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Smee
Joined: 24 Dec 2004
Location: Jeollanam-do
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 Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 8:07 pm Post subject: |
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It's very nice.
I like Romanian best, though. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 9:16 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| mithridates wrote: |
| Such as? I'm curious because I've seen them done for constructed languages before. |
Sorry it's taken me so long to respond. Got distracted by the origins circus over in CE. Funny stuff.
Anyway, language learning is a really complicated process, and in addition to factors like genetic distance between L1 and L2, postive/negative transfer etc, you also have all kinds of sociocultural and motivation factors. Language learning doesn't take place in a vacuum. So, we have to ask who's learning the languages? For what reasons, and in what contexts? Let's take for example a Korean learner. Even if it is the case that Bislama is easier in some ways, most Koreans (unless they're language geeks like yourself) are very unlikely to be particularly motivated to learn it well. On the other hand, they will have a lot more motivation to learn English. So how can we come to any generalisable conclusions? We can't even do introspective studies in one learner to control for individual differences, since the learning of one language will impact the learning of the other. Add in to that the difficulties of organising the logistics of the study and multiply by the "so what" factor - e.g., unlike constructed langugages, creoles are learned as native languages and don't need empirical evidence to convince people to learn them. All in all, I can't find a rationale for a course of research at all, at least not in applied linguistics. I'd be interested in Woland's comments on this, however.
I would be interested to look at the studies of the constructed languages that you're talking about, if only just to see how they dealt with all the methodological difficulties inherent in the enterprise. |
Yeah, maybe there is no study. If there is one it would probably be on Tok Pisin and probably done by an Australian when PNG was a colony. There doesn't need to be a study of course to show that pidgins and creoles are easier than most languages, because AFAIK just about every place that has had one develop has been used by the majority of the population even though they're fully aware that it'll likely never be used anywhere but their small country/island.
For IAL studies, most of them have been done on Espo and I think some might have been done on Ido way back when but I'm not sure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
Two of the three largest IALs were developed way back when when Tok Pisin and Bislama didn't exist, and Afrikaans (not quite a creole but similar in some ways) wasn't recognized as anything but a Dutch dialect. Zamenhof originally toyed with the idea of promoting Latin, but found it much too hard and that's when he decided to make his own. If he were alive today I wonder if he wouldn't have just gone with a creole. The problem with creoles is that most of them are in places that have shyte economies (Haiti, PNG, Solomon Islands, Cameroon, etc.), with the exception of Vanuatu (average), Mauritius (best in Africa) and Aruba, but that's because it's the Netherlands. I know a guy who seriously believes that the world should be forced to use Papiamento.
I read a paper last night that feared what would happen to the other 105 or so languages on Vanuatu if Bislama were to be made into the only official language. He seems to think that keeping it as the national language along with Eng and Fr as official languages retains linguistic diversity, but that a language like Bislama is a "monster" (I think that's the word he used) in how it just spreads from person to person and propagates itself to the expense of the others before you know it. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 11:21 pm Post subject: |
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Whoa Mith, those are some of the oldest studies I've ever seen! We can assume that most of them looked at pedagogy from a grammar-translation perspective, which means their conclusions will have severely limited applicability to current language teaching methods.
| Mith wrote: |
| There doesn't need to be a study of course to show that pidgins and creoles are easier than most languages, because AFAIK just about every place that has had one develop has been used by the majority of the population even though they're fully aware that it'll likely never be used anywhere but their small country/island. |
With pidgins and creoles I don't think it's even a matter of knowing or caring whether or not the language is used elsewhere, or even of being conscious of their development; it's just a matter of using whatever is most useful for communication at the time. And I would seriously doubt whether the Australian government ever seriously considered the question of whether tok pisin or English would be more appropriate for formal education in PNG. For formal education, which I figure was very rare, it would have been standard English all the way. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 11:50 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
Whoa Mith, those are some of the oldest studies I've ever seen! We can assume that most of them looked at pedagogy from a grammar-translation perspective, which means their conclusions will have severely limited applicability to current language teaching methods.
| Mith wrote: |
| There doesn't need to be a study of course to show that pidgins and creoles are easier than most languages, because AFAIK just about every place that has had one develop has been used by the majority of the population even though they're fully aware that it'll likely never be used anywhere but their small country/island. |
With pidgins and creoles I don't think it's even a matter of knowing or caring whether or not the language is used elsewhere, or even of being conscious of their development; it's just a matter of using whatever is most useful for communication at the time. And I would seriously doubt whether the Australian government ever seriously considered the question of whether tok pisin or English would be more appropriate for formal education in PNG. For formal education, which I figure was very rare, it would have been standard English all the way. |
Yeah, they're old because nobody really cares about IALs anymore. I think it was the League of Nations where Espo was brought up as a possible working language, but France vetoed it because of course French is the international language. Heh. Espo's gay anyway but it's funny how confident French was back then. One reason I've been more interested in creoles than IALs is because I've seen a lot of the process that goes on behind the scenes in the IAL community when they try to keep up with other languages in creating new words like blog and podcast - all nouns have to end with an o for example but sometimes somebody will come up with a better idea than just podkasto or whatever and there will be some arguing for a while on which one is better, and then they have to wait for the new word to be formalized before they can 'officially' start using the new word, at which point there's a whole new host of words that they haven't dealt with yet. Natural languages just do whatever with new words and the most popular method wins out eventually.
From what I've seen of these creole languages, the former colonial powers always thought of them as little more than trade languages and gave them little thought until they realized that everybody spoke them better than the language they ran the country with. The Peace Corps has a number of textbooks on Tok Pisin and Bislama for when people are sent there, so they're given importance now that they didn't have when they were colonies. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 12:00 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| From what I've seen of these creole languages, the former colonial powers always thought of them as little more than trade languages and gave them little thought until they realized that everybody spoke them better than the language they ran the country with. The Peace Corps has a number of textbooks on Tok Pisin and Bislama for when people are sent there, so they're given importance now that they didn't have when they were colonies. |
Oh yeah, the entire understanding of pidgins and creoles has changed in post-colonial times.
Here's the website of one of my professors who has done quite a bit of work with pidgins and creoles, and in particular with Bislama: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~mhoff/PidginsCreoles |
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