Talk:Pidgin/Archive 1

I would hardly classify "leet" as a 'pidgin'. A systematized slang at best, definately, but hardly a pidgin. Which two languages have supposedly merged together? --Gabbe 22:59 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

Agreed. (I'm not sure Nadsat counts as a constructed language either, while we're at it...) -- Tarquin 23:03 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

---

Babyish

Babyish is a pidgin of Cantonese and English.

Babyish seems to be a fictional pidgin, a personal rather than a community conlang. Is that correct? Marnanel 16:45, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

---

"The word pidgin was used in John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden."

So what? Was it first used there? If so, the article should say so, otherwise I don't see why it matters. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 02:30, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No, it wasn't first used there. I included that sentence to give an example of a promiment literary work that actually uses this unusual word. Cluster 02:46, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I had the same question about why there was a reference to East of Eden. I understand the intention, but it seems unnecessary to validate this word with a literary citation. --Macchiato 20:09, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Mixed Languages

What are the differences between mixed languages, creoles and pidgins? They are three different families at Ethnologue.

The difference among creoles and pidgins should be clear from the article. Isn't it so? --Error 04:01, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

But there isn't any article on "mixed languages". -- 10:44, December 15, 2004, UTC

Is code switching enough? --Error 02:25, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Spanglish

Hi,

Is the mixed language spoken in what is known "Mexamerica", in Southwest USA a new pidgin ?

No. See: Spanglish - FrancisTyers 10:28, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Category usage

I've split a couple of the pidgin languages listed here into their own articles, and made sure they show up in a category. I think this makes more sense than listing just a couple here. --Screetchy cello 19:10, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

List about creation

Sources for my addition/clarification is Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: an introduction to language and society. 2000 and lectures attended at Stockholm University (Sweden) where this book is the main source of info. --da'covale 11:20, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

Etymology and History

I added the Cantonese/Mandarin section to clarify to perhaps students or native-speakers of Chinese why they would also be terribly confused to see that Pidgin is a transliteration of "business." Certainly the jumbled nature of a pidgin's emergence probably made its own dictionary term just as confusing. The pid-gin sound can come from anywhere from any of the five languages Canton pidgin is said to evolved from. For me, I just want to slap any dictionary or encyclopedia out there who states with certainty that pidgin is from Chinese word for business (cringe).

History has been changed to a link for copyright reasons.

Eric

Just as a data point: the OED's earliest cite for pidgin is from 1826, and in fact refers explicitly to the explanation that the word is a corruption of the English word business. Are there any citations to back any of the Chinese etymologies? 64.119.154.226 05:36, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Spanish-speakers might benefit from the impressively detailed etymological analysis here. It severely questions the Chinese origin hypothesis. Taragüí @ 09:15, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Pidgin Lore

I've heard a few things over the years, and never knew whether they were true:

1) In typical pidgins, most of the words come from one language and are shoehorned in to the syntax of another.

Don't know how typical it is, but in some Caribbean creoles or pidgins, French words were replaced with English ones (or vice versa?) --Error 29 June 2005 01:00 (UTC)

2) Yiddish can be viewed as a pidgin that's about 80% German, 15% Hebrew, and 5% whatever is the local language.

Check Yiddish. --Error 29 June 2005 01:00 (UTC)

3) There was once a pidgin called "Portagee" (now an ethnic slur) that was a Polynesian-Portugese hybrid.

Check Portagee. --Error 29 June 2005 01:00 (UTC)

Can anyone enlighten me about these?

Thanks

Rick

btw, re: "Spanglish is not a Pidgin, it is a portmanteau because it shares vocabulary rather than inventing a new one." - the definition of portmanteau in the link refers to single words rather than languages or dialects.

Corrected. --Error 29 June 2005 01:00 (UTC)

Well, "Spanglish" is a portmanteau, but that's only referring to the name of the language...

I *do* know that in the California Central Valley, there are many people who speak only something that is neither Spanish nor English. (Examples appear in most issues of "Low Rider" magazine). Sounds like a nascent Creole to me, based on the definition on the main page.

Hawai

The most popular American Pidgin language is that of the surf culture in Hawaii, where locals mix the traditional dialect of Hawaiian with English. However, this Pidgin language is not based on a need for communication, but instead on the Hawaiian people's need to "stand out" from "regular" Americans.

I don't know about its popularity, but Hawaian Pidgin English and Hawaian Creole English come from the mixing of immigrant workers for the sugar plantations (and ranches?). When you get Chinese, Japanese, Hawaian and other people together and do not teach them full English, the pidgin ensues.

If the surfer version is another thing, I have misunderstood. --Error 29 June 2005 01:00 (UTC)

Bakeness

What does Bakeness mean? --Error 29 June 2005 01:33 (UTC)

I find no relevant Google results. I'll revert --Error 1 July 2005 01:04 (UTC)

Ausländisch, a German pidgin

Among the shifting refugee communities in central Europe around 1944, a German-based pidgin evolved and was standard enough to be given the name "ausländisch" by the speakers themselves. (My knowledge is derived from my mother's use of it in that area at that time). On meeting a stranger you could ask, before starting a conversation, "sprach ausländisch?".

This Ausländisch is to be distinguished from the language of the same name spoken by Italian immigrants to (for example) Dusseldorf in the 1970s-1980s. That seems to be much more of a private dialect of the immigrants rather than a means of communication between different linguistic groups.

As far as one can tell the 1940s Ausländisch was built on a grammar-free German-- but I hope that some eager doctoral student then (or shortly afterwards) recorded some examples of its usage. It would be intriguing, for example, to see if it shows some Slavonic influences.

Awkwardness.

Currently we have one of the conditions for the creation of a pidgin being "An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible lingua franca." Isn't this a rather awkward way of phrasing it, given that the Lingua Franca was, well, a pidgin? This seems unncessarily confusing. john k 6 July 2005 23:41 (UTC)

Nope. Lingua franca (as employed here) does not mean the original Frankish pidgin, but a language spoken across different communities and employed for intercultural communication, even if it's not native to either of the speakers. It's the most frequent (even if conceptually secondary to the etymological origin) usage of the term. See lingua franca#Languages which have served as a lingua franca. Taragüí @ 09:09, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Universal Grammar Mention, Pidgin Evolution

Should something be mentioned concerning Universal Grammar? I've read that the pidgins and Creoles around the world share the same grammatical characteristics, like SVO, and aggulantating tenses, so perhaps this should be mentioned, and this article needs more information about how pidgins are formed and transform into creoles. Most language books I've read state that pidgins and creoles are the closest thing we have to the world's first languages.--Ikiroid 17:21, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

I've added in a similarites section, and I want to cite the book I have gotten the information from, but I don't know how to cite books on Wikipedia. Someone please help me with this.--Ikiroid 00:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

African Pidgins

can someone with experience on this page please add some of this info? this is first-hand information, I have lived in Cameroon and visited Sierra Leone.

Across formerly brtish-colonized West Africa (and probably other parts of Africa) Pidgin is the most widely used language between people who don't share a native tongue. Almost identical languages are known as "Creole" or "Krio" in Sierra Leone and as "Pidgin" in Nigeria and Cameroon, although they would both technically be considered "creoles" according to this article. The majority of the vocabulary is English-based.

• This certainly needs to be addressed -- I've actually been looking for info on West African Pidgin(s), and am a bit unsure about the relationship between Krio, Kamtok, and Nigerian Pidgin. Can anyone add to this? thanks. bikeable (talk) 07:21, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup Time

I just took all the info above the table of contents in the article and edited it and categorized it. We need to outline what still needs to be fixed the article. Feel free to respond below with some ideas.--ikiroid 00:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)Ikiroid(See my talk page)

Eh?

I thought, and I guess I was wrong, that a pidgin linguistically had a wider reach and could be significantly more sophisticated than has been made clear in this article, I thought, for example, that Afrikaans was technically a pidgin because of it's origins from people speaking different languages in a new country needing to communicate with each other and make up new words for objects or experiences they didn't need back in their native countries. How far off the mark am I here? •Elomis• 03:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

If anything, Afrikaans is a creole language. See that article for the way in which a pidgin may become a creole. Pidgins are very limited languages while creoles are fleshed out "full languages." Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 04:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Caribbean section

AE, you edited out links to the terms kreyol (which points to the creole language article) and patois. I did not change any content when I redirected the links in the sentence which refers to Haitian Kreyol and Jamaican Patois. The links for Haitian and Jamaican pointed to a disambiguation for Haitian and the Jamaica article for Jamaican. So I redirected the adjectives to the articles on the languages themselves, then linking the word Kreyol to the article Creole language. I made sure to link directly to appropriate pages so readers would not have to click through a disambiguation. I would like for you to revert so those links are restored. MKoltnow 22:40, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Your disambiguation edits were good. But patois does not go to Jamaican Patois (there is no article separating Jamaican Creole and Jamaican Patois) and creole language is an article on all creole languages and therefore is not an example of creoles or pidgins in the Caribbean. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:14, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

That's my whole point--I carefully linked the words Haitian and Jamaican to the Haitian Creole and Jamaican Creole articles, but left the words Kreyol and Patois linked intentionally to the general articles. I think that readers should be able to link to articles on general terms as well as specific ones. Is there some reason why they should not be able to from the Caribbean section? I think more people will follow links embedded within the article than ones down in See Also, so I'd be willing to dump the Creole Languages link (perhaps others) within See Also and preseve links to terms within the article, where appropriate.

I understand that some readers might think that both links in Haitian Kreyol link to the same article, or be surprised when they reach the general article rather than the specific one. But I think it's still of use--there will be people who want to link through to one or both of those articles and will appreciate the links' presence. Too many links, or poor link density can spoil the readability of an article, I grant, but we are writing for people whose level of expertise in Linguistics covers a wide range. MKoltnow 01:35, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I'll try to find a better way of linking Patios, but creole language is linked to the article already. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 02:23, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

This whole section has a serious problem: the examples from the Caribbean are creoles, not pidgins! There is a clear difference, which the article describes above. We should not allow them to be confused below. I think the section should be deleted, because there are no surviving pidgins in the Caribbean that I know of. If someone else has information about some, then by all means put it up, but don't mix up creoles and pidgins. Makerowner 04:05, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I've tweaked it so that it's more appropriate. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 05:31, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, that's much better. Though I'm not sure the article needs a section on a group of extinct pidgins unless there is some particular feature of these pidgins that is important to the study of pidgis in general. Also, as far as I know, the development of the Caribbean creoles is not 100% known by linguists. While all other creoles around the world developed from pidgins, no one saw the pidgins develop into creoles. I think it would be better to say that pidgins develop into creoles if they become the native language of a community, and point to the Caribbean creoles as an example of a suspected case of such creole formation. There are better documented cases of creole formation, for example Hawaian Creole. I'll see if I can find some good sources. Makerowner 04:27, 29 December 2006 (UTC)