Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news.dfci.harvard.edu!camelot.ccs.neu.edu!nntp.neu.edu!news.eecs.umich.edu!news.radio.cz!newsbreeder.radio.cz!news.radio.cz!CESspool!news.apfel.de!fu-berlin.de!news.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom16!alderson
From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Progressive [was: Creolisation of English]
In-Reply-To: Ron Kephart's message of 15 Feb 1997 17:50:25 GMT
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.97Feb18121738@netcom16.netcom.com>
Sender: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Organization: NETCOM On-line services
References: <32f6cbb1.23517140@news.xs4all.nl> <5d2um4$4n@agate.berkeley.edu>
	<5e4t11$1uo@pelican.unf.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 20:17:37 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <5e4t11$1uo@pelican.unf.edu> Ron Kephart <rkephart@osprey.unf.edu>
writes:

>Apprently Cajun French borrowed a similar form from Louisiana Creole, which is
>a true creole related to Haitian.

>See J. Holm, Pidgins and Creoles: a Reference Survey, Cambridge, 1988?.

I do not have access to the Holm survey, so I cannot check it against what I
have been told.

As an undergraduate, I was friendly with a graduate student who was a native
speaker of Louisiana Creole.  Some of her relatives in her grandmother's
generation were speakers of Haitian Creole, from a period of immigration in the
early 1900's.  Her dissertation was on the phonology of the two creoles and
Cajun French (contrasted especially with Standard French).  According to her,
the two creoles are originally unrelated.

I have drawn a blank on her last name--we last spoke in 1975--but her first
name is Debbie, and she had a paper in the 1975 CLS proceedings on a phonologi-
cal conspiracy which she named Lafitte's Conspiracy, which figures in the
title.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
