Skip Robinson wrote: >(It must be Friday somewhere.) I'm fascinated by the characterization of >English as 'pidgin'. I don't see that word in any of the articles cited, but >it's an intriguing idea. I think where the term falls short is not the >mish-mash mongrel origin of English but the ideas of 'compromise' and >'simplification'. It seems that English has taken every opportunity to >increase in complexity, not decrease, at least in regard to vocabulary. Still, >despite having university degrees in English and in Linguistics, I feel better >educated for this exercise.
I like your point very much! I think people like to say English is a pidgin because of several perceptions (I had written “factors”, but that implies that they’re necessarily correct; I’m not convinced any of these is accurate/unique to English): 1) They think of it as not having evolved as the native language of a people (wrong, of course—just not the case in this country) 2) It has strong history to both Greek and Latin, as opposed to many other languages, which tend to have simpler/more direct forbears 3) It has borrowed VERY freely from other languages (of course pretty well all languages borrow from other languages, but English (perhaps) more freely than others) 4) There’s no Academie Anglaise as there is in France; indeed, English words often evolve very rapidly (my favorite example: “chad” going from a mass noun to a count noun overnight, with the 2000 election, simply because the media misused it and most people had never heard it until then, so the instantly most-common usage was as a count noun) In any case, if you look up the meaning of “pidgin”, it most definitely isn’t “a grammatically simplified form of a language, used for communication between people not sharing a common language”, so I think we can agree that it might be a creole, a mongrel, or some other variant, but “pidgin” it ain’t! As James Nicoll<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll> famously wrote, 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 riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. I’d argue that borrowing a perfectly good word from another language is probably better than creating a new one from whole cloth; at least then there’s some chance of being able to divine its meaning for some people! ObAnecdote: when she was maybe 8, my daughter challenged my dad (a linguist) with the word “napiform”. He said, “Well, I’ve never heard it, but I would imagine it means ‘turnip-shaped’.” And he was of course correct, basing his analysis of “nap” + “form” and knowing Latin. BTW, here are a few interesting pages: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142968/is-english-actually-a-pidgin-or-creole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://www.quora.com/Is-English-a-pidgin We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussions of z Systems hardware and software. …phsiii (son of a linguist and admitted pedant) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
