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From: need@bloomfield.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need)
Subject: Creoles and Pidgins and English
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Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 20:29:42 GMT
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In article <593766564wnr@shappski.demon.co.uk> Andre@shappski.demon.co.uk  
(Andre Shapps) writes:
> In article: <D4tvGs.Ew8@midway.uchicago.edu>   
need@bloomfield.uchicago.edu 
> (Barbara Need) writes:
> 
> > Well, no. There is no evidence that English after the conquest went  
> > through either pidginization or creolization (at least not as I  
understand  
> > these terms).
> 
> Can someone give a quick definition of pidgin and creole, in particular  
are creole 
> languages born from pidgin languages and at what stage does a creole  
language 
> become just a language?
> -- 
> Andre Shapps

A quick definition? Not really.

The best I can come up with is that pidgins are communication systems  
which develop in situations where there is a necessity to communicate with  
no common language. Often these have very limited vocabularies, simplified  
syntaxes, etc. Often one language is the source for the vocabulary (called  
the lexifier)--in the case of many known pidgins this has been a European  
langauge.

Creoles are simpified language systems with native speakers. Sometimes  
these can be shown to have developed from pidgins after a couple of  
generations, sometimes they seem to have sprung up within a generations  
(some pidgins never become creolized).

The situation in the North of England in the later Old English period was  
a case of two speech communities with languages which were very close.  
There may have been some influence in terms of reduction of case endings,  
but that is natural in Germanic langauges with first syllable stress  
anyway, so it's hard to say that the simplification is due to the Odl  
Norse influence (the main differences lay in pronunciation, giving us such  
pairs as skirt/shirt--the syntax and morphology were still quite  
similiar). 

As for the Norman French influence on Old English, again, while these were  
languages with more different grammars (and a different basis for the  
grammar: one Germanic, one Romance), the processes of language usually  
ascribed to the Conquest can be traced with little or no break in the  
continuous texts of the period. Not a creol here either.

Barbara Need
University of Chicago--Linguistics
