Oh... god...

[conuly]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/19553/

Dialects are variants of established languages. Pidgins are amalgams of two languages. English is a pidgin. In the 14th century English storytellers, notably Chaucer, decided to fuse French, the language of the Norman conquerors of Britain, with the common Anglo-Saxon language (itself a pidgin of two Germanic languages).

Firstly, I'm not sure that theory holds true. HOWEVER, even if it did, English would STILL not be a pidgin. Pidgins are truly "primitive" languages, incomplete. A language like English could be a creole, but never a pidgin, because pidgins have no native speakers. As soon as they have native speakers, those speakers develop things like complex grammar, and the language is no longer a pidgin. It's a creole.

African Americans, especially from the South, have family get-togethers that can include many hundreds of participants. They, too, according to AfricanAmerican friends, speak two kinds of English. Yet, the attempt by many African Americans to get Ebonics, a dialect of English, recognized as a valid language failed because Ebonics is a private, not a public, language

AAVE (African American Vernacular English) certainly occurs in public, or else nobody would know about it. He's actually saying people only use this inside the home?

*sighs* Basics, people, basics.

Comments

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

No, top theory is half-false, at least. Nobody "decided" to "fuse" English with other languages -- it was a natural evolution that took place as families moved from one culture to the next and various communities were isolated/opened. All of the Western languages trace back to Indo-European; if you look at the modern languages, they share various key words with only one or two letters shifted by location/time.

Here's a page just for Early Modern English, which explains some of the vowel shifts & "borrowing" that was done at that point in linguistic history:

http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/worldlit/teaching/upperdiv/emodeng1.htm

[conuly]

I expect people to make THAT mistake, at least. When I said I don't think it's true, I meant "I think the entire idea of English being a creole has been discarded". Among other things, creoles don't generally have the syntax of either parent language - there's a somewhat "standard" syntax that creoles tend to form to, even as they have their differences.