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Re: Zhyler & Kele Babel Texts

From:David J. Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
Date:Thursday, June 19, 2003, 7:31
Stone wrote:

<<Can you give an example? Pidgins and Creoles interest me.>>

The example I was given was Melanesian Pidgin English (proto-Tok Pisin, Niu
Guinea Pidgin English, etc.).   John McWhorter was the one who gave this
example.   He said that there would be a plantation on one island, and the owner
would go to various islands to recruit indentured servants.   They would only
take "able-bodied" men--no women or children--and they would work on the island
for ten years, after which point they would return.   Very few shared a common
language, of course, that whole area being extraordinarily rich,
linguistically, and so Melanesian Pidgin English developed.   When the workers would come
back, they would oftentimes teach it to their family, and it became useful for
communicating with other groups on the island, or other islands nearby, since
there was usually a group from each major language that had worked on the
plantation.   The usual case of a pidgin is that it's only spoken in dealings with
the plantation owner, or the dominant group, and then gradually becomes the
language used amongst the slaves or servants, but since the workforce was
constantly being renewed, it was impractical for them to just kind of make do, so
that was probably why the ones leaving would teach others the language, and it
just carried on.   But the main place where the language took shape was on the
plantation; not on the outlying islands.   And since there were no children
on the plantation, it can be said that the pidgin creolized without children
learning it.   It's not the case that the plantation workers would come back,
teach it to their children, who then creolized it, and then from them it passed
on back to the plantation, and from their, to the other islands.

Unfortunately, I can't find any text on this.   I've been quickly glancing
through three books (Pidgins and Creoles, John Holm, 1988; Pidgins and Creoles,
ed. Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken, Norval Smith, 1995; and Contact Languages,
Mark Sebba, 1997), but I can't find any references to the formation of
Melanesian Pidgin.   They're in there, and examples of this were discussed (I
believe in the section where they were providing counterexamples to Bickerton's
claims), so it's not just a theory John McWhorter made up (and, quite frankly,
whenever you hear him present a theory, you have to take that possibility into

And, personally, I've always thought it was ridiculous to think that only
children could creolize a pidgin--as if adults were *incapable* of creating a
*real* language.   To that I say, why not?   We do it all the time!   ;)

Also, it's interesting to note that one of the universalist's main proponents
(the aforementioned Derek Bickerton, who came up with the bioprogram) never
once looked at a pidgin/creole whose lexifier was not English.   And, as many
of the features of universal grammar look suspiciously like English, it's no
wonder that he would come up with the claim that pidgins are basically like a
language that is universal grammar, since they all were English-based.   That
was supposed to be solid evidence that SVO was the preferred, "natural" word
order, even though there are many pidgins/creoles with SOV and VSO word order
(and I think with VOS...).

Anyway, that's my two cents on the matter.   I'm going over material right
now, though, because I'm going to help design and then TA a class on pidgins and
creoles at UC San Diego in the winter, so if I come across a textual
reference, I'll let you know.