka-r-esque] in certain accents, but never inside,
| say, "dais".
|
| > Placing /n/ between a and elephant is not the
| application of a general rule, it's the application of a
| rule specific to a.
|
| This could also have been a general rule, that happens to
| apply to a single word in modern English. Regardless, as
| I have mentioned before, if you want to define
| "phonological word" as a unit whose exact pronunciation
| is only knowable when you have all parts present, then
| lots of phrases are phonological words in English, unless
| you add a lot of exceptions to your definition.
|
| > You're saying that people argue over which items count
| as words, not that they argue over what it means to count
| as a word.
|
| These are not that different in practice. If you have a
| good formal definition, then you should be able to say
| for any object whether it is a word, a part of a word, or
| a sequence of words. If you can't do that, you don't
| really have a definition. The definition you gave
| basically equates word with atomic, but then if "atomic"
| is not well defined, or even definable, then we're back
| to square one of not knowing what a word actually means.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described
| as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because
| while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to
| make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is
| not trivially decomposable from the individual words.
|
| A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be
| "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that
| is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up
| modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" _set up_ , and
| isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove
| that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence
| drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance
| described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway
| stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional
| parts of speech.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Those are all very good examples.
|
| Another I like is contractions. If say "can not" but it
| _sounds_ like "can't", how many words is that?
|
| I might say that "not" does not have any semantic meaning
| in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of
| some other word, so perhaps "can not" and "can't" are both
| just one word.
|
| Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren't actually words.
|
| Another interesting question is whether words are truly a
| product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the
| synthetic technology). Did "words" exist before writing?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words?
|
| Not the interesting part, I think.
|
| Is the English _un-_ a word? Before you reflexively say no,
| consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never
| appears on its own and never receives word stress.
|
| Is the French _je_ a word? Before you reflexively say yes,
| consider that it never appears on its own and never receives
| word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
|
| Is the Latin _que_ a word? (The Q in SPQR, "senatus
| populusque Romanus", although perhaps it'd be more authentic
| to write "SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS".) It has a well-defined
| meaning: "and". It goes after whatever word you'd put "and"
| before; not syntactic constituent, _word_. It counts as a
| part of that word for the purposes of stress, so _POpulus_
| but _popuLUSque_.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 troll comment. Makes no argument, implies
| anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black
| Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
|
| 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.
|
| Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English
| people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to
| non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted
| in white people? Are white people so special and unique that
| everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm
| missing your point, what was it?
|
| [*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a
| long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern
| argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black
| Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never
| considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're
| actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
| imbnwa wrote:
| >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 to a level of generality that applies to everything,
| therefore meaning nothing in particular.
|
| Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic
| Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed
| by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former
| allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin,
| Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.
|
| You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a
| fusion of other languages that results from different peoples
| entering into extended contact.
|
| 'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning
| and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is
| simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.
|
| No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were
| languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing
| to modern racial connotations.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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).
| tremon wrote:
| That attitude is not unique to England though. Latin was
| the lingua franca of the European literate and scientific
| world, first because of the Church, and then because of
| the Renaissance. Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza also
| wrote primarily in Latin instead of their country's
| language. Pretty similar to how we are conversing in
| English right now, regardless of what language we speak
| in our home town.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _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.
| 39896880 wrote:
| The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition
| of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of
| linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed.
| Language involves humans. Language is _messy_.
|
| As well, any question that involves "meaning" must itself
| answer the question "to whom?" I answered from the
| perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed
| out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention
| consider it an appropriate term.
| cryptonector wrote:
| In Spanish 'criollo' is the word for 'creole', and its
| meaning has changed a fair bit from the French. It's more
| like "local", "ex-colonial", "dating all the way back to
| colonial times".
| danans wrote:
| > 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".
| nicole_express wrote:
| 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!
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| teleforce wrote:
| Is English just badly pronounced French [video]:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.h...
|
| If so it is equally badly spelled German.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| *spelt.
| philshem wrote:
| Nope.
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/
| whatshisface wrote:
| Long after the sword was smelt
|
| In foreign lands did wielder welt.
|
| The script upon the scabbard belt
|
| Thereupon became misspelt.
| 73kl4453dz wrote:
| A missing n?
| ndileas wrote:
| personally I prefer wheat.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| "Spelled" is a perfectly cromulent word in UK English (the
| best English).
| walthamstow wrote:
| Interesting. I thought spelt and learnt were UK English.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| They are UK English, but "spelled" and "learned" are in
| common usage too. I wouldn't consider it to be an
| Americanism if I read/heard those versions (I'm English,
| myself).
| vidarh wrote:
| German is badly spelt German. Damn High German consonant
| shift.
|
| (E.g.compare ship, schip, Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or
| day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag etc. - we'd have a far neater,
| gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low
| German had "won".
| theodric wrote:
| With 40%+ Germanic vocabulary (per Braudel), is French rather a
| Germanic creole?
| bonzini wrote:
| 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?
| biorach wrote:
| Mostly the former. Much of what is now France was dominated
| by speakers of Germanic languages after the fall of the
| Roman empire. They were eventually assimilated but left a
| linguistic legacy.
| LeonB wrote:
| 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.
| rahen wrote:
| Brilliant video. I would hardly have seen the connection
| between 'guepe' and 'wasp' before.
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| "that strategy of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly
| narrower meaning" - I think this happens with most borrowing,
| into any language. E.g. "opsjon" in Norwegian is from "option"
| but only means stock/legal options, never used in the common
| meaning of "choices". (And the video's own example with "les
| peoples".)
|
| But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse,
| "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have
| been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat
| Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even
| Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
| agumonkey wrote:
| this kind of crippled borrowing seems universal though, you
| only complement your own language where you have a hole
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Well of course, fjords should have a narrow meaning. That's
| kind of what separates them from bays isn't it?
| vidarh wrote:
| The Norwegian words for bay - like vik, bukt, does not
| necessarily imply broad or open. The main distinction
| appear to be length.
|
| Bukt or gulf are the words mostly use for major bays, but
| bukt in particular can also be used for very short, narrow
| inlets, while fjords are used for some of our largest bays.
|
| The Oslo fjord for example, is quite broad and open for
| most of its length. Most of the smaller bays in the fjord
| are bukter, but the largest, longest of them are also named
| fjords.
| agumonkey wrote:
| The bit about non rhyming poetry forms makes me wonder how
| brit-pop would have sounded without those "french" structures.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| thanks
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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 the
| note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same
| thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc",
| meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a
| shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah"
| in English) is just a vowel shift.
|
| French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say
| 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French
| was really the result of every day people not treating it like
| a dead language to be preserved.
| trealira wrote:
| You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word
| _oui_ comes from _oil,_ which was the way to say "yes" in a
| family of languages called the _langues d 'oil._[1] The word
| _oil_ is a shortened form of _hoc ille_ in Latin.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl
| cryptonector wrote:
| Oh thank you for that! I had wondered.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I used to joke with a friend of mine who was of Netherlands
| descent by saying that Dutch is misspelled English. (And, yes,
| I'm aware of the several rounds of orthographic reforms that
| Dutch has experienced.)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The SMBC from a couple of days ago, sort of spoke to that:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur
| talideon wrote:
| That's the cartoon the Language Log post is commenting on. It's
| even included at the top of the entry.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, I figured that (after the fact). I figured that it
| wouldn't be harmful to post it. I am deeply apologetic, if it
| caused trauma. That was not the intent.
|
| I read the headline on my iPad, just after I woke up. Just
| got back from my run, and I'll read the article after my
| shower.
|
| I figured some helpful soul would do an RTFA, if that was the
| case, and was not disappointed.
| wrp wrote:
| You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely
| defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that
| had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it
| turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I
| think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some
| "post-colonial" writers have been doing.
| sparsely wrote:
| There's a good comment on the blog:
|
| "This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want
| to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a
| blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we
| today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most
| of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly
| simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is
| pointless, what I just stated is still true."
| mise_en_place wrote:
| 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.
| cml123 wrote:
| incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but
| I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary
| uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0]
|
| [0]https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang
| BtM909 wrote:
| opponthoud -> oponthoud
|
| Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
| indigo945 wrote:
| 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 between "I played tennis"/"I have
| played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
|
| I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much
| more interesting problem to figure out _why_ it 's not
| considered a Romance language than you imply.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
| munificent wrote:
| _> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in
| origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or
| Romanic._
|
| Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or
| fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is
| highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios
| between the former and latter.
| secretmark wrote:
| 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.
| jonstewart wrote:
| > quotidian
|
| iswydt
| jachee wrote:
| Don't bring Welsh into this. ;)
| patall wrote:
| Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language
| verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect
| tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
| derdi wrote:
| I think the parent was specifically referring to "I was
| playing", which in German would not be expressed using only
| forms of the verb. You would have to use an adverb, as in
| "ich spielte _gerade_ ". Or you could noun the verb: "ich
| war am Spielen".
| geocar wrote:
| > Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs
| (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to
| tense:
|
| What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
|
| > there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have
| played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
|
| Sure:
|
| -- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugue
|
| -- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
|
| -- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
|
| English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to
| explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're
| just conjugating the verb differently, but _I_ think this is
| just because things are written down;
|
| Because, if I _say_ any of these sentences in Spanish or
| English rapidly enough, someone who does _not_ know the
| language will not know where each word begins and ends, and
| it may just _sound_ like English "conjugates" at the
| beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end.
| What's the real difference here?
|
| > But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why
| [English is] not considered a Romance language than you
| imply.
|
| I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a
| language, we're not really talking about something that will
| help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're
| _really_ just yapping about geography and time.
|
| So what do you think would be different if English was more
| widely considered a Romance language?
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > 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]
|
| I think that's complicated by the fact that many english
| words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source
| and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap
| between english and dutch or german is partially additive
| with latin. e.g. [1]
|
| Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study
| ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to
| english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and
| german are easier for an english speaker because of
| comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of
| compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener
| a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring
| the meaning from context.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_o
| f_G...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
| tremon wrote:
| _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 use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
| trealira wrote:
| 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.
| fch42 wrote:
| With respect to past tense, a "common" thing in english
| appears to be that the imperfect of a verb is the same
| word as the past particilpe of that verb. So "played" can
| be the imperfect tense itself, or the participle of
| perfect tense in "have played".
|
| In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often
| formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so
| "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle
| prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" -
| (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also
| exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how
| the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).
|
| To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more
| Romance-language than German language. The fact that
| English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is
| neither German nor Romance though.
|
| I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the
| language is the least common denominator of all the
| people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use
| a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and
| write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
| retrac wrote:
| > Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin
|
| That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese
| vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one
| argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it
| was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from
| drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from
| Old English often make up more than 90% of the words.
| Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office
| while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily
| like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with
| all its Chinese vocabulary.)
|
| Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded
| things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've
| been doing it so far this whole _paragraph_ -- oh that 's
| Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing
| exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
|
| Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be
| different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the
| majority there.
| geocar wrote:
| Once upon a time I was walking with a friend around Amsterdam
| and a man walked up to me and asked me where something was (a
| nearby restaurant), I answered in English with directions and
| he thanked me, then a moment later this exchange happened:
|
| - Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
|
| - No. Sorry.
|
| - But you can! I am speaking it!
|
| - No you're not! You're speaking English!
|
| He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing
| a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had
| to convince me that she didn't understand _anything_ he was
| saying, and wouldn 't have said anything to me at all about it
| except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
|
| She asked me to try and remember what _exactly_ I was hearing,
| and I realised I couldn 't! I could only remember something
| _like_ "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar]
| is?" and maybe _that_ there was a heavy accent, but not exactly
| how it sounded.
|
| Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually
| understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to _saying_
| that I understand it (in response to something that sounds
| something like a question) that I started to believe it.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Very much reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit from ages
| ago. Two guys are at a party, one says "hello", the other
| says -- in perfect English -- "Sorry I don't understand you,
| I don't speak English. please don't beat me up." The first
| guy assumes it's a joke and plays along until he gets annoyed
| at the perfect accent and responses ("no really, I don't
| understand what you're saying, nor what I'm saying, I've just
| practiced this conversation a lot. please don't beat me up.")
|
| Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy
| claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
|
| Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an
| extreme.
| larkost wrote:
| When I was a kid my boychoir hosted a choir from Estonia
| (this was before the fall of the Iron Curtain, so this was
| a big deal), and I remember when I was trying to help out
| back-stage at their concert and one of the Estonian boys
| needed help, but the only thing he could say was "I don't
| speak English", in a perfect midwestern accent (the
| Estonian choir director had drilled his entire choir on
| that one phrase). The cognitive dissonance was hard to deal
| with.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Prior to a trip to Poland I listen to some language tapes
| and learn how to say "I don't understand Polish" in
| polish (something like "nya rezumium popolski").
|
| Almost everybody understood English and finally when I
| ran into somebody who didn't and used that Polish phrase,
| I realized I could have just said in English "I don't
| understand Polish" and it actually would have been
| clearer communication.
| sctb wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU
| Izkata wrote:
| You may find this interesting - "13 American Accents Ranked
| EASIEST to HARDEST to Understand":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6qDjwO69M
|
| Towards the end I have no chance of understanding it.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| My wife had a very similar experience, except in her case, we
| were awaiting a flight somewhere outside the US--I think in
| Asia--and she carried on a conversation with a group of
| flight attendants in Spanish (her second language, but she's
| fluent).
|
| Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian
| airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine)
| well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish
| making themselves understood... she however was quite
| entertained.
|
| (This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard
| Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving
| room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up
| Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his
| unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they
| were being trolled as it were...)
| ookdatnog wrote:
| This is a fascinating phenomenon that I've encountered
| before. It seems that some multilingual people cannot easily
| tell which language they are speaking and/or switch languages
| during conversation.
|
| A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that
| Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear
| you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should
| explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
|
| In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-
| speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request,
| _and then proceeded in English anyway_! She asked that person
| multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without
| addressing her request. Baffling.
| blueyes wrote:
| 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 allows
| for easy word invention through combination.
|
| Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which
| themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow
| linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not
| that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage
| gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex
| syntactic rules as well as a literature.
| rectang wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| There's a video where Eddie Izzard speaks Old English to a
| speaker of Frisian to demonstrate.
|
| As a Norwegian speaker, I can also pick up much of that
| dialogue without the subtitles (though I have the advantage
| of also speaking passable German)
| kragen wrote:
| the question is not really whether english is germanic (it's
| clearly germanic! nobody disagrees!) but whether it's a creole
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This quote by John Nicoll is very poignant:
|
| "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is
| that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just
| borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
| down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets
| for new vocabulary."
|
| -- James D. Nicoll
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's
| funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious
| about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the
| concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of
| languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc).
| "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.
| gregors wrote:
| French + German
| NickC25 wrote:
| English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French
| words.
|
| The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas
| our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several
| hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking
| world being hotbeds for immigration.
| advisedwang wrote:
| A few major differences between english and german that I think
| make them more than just a lexical substitution:
|
| 1. Word order
|
| 2. Morphology (ie you combine morphemes to create words
| differently in english and german)
| smoyer wrote:
| Funny ... I thought I was seeing Welsh but perhaps with too many
| vowels!
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