lingua franca and pidgin!!!

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Triny
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lingua franca and pidgin!!!

Post by Triny » Sun May 04, 2003 3:48 pm

HELLO... :D I WANNA DISCUSS ABOUT THE DIFFERENTS ABOUT LINGUA FRANCA AND PIDGIN, BECAUSE THEY ARE VERY SIMILAR... LINGUA FRANCA IS FOR SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND PIDGIN ??? :(

Harzer
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Post by Harzer » Mon May 05, 2003 7:23 am

Hi!

A lingua franca is a language used for communication on a regular basis by two groups, neither of whom speaks the other's language. It is accepted that the users are trying to observe the regular grammar and phonological rules of the common language.

Pidgin is also a common language, but it is a hybrid which takes features from the several languages known by the speakers. Pidgin does not attempt to obey the grammatical and phonological rules of any of the parent languages, but allows a simplified grammar to evolve through usage.

Lingua francas seem to be spoken by more developed communities and pidgins by more primitive ones. Yiddish might be seen as a lingua franca, whereas the New Guinea "tok pisin" is a pidgin which has developed from English and various native languages, of which there are several hundred in this country, and is essentially used for trade and administrative purposes.

The term "tok pisin" shows several features of the language itself:

The qualifier "pisin" follows the noun "tok".

The sound [dg] is not in the local phonology and is substituted with [s].

wjserson
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Post by wjserson » Wed May 14, 2003 6:32 am

I would like to add a very important distinction as well :

The term 'lingua franca' desgnates the function of a specific language. Any language, pidgin or not, can function as a lingua franca to facilitate communication between two communities or individuals. French can be used as a lingua franca in a country such as Zaire to help native speakers of Lingala and Kikongo speak if neither of them speaks the other's native language.

A pidgen, however, is an actual classification of language (and some linguists would say they're languages themselves) : "I speak Hawaiian Pidgen English." No one ever says "I speak lingua franca." And a pidgen can certainly be used as a lingua franca. In most cases, pidgens are used to facilitate two or more language communities. So you can say that most pidgens function as lingua francas.

In Papua, in southern New Guinea, a pidgin called Police Motu is a lingua franca in the region (originally used by the Papuan native police force which drew its recruits from all over New Guinea).

(wow, this must be the first time I've used any knowledge I gained during my BA!)

:D 8)

Stephen Jones
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Post by Stephen Jones » Sun May 18, 2003 5:51 pm

Is "Tok pidgin" a pdgin, or a creole or a fully fledged language?

One definition of a pidgin is that none of the speakers of it are native speakers. So if you have a community of people with no common language, then you will have them speaking a pidgin. However if their chkdren grow up with the pidgn as their native language then it becomes a creole.

There are certain rules of pidginization which appear to be universial whatever the language that forms the basis of the pidgin. One of them is replication as in "Same-Same", normally pronounced "Sim-sim". These featrues do not apply to Creoles which start to take on the characteristiics of a fully fledged language.

Many people cliam that pidiginization is the source of new languages.

wjserson
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Creoles and Pidgins

Post by wjserson » Tue May 20, 2003 1:15 am

Well put SJ,

I learned the same concept : no pidgen is spoken as a mother tongue, the generation that speaks the pidgin as a maternal language transforms the pidgen into a creole, and after this process the syntax, morphology, and other aspects of the language do become more complicated as the need is there to make more complicated sentences (ie. past vs present vs futur).

Now here's a question with which an answer will be much more subjective: What distinguishes a 'creole' from a 'language'? Are 'creoles' just simplified versions of the 'languages' of their origin, or are they independant languages? Would Haitian Creole be placed under Romance Languages or under French Languages? Things that make you go hmmmmm...?

Everybody has an answer to this, and everyone has an opinion, I'm simply throwing out the question to start a cool conversation.

Roger
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Post by Roger » Tue May 20, 2003 2:38 am

It's probably best to refrain from categorising every variant of a language and just keep using terms such as Creole or pidgin in reference to their respective objects: Creole seems to be a pidgnin version of French, it is apparently natively spoken by Haitians who otherwise read and write in French. Is it then a dialect?

SOme people have difficulties keeping dialects apart from languages. I do not see how you can lump languages and dialects together, but others do.
Is Yiddish a dialect (of German) or an independent language? German speakers cannot read it (because Yiddish uses Hebrew characters).

Stephen Jones
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Post by Stephen Jones » Wed May 21, 2003 9:12 pm

Roger,

Two sayings on this one. Firstly a language is a dialect with an army
and secondly a language is a language becaiuse its speakers think it is.

Normally however you accept a hierarchy. Various ideolects make up a dialect and various dialects make up a language.

You must be very careful to avoid the trap of thinking that you have the standard version of the language and then various dialects that are somehwo inferior. The standard version of the language is simply another regional or social dialect, albeit a more prestigious one.

So Catalan is a language and not a dialect because if it were a dialect it would have to be lower in the hieracrcy than the parent language, and since the only possible parent language would be Romance you would have to call Spanish and French dialects too.

Roger
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Post by Roger » Mon May 26, 2003 1:21 am

I have come across this kind of reasoning. It may work, it does not work all the time.
My differentiation is:
A language is a language when it has a written form. A dialect is an oral version with no written form (albeit on occasion it might be used in a text).

wjserson
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Location: Ottawa

Post by wjserson » Fri May 30, 2003 5:19 pm

So according to your explanation :

Haitian Creole would be a dialect of French because, as of yet, no standard written system has been established for it. Can it be a dialect of French when they are totally incomprehensible, or when all one can understand of the other is one or two nouns per sentence?

Stephen Jones
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Post by Stephen Jones » Sun Jun 01, 2003 7:56 pm

Sorry Roger; line of reasoning doesn't work at all.

You can write any dialect of English you want. Henderson was writing in Scots in the 14th century but it was still a dialect of Englsih, as was Chaucers.

Standard English is just another dialect of English, a social dialect as opposed to a regional one, but a dialect none the less.

What is all important is the question of hierarchy. A language can never have just one dialect. There must always be two dialects at least becasue a language is higher up the scalle than dialect.

You could argue that French, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian and Italian are all dialects of a language called Romance and indeed that would have been the orthodoxy many hundreds of years ago.

Now, what often happens is that as the different dialects develop separate written forms these become standardized, and this standardization helps to accentuate the differences but political factors tend to play a more important part.

And what can we say about written forms that are not alphabetic?

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