Not How Kids Speak.

McW’s article is unfortunate. I think that he is on to something, but he’s picked a highly misleading name for it (and thence contrived to mislead himself.) It’s not ‘kidspeak’, but the adults deploying it do probably imagine themselves as using childish forms, insofar as they think about it at all. It’s just that they’re wrong.

It seems a pity to deploy the locution “harness the confidence of a mediocre white man” in the context of criticism of John McWhorter. I’m sure this was supposed to be some generic confident mediocre white man, but a kindly editor might have pointed out the double infelicity.

The idea that 20 year olds (or 40+ year olds — Carrie uses all of the things he discusses and has for quite some time) would copy 5 year olds is laughable.

There are people of this age who do that all the time.

They are called parents.

Now if JMcW had only been talking about the tendency for adults to dress like children, that would have been impossible to take exception to … surely …?

Kidgarb.

@JWB:

I find your comment both true and … liberating.

Perhaps attention remains as scarce as it ever was (although it can perhaps flit more quickly and frictionlessly from shiny object A to shiny object B than was possible before?), but as old-timey “gatekeeping” institutions are disintermediated or destroyed, it becomes harder to blame them for X unjustly getting more attention than Y. So we are compelled to blame vaguer and more amorphous forces. Perhaps sinister foreigners? Now obviously the old gatekeepers are not completely gone, and it is presumably advantageous for Prof. McWhorter to have his writing on the Atlantic’s website rather than on http://www.somedudeshoutingintothevoid.com.

sinister foreigners

It’s what I aspire to be. Unfortunately the power that I was assured I would wield seems … elusive. I blame the sinister indigenes.

Unfortunately the sinister-foreigner threat posed by the denizens of Wales has not been taken seriously in the fearful popular imagination in recent centuries, as the Earl of Northumberland’s conspiracy with Owen Glendower continues to fade from memory. Perhaps Plaid Cymru ought to get working on that, in hopes of attaining for its constituents the prominence in fear-of-the-Other circles currently enjoyed by e.g. the Israelis and the Russians.

Talking of English-lexifier Atlantic creoles (we were, you know, you just didn’t notice), a kind person got me Kofi Yakpo’s A Grammar of Pichi for my birthday. [Fernando Po creole.] Best account I’ve yet come across of one of those languages. At 500+ entirely unpadded pages, it’s a sort of counterargument in itself to John McWhorter’s standing views about creole exceptionalism. It’s got lexical tone! It’s got a distinct narrative perfective! What more could you want? (Well, exuberant polysynthesis, obviously, but non omnia possumus omnes.)

It’s a weird thing to see the examples happily code-switching not between creole and English but creole and Spanish.

Did I grow this moustache in vain?

“I published a response arguing that Higginbotham was entirely wrong about the facts, and he replied indignantly … that I was completely wrong about him being wrong, and naturally I believe that he is completely wrong about me being wrong about him being wrong. (These things tend to drag on; in future work, Higginbotham will argue that my eyes are too close together, and I will argue that, on the contrary, his head is too round.)” —Geoffrey Pullum (citations omitted)

Perhaps Plaid Cymru ought to get working on that

Burninate the English! Meibion Glyndŵr am byth!

Surely the power of the internet ought to make it easier for mediocre people of all sexes and races to blather on about things they don’t actually understand?

Works in my case. But I suspect it only shifts the burden from my relatives and acquaintances to strangers.

I regret to say that this recent piece makes singing in Welsh come off as all cuddly and approachable and inclusive and not at all evocative of dread. I do somewhere have a CD anthology of the ’80’s indiepop stylings of Ffa Coffi Pawb, but they probably could have used a more aggressive guitar sound.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/12/welsh-language-party-spotify-culture

What makes McWhorter’s blathering incredibly dangerous is that he also believes, for example, that the people currently pointing out that racism exists in America are also all literally acting like children, and isn’t afraid to use his soapbox to point this nonsensical observation out in a pseudo-academic way (see “Notably, however, the approved methodology of persuasion is based on the impulses of the child….” from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-wave-anti-racism-dead-end/578764/).

Infantilizing anyone you don’t agree with plays right into all the current Fox News talking points about college campuses being full of “SJWs”, “snowflakes”, people needing “safe spaces”, and so on. The point behind all those talking points, of course, is that those currently in power or benefiting from current power structures should not be challenged in any way – that anyone who challenges or questions things in any way, or protests for any sort of change to the status quo, is simply being a whiny infant.

This mindset is poison, and it’s directly leading to the creation of a generation of sociopathic (mostly) white (mostly) males being brainwashed to become refugee-despising MAGA trolls, incels, white nationalists, anti-feminists, “alpha males”, and, well, eventually mass murderers, via rabbit-holes of youtube recommendations for the likes of “Intellectual Dark Web” figures like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

McWhorter is not Jordan Peterson in terms of pseudo-academic poisoning of public discourse, but he’s not far off. Maybe somewhere between Pinker and Peterson.

The world is full of mediocre white men who need to shut up.

That’s not a respectful thing to say about any group of people.

@ aidan until, for example, this stops happening, I think it’s an acceptable hyperbole:

https://hbr.org/2017/04/female-supreme-court-justices-are-interrupted-more-by-male-justices-and-advocates

If group identity posturing must be present, I strongly prefer that the authors lead with it, to let the reader know the lay of the land, so to speak. Thus it’s good of the Vocal Fries to open with the “mediocre white man” jab, to signal that the piece is not for me and I can stop reading.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon missionaries are good about up-fronting their agenda. They usually appear in pairs. The Mormons wear blue suits, and the Witnesses are clutching pamphlets. Both knock on your door at times when reasonable people are already down the pub.

It’s equally easy to recognize secular group identity posturing. Words such as “hegemonic”, and phrases such as “I am concerned that” and “it’s high time that”, give the game away.

I have a great more respect for those who say “I have a concern” than for those who say “I am concerned that” (though I have been one of the latter on occasion).

I agree with Anatoly – that kind of identitarian point-scoring is bad taste regardless of the target, and bad for discourse in general.

Especially the way I myself [sing in Welsh]

I fear that in this modern age, when the weird is more likely interesting or amusing than frightening (pace Lovecraft), a bunch of people singing “My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea, Glad farts and centurions threw dogs in the sea” is simply not going to be productive of terror. (There are many folk-process variants including “on top of a tree” in the first line, but I believe this is the Ur-Nigel text.)

“In the first selection [from E.R. Eddison] the speakers are a little crazy, and in the second [from Kenneth Morris] they are not only crazy but Welsh.” I have always admired that thoroughly Le Guinian superlative.

We mediocre white men have all the representation we need, and I don’t see that changing soon. I have no problems with occasionally being overridden by other voices. However, just because a lot of mediocre white men have a certain opinion it is not automatically wrong — I see too much of that sort of ad hominem argumentation from so-called SJWs, and I don’t like being defined as wrong because of who I am. (But that was no different when I was on the sidelines of the right-thinking almost-revolutionary left forty years ago — never trust anybody over thirty and all that). What is different now, I think, it that the more identity conscious groupings repel much larger numbers of potential allies by taking very oppositional stances, and I hope they realize that that’s what they are doing.

Some of my friends have been viciously attacked and deeply hurt when they were trying to engage on the side of good, solely because they were seen as the wrong kind. I’m sure the pendulum will swing and that will all have been sorted by the time my grandchildren are grown — in the meantime there are lots of sick and starving children in the world that need my donations and my happiness does not depend on helping people who don’t want my help.

I marvel how fast “mediocre white man” racial slur (but what else is it?) was embraced by posters.

Reminds me of the “deplorables” meme which won Trump the presidency.

Ooops, bad mistake there: for “right” read “privilege”. Hattic powers to the rescue?

I am pretty sure it would be a racial slur if they called McWhorter “mediocre black man”

I’m all for rudeness. There’s plenty to be rude about. And I personally have far too little insight to realise that I am mediocre, so I am quite untroubled by this particular example.

However, to be effective, rudeness needs to be properly targeted. Otherwise you pointlessly alienate people who are in fact your potential allies.

If you don’t think you need allies, great. Hegemony is already yours. In fact you are presumably The Man. You can be as rude as you like about us peasants. Nothing we can do about it.

If you don’t care about being effective, fire away. But if you’re not interested in making things better, what’s the point of being rude?

McWhorter is not Jordan Peterson in terms of pseudo-academic poisoning of public discourse, but he’s not far off.

Come on. There’s rhetorical hyperbole, and there’s stark nonsense. “Not far off”, indeed!

@Stu:

I had foolishly omitted the consideration that plenty of people wish to be effective in making things worse. My bad.

@JWB:

Indeed, yes. Posturing is indeed popular, and both cheaper and safer than effective action.

The “you” I was addressing was a fine person like ourselves, interested above all in the deployment of rudeness as part of our greater Cause.

@David:

All is forgiven. Every day, in every way, we strive to stop loopholes in the logic.

It’s Whites without the membership qualifications.

It’s Whites without the membership qualifications.

No damned nonsense of merit about it!

They take what they can get.

Of course it wouldn’t; it would be a straightforward description, accurate or not depending on how you judge the level of McWhorter’s mediocrity.

I don’t agree. It would be a slur by gricean implication, since ‘black man’ would be uncalled for in the context unless his blackness would in any way be relevant to his (theoretical) mediocricity. What makes ‘mediocre white men’ a non-slur is that within a larger discourse of systemic privilege it’s a pointed description of a certain outlook, and the gricean implication would be that their whiteness is relevant for their point of view being heard rather than their mediocrity as such. That is not to say that it’s very helpful, since it can obviously be alienating to those who do fit the description ‘white men’ and are unprivileged for other, though inherently related, reasons. Ref. the debate (or maybe rather non-debate) over white privilege vs. rich privilege vs. cultural privilege vs. educated privilege.

Another deplorable facet of Trond is that his English puns are always wittier than mine, which rarely rise above the facetious.

I never understood SJW logic.

OK, whites oppressed blacks and men oppressed women in the past, but if now blacks start oppressing whites and women oppressing men, how can it be a social justice?

To me it just seems adding more injustice.

if now blacks start oppressing whites and women oppressing men, how can it be a social justice?

I don’t think one needs to be fearful of this coming about any time soon.

Unless one means “oppression” in the sense that US Christians like to imagine that they are oppressed. As one who used to live in a city where churches got burnt down at fairly frequent intervals, this is not a sense of the word that I have great sympathy for.

there seem to be all sorts of applicable social conventions and taboos that mean in practice that “that can’t be a slur because it’s arguably relevant and thus not gratuitous” will sometimes be accepted as a complete defense but other times not.

I think that is, generally speaking, not a bug but a feature. God preserve us from waking up one day to find ourselves in a society where the criterion of whether something is a slur or not has been firmly fixed from on high regardless of the context and the participants in the conversation.

It is a good argument for not being too free with well-meaning legislation in such matters. Primum non nocere.

I don’t know, these things tend to happen very quickly.

Soviet Union was big on social justice in 1920s and as part of that there was an officially declared policy of oppression of the “formerly privileged classes and nationalities”.

Ten years later, many of these “formerly privileged” were simply rounded up and shot.

So this kind of rhetoric should make people nervous.

It happens that I’m reading La Volonté de Savoir just now for the second time, the first being in 1993. Again I wonder how the people that squabbled over Foucault back then could have read the same editions as I, given the squabbling. I surmise that they were derailed by the cod-political metaphors, the “lines of penetration” fluff. I would like to think that reading only this one volume would be “reading enough Foucault” to understand the discourse idea, but it rarely works out like that.

I’ve seen people proudly call themselves SJWs often enough that I’ve had a discussion about the culture shock the word warrior gives me.

I’m flabbergasted that you could read AG’s entire comment and come away with the idea that he is some sort of Fox News acolyte.

…Nobody claimed or implied he’s any sort of Faux Noise acolyte.

I think it would be pretty comical if and when mediocre white men will be advised to stop blathering lest their conduct will reflect poorly on their race and gender.

In my blathering opinion, if you are trying to make a specific point (“adults do not speak like children when they use innovative, simplified, or playful language”) it is better to steer clear of generalized swipes at large groups of bystanders and when your are trying to make a general statement about shutting up the whole classes of people, it is better not to focus exclusively on a single mistake by a single dude. But it’s just my analytical mediocrity speaking. The true heights of invective masterfully blend both.

And I agree with the “social justice warriors” that insisting on good taste and polite discourse in practice inevitably favors the status quo and entrenched power structures.

Eh, I think fighting effectively – and even fighting hard – is somewhat orthogonal to fighting dirty. Take things like the sit-ins or lie-ins of the 60s, which were disruptive in the best ways, yet surprisingly polite (or better, dignified) in all but the most legalistic senses. Petty rhetorical potshots are entirely the reverse, serving only to alienate potential allies and roughen the discourse without accomplishing anything of substance – i.e. all heat, no light.

To elaborate a bit, I would say that good advocacy requires both sticks and carrots, and if you want to persuade your opponents to abide by generalizable norms of good behavior, it helps to offer some shows of good faith that you’re willing to abide by these norms yourself, that you aren’t just using this advocacy as a cover for your own gratification, and that there will be a place for everyone in the world you’re fighting for. There are defenses to be made of demographically coded insults directed “up” – about how they don’t sting nearly as much, they’re a justifiable expression of resistance under the circumstances, etc. – but these tend to go over very poorly with their targets and can very easily look like excuses for hypocrisy (and with good reason, because we’re all human). Which leads me to one further point, which is that resentment in itself is bad. Hatred is harmful to our mental health and corrosive to the human spirit, and it doesn’t always dissipate so easily after the fight is won. Although some degree of it may be inevitable in liberation struggles, I think it’s a bad idea to cultivate it by choice.

Yeah, these are difficult issues and there are no easy answers. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

There are simple but maybe not easy answers. Treat people with respect!

I have my third attempt at a professional exam pending at the end of this month. The body examining me would have been, thirty years ago, predominantly men. It now has a slight predominance of women, a more pronounced predominance in the non-coal-face, predictable, self-regulatory positions, including the examiners. Any interaction (application for posts, professional exams) with the body I have had where my sex was evident, and especially, where my hairline, as a bald man unremarkable in his appearance otherwise, has been unrewarding and negative, where less-competent female colleagues sail through. Any interaction where these things have been concealed has been friction-free and positive. Anyone who deals with me at any length in my profession has no issue with my competence and interaction; the same female colleagues who sail through are honestly surprised I don’t progress.

All circumstantial, and I am a capable man who can bore you at length with reason to believe in me, I will manage this. But if you want to disrespect large groups of people on the basis of their race or their sex, go fuck yourself.

@JWB:

I may have missed your point (which would not be unparalleled); however, I really do think that we do not want a better definition of slurness. I think it is an intrinsically protean thing, and attempts to pin it down too closely would not only misrepresent it but are liable to have harmful real-world consequences. In incompetent hands, such attempts actually empower the bigots, who can quite plausibly misrepresent themselves as victims. It is unfortunately not necessary to give examples (except to those of us who have followed Teju Cole’s wholesome counsel to make Language Hat a substitute for the daily news.)

The specific McWhorter piece is not very impressive. One oddity is that he could probably have made his overall thesis work just as well if the claim were that new slang expressions that have come into vogue among grownups make them sound like teenagers rather than like toddlers. That would have been much harder to contradict, especially if your claim to expertise involves child language acquisition. The vogue for coining vaguely playful words in -y goes back some years: here’s a 2012 piece defending it w/o much theorizing about where it might come from. Which I found via another piece decrying it or at least a particular application of it.

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/internet-suffixes-2012-4/

To me personally the highly productive use of -y immediately suggests Buffyspeak.

(I recall reading somewhere an account of someone saying that he considered that not only do actual teenagers not talk like that but nobody else does either – until he met Joss Wheedon.)

Life imitating art?

Nubi, though a creole in historical terms, is full of stuff that Creoles Aren’t Supposed To Have, like noun plurals (four declensions for Arabic-derived words plus noun-prefixing for Bantu borrowings), adjective-noun agreement for some adjectives, and the full Arabic complement of prefixes, suffixes, and compounding strategies. Yet it is much simpler than either MSA or its non-creole ancestor Sudanese Arabic. I begin to wonder if creoles simplify not radically but only relatively to their lexifiers.

my daughter’s good side

People will point me out, as I creep, bald and yellow and supported by discreet corsetry, into the nightclubs of my great-grandchildren, and they’ll say, ‘Look, darling! that’s the wicked Lord Peter, celebrated for never having spoken a reasonable word for the last ninety-six years. He was the only aristocrat who escape the guillotine in the revolution of 1960. We keep him as a pet for the children.’ And I shall wag my head and display my up-to-date dentures and say, ‘Ah, ha! They don’t have the fun we used to have in my young days, the poor, well-regulated creatures. —Strong Poison

@David M:

That is an interesting paper (I suspect you recognised it as classic Eddyshaw-bait.)
There is an awful lot wrong with his treatment of the African stuff.

There are two fundamental problems:

One:
He assumes that Proto-Niger-Congo was pretty much the same as Proto-Bantu structurally. I fulminated on this tail-wagging-the-dog delusion just the other day. I note that he happily presses Kordofanian and Atlantic in to support this: this is not legitimate, as even the most enthusiastic lumpers would agree that their relationship to Bantu is much more remote that that of “Kwa.” There is (sometimes) a great typological resemblance to Volta-Congo but very little in the way of matching of form and function in morphology (or in lexicon.)

He has no actual knowledge of Gur, which gets a mention in passing in one paragraph. What he does say is based on obsolete sources and very inaccurate.

This matters quite a bit, because the Gur languages do the whole Niger-Congo noun class thing just as enthusiatically as Bantu but with noun class suffixes, with clear cognates among the affixes (which tend to come in matched pairs.) The traditional Bantu-centric approach has been to hand-wave all this away by supposing that Gur suffixes are secondary “articles” that have fused with their nouns, while the original prefixes have worn away (or something.) There is no actual evidence for these lost prefixes: it’s just that they must once have been there because other branches of Volta-Congo have them.

It is true that Gur class suffixes are fairly loosely attached at some level even synchronically (see my Kusaal grammar, for example.) So, however, are Bantu prefixes. The obvious conclusion is that in both cases one is dealing not with Proto-Niger-Congo flexions but with clitic “articles” which have subsequently undergone fusion: the big division in Niger-Congo NPs was word order, with the Eastern languages putting the “articles” first, and the Western languages putting them second.

The exuberant verb derivational suffixes of Bantu are very striking. Projecting them back to Proto-Niger-Congo is highly suspect. Attempts to compare them with West Atlantic are models of methodological fudging, glossing over the fact that matches of form and function are very hard to demonstrate. The most elaborate attempt I’ve seen cites exactly one Gur language, Mooré, in Gaston Canu’s frankly unreliable grammar. Canu creates several spurious derivational suffixes by dividing CVC roots CV+C; one such suffix plays a starring role in the comparisons.

The “Kwa” languages are indeed very stripped down morphologically. It’s worth pointing out that Yoruba and Gbe have in fact not lost their class prefixes, though they have lost the corresponding agreement system. (So have Mooré and Kusaal, which are not a bit creole-like.) The prefixes have undergone quite a lot of phonological attrition. So have the stems. It seems exceptionally unlikely that the Kwa languages are descended from languages with the morphological complexity of (typical) Bantu, either “normally” or by creolisation. There never was such a previous stage: the Bantu languages have innovated morphological complexity by agglutination of formerly independent pronouns and particles.

Two:
The whole argument is just a sustained petitio principii. The only way we can think of that “Kwa” languages could have lost this putative elaborate morphology is by creolisation: ergo, they underwent extensive creolisation. Their morphological simplicity proves that creolisation happened, because that’s exactly what happens in creolisation.

(Yoruba has the devil’s own system of lexical and grammatical tone, by the way. Pretty impressive for a creole, what with creole exceptionalism and all.)

As I read it, McWhorter’s “Creole Prototype” is a list of the common features of all the languages defined as creoles at the time when he formulated it. The prototype had to change when more languages were added to the list. It is not supported by any theoretical backbone, beyond the general observation that incomplete learning will simplify grammars.

I find much of the the polemics for and against creole exceptionalism too politicized and unpleasant to read. On the one hand, writers like Mufwene and DeGraff play the leftists who see imperialist bias everywhere. On the other hand, McWhorter plays the conservative who takes joy in sticking it to the lefties. Neither makes for enlightening reading.

That said, McWhorter’s paper “What Happened to English?” is deep and important.

the usual Latin version is not even a real quote

Indeed not: I discovered this myself when it occurred to me to wonder what the original Greek was. There wasn’t any. (Hippocrates would never have said anything so daft, anyway. I have yet to hear the principle cited in a medical context where the speaker had actually thought through the implications of what he was saying. In the meaning usually given to it, it would bring the practice of all of surgery and most of medicine to a complete halt.)

The traditional Bantu-centric approach has been to hand-wave all this away by supposing that Gur suffixes are secondary “articles” that have fused with their nouns, while the original prefixes have worn away (or something.)

Or as my Essentialist Explanations page has it, “Gur languages are essentially typical Niger-Congo languages, only with the nouns spoken backwards.” It’s attributed to me, which means that I saw it somewhere but have no clue where.

I think [McWhorter] could have slid over into political stuff just as well if he’d been an associate professor of pretty much anything.

The same is true of Chomsky, at least according to Chomsky, though it’s not likely he could ever have been a successful vulgarisateur of linguistics.

One can imagine a parallel universe with a right-wing Chomsky who had just the same stance on grammar.

Or indeed one in which Chomsky has exactly the same politics but is an algebraic topologist (as he himself has said). Given the known facts of the Noamster’s early life, this seems more likely to me.

It has been pointed out many times that Chomsky’s technical metaphors reek of authoritarianism: c-command, control, binding, etc.

It has been pointed out many times that Chomsky’s technical metaphors reek of authoritarianism: c-command, control, binding, etc.

Then the number of dumb clucks out there is many times greater than the sample I usually encounter.

“Command” and “control” are merely notions from procedural programming. Wasn’t much else around back then. Will you join the pointers-out by claiming that “head” and “rest” in Lisp are authoritarian? (cons and cdr for the old folks)

Is Chomsky to blame for not advocating “reactive streams”, as all IT is abuzz about at the moment ? Whatever technology is à la mode, it must be monitorable and controllable, otherwise no company that expects to survive will invest a penny in it.

Thank god for capitalism and balance sheets, they will save us from the crazies.

The Nijma Gambit.

Norris & Horace McWhirter, the right-wing twins who wrote the Guinness Book of Records, were born on Winchmore Hill within walking distance of where I was born. Whatever the spelling it’s from Gaelic ‘Mac an Chruiteir’, meaning son of the harpist or fiddler (but not the cellist, because..?), according to Wiki.

Per the 2010 census MCWHORTER is the 3801st-most-common surname in the US and more common than alternative spellings like MCWHIRTER and MCWHERTER. 13.26% of the bearers of MCWHORTER are black, which is a notably higher percentage than for those other two spelling variants. That aspect of the MCWHORTER demographics fwiw is pretty close to the US demographics for bearers of, e.g., BREWER (12.64% black) and DODSON (12.31% black).

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

The geographer who’s in charge of the demographics of names found in the US Census is Joshua Comenetz. His wife is Wanderleia Comenetz.

David Eddyshaw (and others who may be interested in the issue): Okay, a day late, but still, here’s my take:

Creole exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon.

The blunt fact of the matter is that creoles whose lexifiers are (for instance) Romance or Germanic exhibit features which are utterly alien to any known non-creole L1 Romance or Germanic variety, spoken today or in the past, including -crucially!- varieties in intense language contact situations. The statement “L1 Romance or Germanic” is important, as creoles share most of these features with pidgins. Importantly, these pidgin and creole commonalities are not only shared between pidgins and creoles, they are also found in various pidgins and creoles, *no matter whether the substate language(s) had these features or not*.

Hence, creole exceptionalism to me is a straightforward consequence of the fact that a creole is a nativized pidgin, unlike any other Romance or Germanic variety (whether said variety is in contact with (an)other language(s) or not).

And I think you are a little unfair to McWhorter when it comes to African historical linguistics: one of his sources on the diachrony of Kwa, Good (2012), quite explicitly acknowledges that Bantu has indeed become morphologically more complex over the course of its separation from Benue-Congo (see page 28 here: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcgood/jcgood-KwaNoun.pdf). Which does not prevent him from claiming that the analyticity of Kwa languages is an anomaly in need of an explanation. Which is exactly what McWhorter seeks to provide.

Etienne: …creoles whose lexifiers are (for instance) Romance or Germanic exhibit features which are utterly alien to any known non-creole L1 Romance or Germanic variety, spoken today or in the past, including -crucially!- varieties in intense language contact situations.

Could you please elaborate a bit? What such features do you consider essentially creole?

@Etienne:

Thanks! I was hoping to conjure you up!

Thanks for the Good paper, too. I think it introduces some interesting points, but suffers from some of the same question-begging as Good’s colleague McWhorter’s paper on Kwa.

The two Gur languages referred to in the paper are in fact part of the same dialect continuum; the language is closely related to Kusaal, but differs in showing a considerable degree of lenition of word-internal consonants after vowels and a lot of vowel harmony, somewhat obscuring what is going on with flexion. (I once came across a very stupid paper which made a big deal of the fact that some Dagaare plural suffixes have the same form as some singular suffixes, and concocted an elaborate semantic theory to explain it all; the author evidently knew nothing at all about Western Oti-Volta and had no idea that the form of the suffixes had fallen together through entirely regular sound changes.)

Good’s description of examples in (9) as noun class suffix “loss” is peculiar. What the examples show is compounding: just like Kusaal, Dagaare constantly uses bare-stem “combining forms” either as heads before an adjective or dependent pronoun, or (less often) as non-referential dependents. Tonal considerations confirm that this is compounding, and such combining forms are obligatorily bound to the right. (I bang on at length about these issues in my magnum opus on Kusaal.) No suffixes have been lost: they were never there in the first place. What this does illustrate is that in the Oti-Volta languages even synchronically the attachment of class suffixes is “loose.” All the languages constantly use compounds in NPs where most languages have multi-word NPs.

An analogous case to Good’s 9d in Kusaal is

na’ab la wief zʋʋr “the chief’s horse’s tail” vs
na’ab la wɩdzʋʋr “the chief’s horsetail” (he may not own a horse at all)

where wief is the sg (pl widi) and wɩd the combing form for “horse.” “Black horse” is wɩdsabilig, pl wɩdsabila; “this horse” is wɩdkaŋa, pl wɩdbamma etc.

The natural interpretation of all this is surely not in terms of affix “loss”, but that you just need to scratch the surface of Oti-Volta compounds to get NPs of the form

head noun + determiner agreeing with head
head noun + adjective +determiner agreeing with head
dependent noun + head noun + determiner agreeing with head

and so forth, where nouns as such are uninflected, with number and gender shown by the agreeing determiner. In the contemporary languages the “determiner” has got so denatured that it now only marks the noun as “potentially referential.”

It has been pointed out many times that Chomsky’s technical metaphors reek of authoritarianism: c-command, control, binding, etc.

Too bad all the background and all the background info of /r/bædlɪngʊɪstɪx seem to have disappeared. The rules used to be introduced with: “We govern by the rules; you are bound by the parameters.”

I’m sure these all started as authoritarian metaphors, just not consciously by Chomsky, but unconsciously in the field Chomsky took them from. Back in the same long-gone age, a common German expression for “without a microscope” was mit dem unbewaffneten Auge, “with the unarmed eye”.

Except for the first feature, it is noteworthy that all of the above features separate Germanic creoles from ALL Germanic L1 varieties, too.

English and Afrikaans are the two that have lost grammatical gender – and repurposed the gendered pronouns to agree with social gender instead of, as might have been expected, losing the distinctions between them altogether.

Oti-Volta compounds

German, too, makes compounds (nouns, adjectives/adverbs, verbs) by turning nouns into prefixes whose form is sometimes unpredictable, and has outsourced most gender (and case) marking and much number marking from nouns to articles. Everything else is still different, though. 🙂

Did the languages just keep on getting creolised again? How would that come about?

The paper postulates that the most isolating languages indeed went through several rounds of contact-induced morphology destruction as they spread from north to south, and notes the presence of the Ijoid languages, which may not even belong to Niger-Congo, on the coast (though not directly adjacent to any extremely isolating languages).

<Don't look at me. I'm dexterous.

Odd. I had heard you were gauche.

David E: Uncertainty and epistemic attrition can often be observed as arguments go south. But discourses are forever, like diamonds. They form the great Chain-letter of Being. I find this reassuring. There is no resource depletion to fear.

@Stu:

Of course. That goes without saying.

@JC:

It has been seriously suggested by Robert Nicolaï (a major serious scholar of the group) that Songhay as a whole started as a Mande-based Tamashek-lexifier creole. Jeffrey Heath is (very) politely dismissive of the idea.

The Northern Songhay languages are indeed fascinating demonstrations that Things Just Aren’t That Simple. Almost up there with Copper Island Aleut and Michif.

Heath in his nice grammar of Timbuktu Songhay talks about how his initial interest was sparked by the notion that it was a creolised version of Gao Songhay resulting from the expansion to those parts of the Songhay Empire. Then he discovered some evidently old retentions in the western Songhay languages and realised that (again) Things Couldn’t Be That Simple.

Of course. That goes without saying.

You had circumspectly solicited my views on Foucault. That was them (the oh-là-là negativity trimmed away, and with an added dash of Luhmann). Sorry to disappoint !

@Stu:

On the contrary, I am most grateful; however, as you will be aware, I am a committed Wittgensteinian, and I felt it necessary to reiterate the party line on all transcental truth.

I feel your pain, I too would say nothing about such a thing.

I feel your pain, I too would say nothing about such a thing if I can help it.

(My comment at 5:57 yesterday has come out of moderation, just in case it’s been overlooked. There’s nothing earth-shaking in it, though.)

Etienne, thanks very much for your summmary. You have amply made the case, based on these examples, that French-based creoles are typologically special, within the spectrum of French varieties. I think using those, or indeed all other presently known creoles, to make a general statement about how to distinguish creoles from non-creoles, is unjustified; that is what McWhorter does.

Etienne, sorry, so you did. Let me say that more generally, I can see how creoles could be typologically distinct from non-creoles within a given family. I am skeptical that you could identify, say, a Thai-substrate Mandarin-lexifier creole based on what we know about French, English, etc. based creoles.

The geography is against very much against Mande influence on Chadic; although there are stray Mande languages as far east as Nigeria, the great bulk of the family is a long way from the Chadic area. Hausa is the westernmost Chadic language, and although there are diaspora native speakers and second-language speakers everywhere in West Africa (and beyond), actual Hausaland proper ends before you reach Niamey. Moreover, Hausa has evidently expanded to its current extent relatively recently: it shows remarkably little dialect variation considering its geographical extent (less than Kusaal!)

Gwandara, uncontroversially the closest relative of Hausa, actually is generally thought to have originated as a Hausa creole, by the way:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/21201/Tone%20Splitting_Gwandara%20ethnohistory.pdf?sequence=1

We discussed this before.

The fast boat of Polynesian expansion moved into Island Melanesia which was already inhabited by Melanesians, spent some time there, got a little genetic mixture (and presumably had extensive language contact) and then resumed their march into the Pacific.

500 years they spent in Melanesia should be enough for any creolisation

500 years they spent in Melanesia should be enough for any creolisation

The language changes I’m talking about postdate that. Compare Fijian (the closest non-Polynesian relative of the Polynesian languages) with Polynesian.

The tabooing of vocabulary wouldn’t explain loss of morphology and syntactic changes. Come to that, that process is well-known to be highly important in the Eskimo languages, but has not resulted in the Eskimo languages becoming even a tiny bit creole-like. Likewise in Australia.

Cowan, the majority of your examples fit my predicate–interfering with public thoroughfares is considered legitimate when you don’t have a more appropriate mechanism, like the vote. I’m not sure most of the rest were successful. The rosy future where porn would be stamped with a union label seems to have receded.

Etienne: Proto-Chadic certainly had gender, a reasonably complex system of number marking, at least one suffixed/infixed morpheme for aspect marking, and relict traces of case marking in its personal pronoun system. Lots of the more southerly Chadic languages (eg Goemai) have lost gender; many have lost number marking on nouns and verbs as well (eg Geji); some (like Bura) seem to have lost any kind of bound morpheme marking of tense/aspect. I’m not sure if any have entirely leveled out the personal pronoun system, but the situation seems pretty clear: intense contact has carried southerly Chadic languages in the same direction as European-lexifier creoles, without implying any directly parallel catastrophic creolization event. As David noted, the substrata would not be Mande, but rather various Benue-Congo languages.

Among bound morphemes, Northern Songhay has definitely always retained at least the adjective formant -ow and the adjective nominaliser a-; there is some evidence that participial -nte might also have survived, and causative -nda was probably already suffixal by proto-Northern Songhay. The list is rather meager though; most Songhay morphology got lost.

in the [creoles of Surinam], the 700 English lexemes make up most of the vocabulary of the language

The SIL Sranan-English dictionary has 3862 lexical entries, of which 895 are idiomatic phrases and 253 are homonym disambiguations, leaving 2744 unique entries — a far cry from 700.

words are a language universal

Martin Haspelmath denies that morphosyntactic wordhood is a cross-linguistically valid concept. Indeed, the most difficult thing to learn about writing Chinese in Hanyu Pinyin is to know where to insert the spaces.

High linguistic diversity and no mountains causes loss of morphology …

Actually, that could be potentially testable … if it’s false (and I suspect it is, even with “mountains” standing metaphorically for all kinds of major barriers to communication) if would mean either

(a) language diversity is not an adequate explanation in itself for high rates of language replacement

or

(b) a high rate of language replacement does not in itself create lots of languages without much morphology

or

(c) my logic is faulty

without comparison to related languages

To be fair, that is what McWhorter is doing with the “Kwa” languages, so to that extent his argument is legitimate; though as we are a long way off being able to reconstruct proto-Volta-Congo (even), the comparison is very much less rigorous than he implies (or supposes.) My problem with it is that (a) the languages really aren’t like his creole prototype once you start looking at them in any other respect than their lack of much morphology, and (b) he hasn’t adequately considered other perfectly plausible ways that the languages could have ended up looking the way they do.

There are possible answers to these points, but they seem to lead either to circularity or to lack adequate supporting evidence. They have the whiff not of explaining, but of explaining away. And I’m afraid that his arguments are irrefutable – in the bad sense that his theory is so constructed as to remain compatible with any evidence.

It might be interesting to look at parts of the world where isolating languages are not common (like the Americas or Australia) and to think about how the cultures and societies differed from West Africa; if no differences come to light which have a bearing on the frequency of creolisation, it might then be reasonable to conclude that the prevalence of isolating languages in parts of West Africa and Asia is simply due to areal factors or is just plain contingent.

My impression (knowing nothing about it) is that in the Americas (and Australia, come to that) the known creoles derive from pidgins engendered by contact with Europeans (like Nheengatu, which incidentally is not very McWhorter-compliant.) If this is the case (it may not be), why didn’t the same rampant creolisation occur previously as it supposedly did in parts of West Africa and Asia?

Incidentally, here’s a creole that really isn’t a bit McWhortery (I was thinking about Lingala, but this is a better example):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kituba_language

The Amazonian language Kukama-Kukamiria

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/36685770.pdf

may be a Tupi-Guarani creole, but as far as I can make out the argument is again the circular one that it has Tupi-Guarani lexicon but not much flexional morphology (for a Tupi-Guarani language): ergo it must be a creole. It’s not remotely like JMcW’s prototype.

might be of interest

Absolutely. Looks like I was very wrong: the argument for a creole origin is far from circular in this case.

(Also, there is an actual language whose canonical abbreviation is OMG. Way cool!)

So not only does intensive language contact not necessarily lead to creolisation, but actual creolisation can produce languages quite unlike McWhorter’s prototype.

Thinking about it a bit more, I suppose a McWhorterian rejoinder might me that cases like Kukama, Kituba or Gwandara don’t represent creolisation in the sense he has in mind: they arise by large-scale imperfect learning, but without a radical break in transmission between generations.

The DeGraff school says this is true of Haïtian too, as I understand it, so in that sense even if he conceded they were right, McWhorter might still maintain the validity of his prototype for the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles. But you might end up with too homogeneous a sample to justify sweeping generalisations.

Any sweeping generalization can be brushed aside by another. New brooms may sweep clean, but old brooms still bristle when consigned to the dust-heap.

Creolisation of Saramaccan required plantation slavery economy, mass importation of African slaves speaking different languages across the Atlantic, imperfect learning of the slaveowners’ languages (English, Dutch, Portuguese), several escapes of the slaves into the jungles of Suriname, creation of free maroon settlements and formation of the Saramaka people.

Pretty unique circumstances which hardly could have occurred frequently elsewhere.

It certainly seems to be the case that most of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade would have been native speakers of languages which were pretty isolating.

Therefore, given that in the case of tone, whether your creole ends up with tone depends on the nature of the lexifier and the substrate, without going full Lefebvre you could similarly argue that the isolating nature of Atlantic creoles is not from any prototype but a contingent result of the nature of the substrate languages. (And that projecting creolisation back into the formation of those very substrates is consequently putting the cart before the horse.)

Anybody know anything about the Pacific English-lexifier creoles, though?

Anybody know anything about the Pacific English-lexifier creoles, though?

English vocabulary, Oceanic grammar.

Yumi save plante wok i stap,
Long ol aelan blong yumi,
God i helpem yumi evriwan,
Hem i papa blong yum

We know there is much work to be done
On all our islands.
God helps all of us,
He is our father

As long as McWhorter just says his three items constitute a prototype, counterexamples are no problem: the prototypical bird can obviously fly, and the existence of ostriches and just-hatched fluffballs don’t matter. It’s when he erects them into an actual criterion for creolehood that he goes off the rails. It reminds me of Abbott Thayer, who discovered the existence of disruptive camouflage in animals whose spots or stripes make their outlines difficult to see. Leopards, yes; giraffes, probably (especially as calves, when they are most vulnerable); flamingos, resoundingly no. Their pink color does not make them less conspicuous against a pink sunset, nor is a peacock concealed against the blue sky! The mental trap involves is in assuming that a pattern which explains a good deal can be made to explain everything.

I noticed recently that for some reason, American presidents start their speeches in Tok Pisin.

– Mipela Americans…

English and (more so) Afrikaans

Also Bengali (I read once that 90% of Bengali-speakers have recent ancestors who spoke something Tibeto-Burman or Munda, though I can’t trace this now) and Cham. Graham Thurgood’s article on Cham transparency demonstrates how it has eliminated almost all its inherited Austronesian morphology and how little grammaticalization the new grammatical markers have undergone, almost all still being in use as ordinary content words. For example, the indirect-discourse marker is ‘say’, the reflexive marker is ‘self’, the experiencer marker is ‘receive’, the locative markers mean ‘top, bottom, back’ etc, the directional markers are ‘go’ and ‘come’. The syntax is rigidly SVO without case markings, even in questions (though left dislocation is possible). Only subjects can be relativized, and the relative clause is unmarked except for lacking an over subject; this is the same syntax used for serial verbs, which have obvious semantics.

Yet there is no evidence that Cham is descended from a pidgin. Thurgood’s explanation is two millennia of intense contact with speakers of Mon-Khmer languages, many waves of whom shifted to Cham over the centuries, blocking normal grammaticalization and maintaining it in a pseudo-creole state.

@JC:

Bengali certainly isn’t isolating … I think I can fairly add it to my list of counterexamples, along with Latin and Lingala. I’m not denying at all that large-scale second-language learning can lead to morphological simplification (someone should tell the Russians, so they can get with the [bio]program), just denying that it could lead to a language becoming (or remaining) radically isolating à la “Kwa.”

Thanks for the Cham paper: very much to the point.
However, the conclusion seems to be that, as Cham is morphologically transparent, this must reflect intensive contact. Can’t a language remain morphologically transparent for any other reason?

I mentioned elsewhere that Tom Güldemann argues that the very transparency of Bantu verb flexion in most of those languages argues against the notion that it is simply inherited from Proto-Niger-Congo: phonological changes should have impaired its transparency by now if it were that old (as indeed they have in some languages.) The counterargument is that the system is continually being remodelled by analogy to maintain its transparency for language-internal reasons.

(Mind you, as a very, very general rule, with the Bantu languages the farther you get from West Africa into their zone of more recent rapid expansion, the more transparent they are morphologically, so I can also see a way of making them support the thesis. I propose to ignore this difficulty … and in any case, the transparency does not throw up lots of isolating Bantu languages. Or any.)

Interestingly, the paper argues that learnability (via transparency) confers a benefit in the struggle of languages to survive in a multilingual environment: this might well be true for Cham specifically, but if it were a strong tendency in general you might expect to see areas of high linguistic diversity characterised by above-average language simplicity. This does not seem to be the case … or maybe we’ve just arrived too early, before the unfit languages have all lost the struggle.

Hausa is another case in point, come to think of it: L2 Hausa consistently shows a whole range of phonological and morphological simplifications, but nowhere near Kwa-style morphological deprivation.

And Arabic. The various spoken Arabics are not as morphologically complex as Classical Arabic (what is?) and clearly influenced by substrates; none is anything like a creole, except where there has actually been real, interrupting-of-normal-service, true-blue creolisation.

what are the language-internal reasons?

Maintenance of the communicative function of the language? If phonological change has worn away your infix meaning “him/her” in certain contexts, for example, surely it’s a natural enough development to regularise the paradigm on the basis of contexts where that hasn’t occurred and put it back again? No foreign learners need apply …

Incidentally, I recall reading that there are European Dutch dialects which do the invariant-verb thing that’s so striking in Afrikaans. Do you know if that’s so?

I have no idea. Maybe you mean invariant in the plural (like in Old English)? That’s a feature of much of Low German (and Alemannic).

morphological simplification (someone should tell the Russians, so they can get with the [bio]program)

They have dropped the vocative (except of “God” and “Father”) and two whole past tenses. The feminine nom./acc. pl. ending has merged into the masculine one, and a whole bunch of analogical levelling has happened in various noun paradigms, merging a few declension classes in the process (so that now there are basically just four left). I suppose that’s a start.

Reminds me of a rooinek South African I once knew, who illustrated the allegedly poor grasp of English by back-country Africaners with a shouted comment to an insufficiently vigilant umpire he claimed to have overheard at a cricket match:

Shook your head, your eyes is stuck!

Schütz’s Fijian grammar denies that Fijian has words, and copes; this works better in Fijian than it would in general, partly because there is quite a mismatch between phonological and grammatical “words.”

RMW Dixon in his own grammar says of Schütz’s work:

Schütz’s grammatical analysis is original to the extent that, for him, Fijian has no unit word, no adjectives, no subject/predicate division, no prepositions, and no passive … this last following on from a paper […] in which criteria for “what a passive is” were not stated.

Ooh, burn! (as my daughter would say.)

McWhorter is at is again here:

https://www.academia.edu/26566146/The_radically_isolating_languages_of_Flores_a_challenge_to_diachronic_theory

One of the things that strikes me about this paper is how ready he is to cite controversial assertions as if they were already widely accepted, e.g.

[English famously has very little Celtic vocabulary despite] having been grammatically transformed by Celtic speakers.

He seems to believe in this paper that languages can in fact remain radically isolating pretty much indefinitely without further episodes of either creolisation or widespread learning as a second language (section 11): all he asserts is that there is only one possible way they can get like that to begin with. And assert it he most definitely does: he believes the evidence must surely follow …

His comments on Brythonic strongly suggest he’s never actually looked at a Welsh grammar: Welsh nouns, of course, though indeed caseless, have complex and unpredictable plural formation (which I would say comes under “flexion”) but Welsh has had only a single regular verb conjugation since Middle Welsh times: pretty much the opposite of what he asserts. It’s not an isolated piece of carelessness.

(His comments on how English VP structure shows Celtic influence elsewhere similarly make startlingly inaccurate statements about the Welsh system. I suppose if you already know your theory is correct it’s not necessary to be careful with the evidence.)

Oh, and

Russian retains its rich inflection despite use as a lingua franca across the former Soviet Union because it spread as a written language taught formally in schools. (Footnote one)

Otherwise ethnic Russians would have given up their inflection because of the example of Kazakhs’ broken Russian?

In many places around the former Soviet Union, Russian is spoken even where there is no ethnic Russian population whatsoever (as a language for communication between different non-Russian ethnic groups).

Schools, TV and mass media help to keep this Russian spoken by non-Russians more or less close to the standard, otherwise it would have diverged really bad.

Another essentialist explanation:

Russian – end result of Baltic and Finno-Ugric speakers switching to Slavic speech.
Bulgarian – end result of Turkic,Romance and Greek speakers switching to Slavic speech.

@SFReader:

I think there’s actually an important valid point in that, bearing on what you might expect the result of widespread imperfect second language learning to actually be. McWhorter tends to segue in his argumentation between widespread second language learning on the one hand and actual creolisation (i.e. the creation of a proper language out of a pidgin) on the other. I would imagine that the former process has historically been much commoner than the latter, as you yourself suggested above; creolisation proper requires really very special social circumstances to come about: it’s an abnormal process virtually by definition.

Now this wouldn’t be an important confusion if the effects of the two processes were pretty much identical. However, the evidence suggests otherwise.

With creolisation one can easily believe that effectively reconstituting a language from ground zero might very well result not only in radical simplification but in languages that were sui generis, à la Bickerton bioprogram or McWhorter’s Creole Prototype, which seems to be a watered-down version of it; I was under the impression that at least the Bickertonian extreme had been essentially debunked, but Etienne will know much better than me. At any rate, as one (not the only) mechanism to produce extreme morphological simplicity, it looks plausible.

On the other hand, with widespread imperfect second language learning a lot is likely to depend on the original languages of the learners, especially when only a few languages are involved and above all when those languages are typologically all very similar. Thus, it really is quite plausible that if a lot of your proto-Russian speakers are Finns with umpteen cases but a very simple verbal system, they are not going to baulk at learning a measly six cases: what will happen is not loss of the entire category of case but a lot of regularisation. On the other hand, if you’re a modern Greek with a pathetic three-and-a-bit cases you may well indeed feel that Slavonic is a bit over the top … and if you’re a Finn you may well feel that one past tense is all a body really needs.

So the characteristic of WISLL (cool acronym, eh?) may well, depending on substrates, be not radical loss but sweeping regularisation of morphology which might remain quite elaborate. Lingala is practically the poster child for this: is I said elsewhere, it’s what Esperanto would look like if Zamenhof had been from the Congo instead of Poland and thought that multiple noun classes and tones were normal features of human language rather than cases and consonant clusters. Lingala has the whole Bantu noun class thing in morphology (though not syntax), and also the whole Bantu exceptionally-free-verbal-derivation-by-suffixes thing: where it differs from the usual Bantu run it’s because it’s very, very regular. The vast majority of people who acquired Lingala as an L2 would have had all of these complex morphological features in their own languages in spades and would probably have created them in Lingala if they hadn’t been there already.

JC’s example of Bengali, perhaps Kukama, and yes, English also fit this kind of scenario to greater or lesser degrees. Cham, too, possibly, with a somewhat different sociolinguistic background but similar mechanisms driving regularity, not sweeping loss of entire morphological categories.

I can see no compelling independent evidence that the rare process of creolisation proper has been significantly commoner in the parts of West Africa and Asia where isolating languages are common, apart from the circular argument that it must be so because that is the only way languages can get to be isolating. Presumably it is just complete coincidence that in both these areas the languages are known to have undergone very significant phonological attrition (and not just of affixes, as JMcW claims, but whole stems) compared with their less analytic relatives.

I’d speculate further that the very properties which McWhorter declares to be typical of (and indeed diagnostic of) creolisation may at least in part have arisen from the historical accident that the unfortunate victims of the slave trade happened to speak radically isolating languages (which had got that way by perfectly ordinary language developments.) As a consequence, their imperfect learning of European languages was particularly prone to produce morphologically stripped down languages like their mother tongues, which were largely typologically similar to one another already.

By the way, it seems to be generally accepted that the Pacific English-lexifier creoles did indeed arise from recreation of a full language starting from a pidgin; as far as I can make out there isn’t any controversy of the DeGraff/McWhorter kind about it.

[Apologies for reposting – if I have; I got a message “you can no longer edit this post” which has previously been a sign that my post has been lost forever. If I’ve reposted, Hat, feel free to delete one (or both, as you may feel inclined.)]

David Eddyshaw: “I’d speculate further that the very properties which McWhorter declares to be typical of (and indeed diagnostic of) creolisation may at least in part have arisen from the historical accident that the unfortunate victims of the slave trade happened to speak radically isolating languages (which had got that way by perfectly ordinary language developments.)”

On that subject, you might like a recent paper demonstrating the importance of substratum effects in creoles: World-Wide Comparative Evidence for Calquing of Valency Patterns in Creoles.

Lameen, David Eddyshaw: the idea that the better-known creoles of the West Indies might owe their analytical structure to the substrate languages is quite widespread, but to my mind not at all credible.

First of all, there are creole languages which are fully isolating despite *none* of the languages involved in their genesis being isolating: such is the case for Chinook Jargon (spoken in an area renowned for morphological complexity) or Palenquero Spanish Creole (As isolating as any other creole, despite its substrate language being a Bantu language, Kikongo). McWhorter had an article showing that the structure of Palenquero Spanish Creole is inexplicable if you assume it is a result of Spanish-Kikongo language contact. Both Spanish and Kikongo have grammatical gender involving agreement, as well as number agreement within the NP and with the VP, for instance: why should Palenquero Spanish creole lack grammatical gender, indeed lack agreement of any kind?

Second of all, even if one were to ignore the first point, the blunt fact is that it is not just the isolating structure of creole languages that needs to be explained, it is the choice of forms. For example, Romance creoles, as a rule, use a single verb stem deriving from the form of the infinitive in the (Romance) lexifier languages. This is puzzling if one assumes that Romance creoles owe their isolating structure to their substrates rather than to pidginization, because outside of Romance pidgins there does not exist *any* known instance of a Romance variety using the infinitive as its sole verb stem: in instances of L2 language acquisition (by speakers of any language, isolating or not) or of the reduction accompanying language death, for instance, Romance varieties will typically make ever-growing use of an invariable/variably inflected verb stem deriving either from the third person singular present indicative or singular imperative (assuming the two are distinct, which is very often not the case).

It would be quite a coincidence if Romance creoles and Romance pidgins had both just happened to be the only attested Romance varieties (including ALL non-pidgin, non-creole contact varieties) to generalize the infinitive as the sole verb stem. If you assume that Romance creoles are nativized Romance pidgins, of course, then not only is this no coincidence, it is exactly what would be expected. Add to this the fact that in many instances the substrate cannot explain the analytical structure of the creole (see above), and the “creoles-as-nativized pidgins” explanation strikes me as the only credible explanation.

Third of all, there is a matter of chronology: it is clear that creoles must have emerged very quickly (over a few generations): this is clear both because of the philological and the comparative evidence. Now, a contact explanation excluding that pidginization played any role in creole genesis must contend with the observed reality that large-scale L2 acquisition over centuries needn’t cause any large-scale change in the expanding language, even when a strong typological gap exists between the languages in question. Consider Romance, which has been expanding at the expense of Basque over the past thousand years or so, via language shift; consider Russian, which expanded at the expense of Uralic in Northern Russia during the same (rough) time period; why is it that the total number of Basque- or Uralic influenced varieties of Romance or Russian (respectively) lacking grammatic gender is…zero? EVEN IF one chose to ignore my other two objections (use of the infinitive in Romance creoles, existence of isolating creoles without isolating substrates), there is an amazing contrast between the (alleged) impact of various analytical West African languages upon various Western European languages (basically, well-nigh ALL morphology was lost in a matter of generations in ALL the European languages involved) and the observed impact of substrate languages upon other expanding languages (where over the course of centuries the convergence with the substrate proves partial at best: cf. the Romance and Russian examples above).

This contrast is noteworthy and needs to be addressed if the “substrate influence, not pidginization” theory is to be taken seriously. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been addressed by anyone, and until it is, and until the other objections I raised above are explained, I simply cannot take any “anti-pidgin” theory of creole seriously. Neither, indeed, should any linguist.

in instances of L2 language acquisition (by speakers of any language, isolating or not) […] Romance varieties will typically make ever-growing use of an invariable/variably inflected verb stem deriving either from the third person singular present indicative or singular imperative (assuming the two are distinct, which is very often not the case).

The paper “‘Me want cookie’: foreigner talk as monster talk” points to the use of the infinitive in Romance (as well as German) foreigner talk, the variety of their own language that L1 speakers produce when trying to communicate with foreigners who do not understand it. This is not the stumbling talk of actual foreigners, nor the worldwide practice of talking loudly or slowly to try to be understood; it is a fluently spoken deformation of the speaker’s own L1 that they spontaneously adopt in certain (not all) foreigner-contact situations. If the contact is sustained enough, the foreigners may actually learn it: many American soldiers mastered (if that is the word) Infinitive-Italian during WWII. All of which suggests that the potential for creating a pidgin exists in all L1 Romance speakers.

(The first sentence of the paper is irresistible: “What do Tarzan, Cookie Monster, African slaves, foreign mercenary soldiers and “guest workers,” Chinese laborers, and other exotic human and non-human fauna have in common in the Romance- and Germanic-speaking world?”)

How it is that Norfolk English lost the 3sg ending.

@JC:

Very interesting paper: supports Etienne’s position, I guess, as presumably pidgins owe a lot of their origin to foreigner talk from the benighted Lexifier Bearers.

I liked
the lack of anything other than questionable literary imitations before the late 19th century yields the suspicion that early Lingua Franca may have been as mythically effervescent as the Holy Grail.

@Y:

Specifically the implication that lexical replacement rates correlate across language families etc.
Where this can be checked at all, it turns out to be false.

The voodoo science of lexicostatistics refuses to stay dead, especially in the context of Africa, where real comparative work has been fruitful in some subfamilies but there isn’t a lot of solidly based large-scale stuff yet and there’s an awful lot of handwaving where it ought to be, instead of the humble silence that there should be (video meliora, proboque …)

Your implication is valid though. I may have let unreasoning prejudice cloud my judgment.
I agree with JC, though, that their actual conclusions seem a bit … counterintuitive. What’s your take on it?

David Eddyshaw:

1-“There’s no difference between infinitives and finite forms in an isolating language: if you were going to relexify Gbe with French morphemes, why wouldn’t you do it with infinitives just as well as finite forms”

-Well, as shown in the article John Cowan linked to above, generalization of the infinitive as a basic verb form is alien to adult L2 acquisition of a Romance language.

The reason is clear to my mind: infinitives have two strikes against them: 1-In most Romance varieties they are less frequent in everyday speech than present indicative/imperative forms, and 2-They are more marked, morphologically, in most Romance languages: they consist of the verbal stem PLUS a specific morpheme (/e/ in French for verbs of the first group, thematic vowel + /r/ in Spanish/Portuguese or /re/ in Italian…).

Thus, to a speaker of an isolating language (be it Gbe or Chinese…) heavily exposed to French or any other Romance language, the present indicative/imperative bare stem would seem a much more “basic” form than the infinitive, even if bare stems and infinitives were equally numerous in ordinary speech, which they are not. And that is indeed what happens in language death + L2 language acquisition situations involving a Romance language: a bare verb stem, and not the infinitive, is the basic form.

2-Regarding Palenquero Creole Spanish: The simple fact of the matter is that the total absence of any gender marking morphology, any agreement, any person- or tense-marking bound morpheme on the verb, is not just alien to either Spanish or to Kinkongo: it is alien to ANY non-creole Romance or Bantu variety. Making it that much less likely that language contact between Spanish and Kikongo just happened to yield a new language variety which A-Is stunningly un-Romance and un-Bantu-like, and B-Just happens to look quite ordinary if one compares it to Spanish pidgins. Right down to the fact that most Palenquero verbs derive from the form of the Spanish infinitive.

3-Pidgins are indeed distinct from one another, but pidgins to my mind are defined by what they failed to acquire from the lexifier (most lexemes, (nearly) all bound morphemes, many phonemes), not by what they subsequently create/borrow. In this connection it is important to stress that many “substrate” features (vocabulary, structures…) in stable pidgins/creoles are post-formative: that is to say, these features were not present in the pidgin/creole from day 1, but rather entered at a later stage in the history of the pidgin/creole.

@Etienne: thanks again.

I’m not by any means wedded to the idea in fact that the Atlantic creoles aren’t creoles stricto sensu; I do like to see proper arguments deployed (which you do); I think they vary in cogency, but the basic facts don’t seem to be to be very disputable unless one has powerful personal/political reasons for disbelieving them. Thanks for indulging my curiosity.

I do have a considerable problem with JMcW’s belief that extreme morphological simplicity is diagnostic of past creolisation. I think his argumentation is frankly Bad Science, about which I have strong views probably reflecting my day job. But that is logically separable from his views on actual creoles (and I wish he would perform the logical separation.)

Your point (3) is particularly interesting (and basically seems to answer “yes” to my question “Is that reasonable?”, which is gratifying.) It gives ample scope (it seems to me) for both a characterisation of the Atlantic creoles as creoles in the proper sense of the term and the observation that (for example) the English-lexifier ones would fit right in as West African languages, and more generally for the sort of work seen in the paper that Lameen linked.

Presumably the devil would be in the detail: at what stage in the life cycle of these creoles they acquired substrate vocabulary and syntactic features (phonological features, too, come to that.)

And mathematicians will go on talking about highest common denominators (if they don’t generalize to lattice infima¹). It’s fine that phrases take on their own life and change their sense outside of specialist usage, but in this case it’s not even the actual concept from arithmetic that’s been adopted, and the popular version runs serious interference against the original in my poor monkey brain. *looks annoyed*

FWIW Danish has exactly the same, mindste fællesnævner in the media against største fællesnævner in the classroom. And I’m sure David knows what’s what.

¹) – An infimum in maths is not the lowest ting in a collection (that’s the minimum); it’s the highest possible thing that’s lower than or equal to all the things in the collection. The lattice in question is the natural numbers with the partial order of divisibility.

That confused “highest/lowest common denominator” talk has annoyed me for years. I don’t try anymore to understand what is meant in terms of fractions (as a side effect, I seem to have forgotten even what “numerator” and “denominator” mean). I just rephrase it mentally as “what they all have in common”.

In contrast, “lattice infimum” is as clear as a guy could want. Apparently I have grown out of fractions.

Take 8 issue with on a scale from 1 to 10.

Raisin’ all hell.

When I take issue, I give no quarter.

David Marjanović: In answer to your remark (“Admittedly, gender is unusually easy to learn in Romance (except French) and Russian, because most nouns showcase their gender in their ending or lack thereof.”), this still leaves unexplained the matter at hand, namely: if one claims that Romance creoles are products of L2 acquisition, and that pidginization played no role in the genesis of Romance creoles, then why did L2 learners (even those whose L1 had gender markers and agreement) so *consistently* fail to acquire Romance gender in the case of all Romance creoles (even those whose lexifier, such as Spanish or Portuguese, has easy-to-learn gender), when no other Romance variety (including those whose genesis involved large-scale L2 learning, by speakers of languages which in many cases -such as Basque- lacked grammatical gender altogether) has lost grammatical gender?

For “HCD” or “GCD” there’s also the synonym “GCF” (greatest common factor), which may be the most common one in the dialect spoken by my kids’ math teachers. It may well have likewise been most common in the dialect spoken by my own math teachers 40-odd years ago, but my memory is a bit fuzzy and unreliable. I don’t know if variation in preference among those three options correlates with geography or what. (And googling suggests that the fourth option of HCF is also extant.)

If we are talking about Wikipedia specifically, I have heard the same thing which is why I have never tried to do so myself. I thought you meant mathematical publication in general.

True. And maths on Wikipedia is painfully stuffy, it’s a shame really. If you want math written for mathematicians go to nCatLab, it will make your eyes glaze over in much fewer lines.

“As a poset is a special kind of category, a meet is simply a product in that category.” Says everything, really.

maths on Wikipedia is painfully stuffy

And maths on StackOverflow is actively hostile to either ‘imprecise’ questions (i.e. the sort asked by somebody who doesn’t already know the answer) or to understandable answers.

Youtube, though has some brilliant explanations/recreational math: numberphile, SingingBanana, standupmaths. So mathematicians in general are not stuffy.

Wakashan, surely?

Uh… oops! Yes.

this still leaves unexplained the matter at hand, namely: if one claims that Romance creoles are products of L2 acquisition, and that pidginization played no role in the genesis of Romance creoles, then why did L2 learners (even those whose L1 had gender markers and agreement) so *consistently* fail to acquire Romance gender in the case of all Romance creoles

I agree with you, of course: the Romance creoles are all descended from pidgins. I don’t think McWhorter disagrees; he just places pidginization on a continuum with WISLL.

I still haven’t been able to figure out whether everyone is in agreement on what “creolization” is –

I think they’re not. They definitely weren’t 30 years ago.

Wadler’s quote

Let me emphasize that this is a joke on Wadler, not a quotation by him. He wouldn’t be so insufferable.

Sidenote: this has got to be one of the fastest-growing LH threads so far. At 259 comments (well, 260 after this one) this thread has in just two weeks already beaten such notable long-runners as Urchin (and I think it actually broke 200 within six days). I think I’ve already lost track at least twice of this being in fact the same discussion as it was last going at. (Maybe more, if I were to re-read everything and see what all we’ve covered.)

I had maybe not previously considered how one would intensify the stock phrase “take issue with”

It’s hard to intesify stock phrases. The commonest way is to add “literal[ly]”, but that (a) makes smoke come out of literal people’s ears and (b) wouldn’t work with “take issue with” and (c) they’ve already used “literal” literally in the same sentence. More generally, I guess it depends on how dead the metaphor is for you. My pet peeve is “take with a huge pinch of salt”.

What would be so terrible about having a short introductory paragraph giving a layman’s explanation

Wikipedia has a few “Introduction to …” articles about technical topics; the only mathematical one is Introduction to systolic geometry I can confirm that it is somewhat shorter than the non-introductory “Systolic geometry” article.

The Matter of McWhorter is inexhaustible.
It is thought to have originated in Brythonic legend, but has now provided literary inspiration to many nations.

I liked this intensification of a stock phrase right here by Hat: “so far up my alley it might as well be living in my house.”

As for intensification (or other modification) of the stock phrase “take issue with,” COCA has examples with:

particular, serious, strong, great, slight, sharp, vociferous, heated, specific, great, real, huge, big, misguided, unyielding–and more.

I think this is the best place to add McWhorter’s example (from The Power of Babel) of how it took a long time for people writing in the vernacular to learn to actually write coherent prose (contra M. Jourdain). This is a short passage from the Russian Primary Chronicle explaining why Kiy, the legendary founder of Kiev, could not have been a simple ferryman, despite the existence of “Kiy’s ferry” at the time. Typos have hopefully been corrected.

Transliterated version : “Ashche bo by perevoznik Kiy, to ne by xodil Tsajugorodu; no se Kiy knjazhashe v rodě svoem’: i prixodivshju emu ko tsarju, jakozhe skazayut, jako veliku chest’ prijal’ ot tsarja, pri kotorom prixodiv tsari.” [It’s hard to tell the hard from the soft signs, given the modern font I’m correcting McW against.]

Literal rendering: “For if Kiy was a ferryman, then he would not have gone to Constantinople; but behold, Kiy was reigning in his tribe, and arriving at the Emperor, as they say, that he received great honor from the Emperor, in the reign of which Emperor he came.”

McWhorter telling the story in English as a child might: “Oh yeah? Yeah? Well, if he was just a ferryman then he wouldn’t have gone to Constantinople, right? But no, he was the chief of the tribe and he went to the Emperor, like, the Emperor, and he got a big prize, when the Emperor was the big man up there, you know?”

He has an example from Malory too, but I think there’s a much better one, Sir Ector’s eulogy of Sir Launcelot: “Thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand; and thou were the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights; and thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.” Whaaaat? The kindest man that ever struck with sword? The gentlest man that ever ate in hall?

The kindest man that ever strake with sword

Far from being childlike or primitive (or incoherent) this is surely a deliberate rhetorical trope.
The passage itself explains this: it’s just the same thought as

thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.

This is chivalry. It is the very point that Sir Ector (and Malory) is making about Lancelot (and indeed, about chivalry.)

The press of battle I have seen before, I would guess that press of knights is a variation on that (meaning ‘close-quarters fight’). Would not be a bad collective, though.

I’m more struck by the truest lover of a sinful man phrase — it’s opposed to that loved women so if it conforms to the general opposition of warrior virtues against courtier ones it should be on the warrior side; but it’s a bit obscure to my modern mind. Eleemosynary, mayhap?

Oh yes, I don’t mean that the meaning can’t be reconstructed or deciphered. But modern readers do not expect to decipher the texts they read until very modern times indeed (Finnegans Wake, e.g.)

I have the advantage of being an L1 speaker of Early Modern English.

Knights losing their status because they lost their horse was a major issue on the First Crusade. The majority of the warhorses brought by the crusader armies had died well before the final battle to capture Jerusalem, and one of the first-person accounts of the campaign was actually dictated by a (probably Norman) knight whose horse died fairly early, so that he spent the rest of the crusade as a commoner footman. Godfrey de Bouillon (who, although he became the first King of Jerusalem, was the weakest of the crusader leaders to made it through to the end) actually had no warhorses left in his entire force by the end of the war. He managed to borrow horses for his own use in the later battles, but essentially the entirety of his army was fighting on foot at that point.

Zwischenbericht: the Bakewell book How To Live, on Montaigne, is fabulously well-written and organized, beyond the dreams of avarice [I just ran out of conventional praiseological phrases].

From the Montaigne link:
>then a younger brother suffered a fatal haemorrhage after being hit on the head by a tennis ball.

Good lord! I’m sure my shock is because I’m thinking of modern tennis balls. What were tennis balls made of in the 1560s?

I’ve heard of serious injuries from lacrosse balls to the head. The only lacrosse ball death I can google was from commotio cordis, where you’re struck in the chest at a point int the heartbeat that it stops the rhythm. I had only heard of such a death once, a Chicago musician who was felled by a single punch to the chest. But apparently it’s common in lacrosse (common as compared to any other cause of sudden death in young athletes that I know of.)

The death of Charles the Affable was rather strange, and there is some variance in the firsthand accounts of what happened. Somehow, he hit his head quite hard on a doorframe lintel on the way to watch a real tennis match. However, everything seemed fine, and the king seemed alert for an unclear length of time, until (either while he was still watching the match or while he was leaving the court area once it was over) he just collapsed in a coma, dying hours later. Since he had hit his head earlier, it’s natural to hypothesize that he suffered a cerebral embolism, but it really could have been almost anything that killed him.

Stu, I’m so glad you enjoyed the Bakewell. I learnt a lot from her book.

why a lintel here is called a Sturz – incidentally I see that unterstützen can mean to patronise. I don’t get that connection at all.

What’s the POINT of being the king if after a game of tennis you have to leave the club via the drains?

@David Eddyshaw: Yes, of course, that is the other obviously possiblity I meant to mention.

Surely it doesn’t have to be Cicero to count as prose?

No connection between stürzen (intransitive: “fall in some extreme way”; transitive: “topple” statues or governments) and stützen “prop up, support, including literally”, unterstützen “support only metaphorically”.

Possibly a better place to discuss the McWhorter/Deutscher claim about coherence in writing would be the thread on Julie Sedivy’s article on complex sentence structure. Sedivy draws heavily from both of them.

And I agree with David E and D.O. that the Lancelot eulogy is not an example of “just fragments of thought” but a deliberate rhetorical strategy, a long list of parallel structures. Nevertheless a lot of Malory’s narrative is indeed choppy and monotonous by modern standards, with a huge overdose of “and then, and then” concatenation.

You have to account for Chinese, which seems to have developed other ways of being sophisticated than mere grammatical complexity.

I might add: what to make of our current age, where the industry of teaching people how to write discourages complexity as detracting from readability.

You have to account for Chinese, which seems to have developed other ways of being sophisticated than mere grammatical complexity.

I don’t actually know, having never progressed that far in my studies… but… doesn’t Chinese have a heaping helping of syntactic complexity? The sheer number of ways to say “and” is definitely staggering.

I might add: what to make of our current age, where the industry of teaching people how to write discourages complexity as detracting from readability.

That’s specifically in English. In German, style guides never seem to have outright recommended short, simple sentences. The one I’ve read brings the issue up, compares English, and concludes the German default sentence that writers should strive for has one main and one subordinate clause…

That’s actually mentioned in the same style guide: they’re long sequences of main clauses, expressing action, action, action – “and they seized Thorgrimm, slew him, and…”

Mallory may have performed his text orally or based part of it on an oral performance

Is there any reason to think so? Of course we don’t really know, but I thought the general consensus was that Malory translated mostly from French written sources and a little from Middle English written sources, and that he composed his text in writing, in prison.

Thanks, PP! Looks like Rosamund Allen, in your link, is challenging the received view that Malory’s “and, and, and” style is tedious and monotonous, which is the view given by McWhorter’s book. Allen argues that Malory was writing for a culture of reading aloud, not silently, and that when the text is read aloud by skilled performers, then it’s easily accessible to modern audiences. Reconstituting the dried-out husk, as it were.

Caveat: McWhorter doesn’t take into account that there can be elevated or literary registers of speech even in languages that were never written. Much more on this at the sentence complexity thread.

Has anyone compared Malory’s English syntax to his French sources? I’m guessing French at the time had much more of an unbroken written literary tradition than English, so is that reflected in the syntax?

can’t remember what it was about

The notion that a fully developed LH thread is about something is a delusion of naive realism, or words to that effect. Like poems, they do not mean but be.

Mmm, I don’t know, I have resumed conversations with friends after ten years of not seeing each other.

The closest to what we have here is

The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1]

The circulation of handwritten letters was necessary for its function because it enabled intellectuals to correspond with each other from great distances. All citizens of the 17th-century Republic of Letters corresponded by letter, exchanged published papers and pamphlets, and considered it their duty to bring others into the Republic through the expansion of correspondence.[2]

Ten year gaps in conversation were routine for these guys.

but respected differences in language and culture

Much of the correspondence was in Latin anyway.

Here’s a fictional 17C doctor (belonging to the famous Sephardic family of the Abravanels) describing his modest lingustic prowess after being asked how many languages he can read:

“Fluently? […] Not more than eight, I’m afraid. Nine, possibly, depending on how you reckon ‘fluency.’ Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, of course, those being the principal languages of medicine. Spanish and Portuguese are native to my family. And English now, naturally. I spent most of my life on the island. German, French. [,,,] My Dutch is becoming quite good, I think. But it would be boasting to say it was fluent as yet.”

[…] “Beyond that? I can manage Russian and Polish, with nontechnical matters. Italian and Latin, the same. I was concentrating on the Latin, actually, but I was forced to interrupt my studies due to the political state of affairs [i.e. the Thirty Years’ War] so that I could learn Swedish.” He frowned. “It’s a charming language, in its own way, but I almost hate to spend the time on it. There is nothing written in Swedish which is not already available in other tongues. Still—” He sighed. “I felt it would be wise, given the role I was asked to play—” (namely, spy for the “Protestant” forces)

A much better example of Malory “putting things down in the order he thinks of them”.

In Russia such columns (like McWhorter’s) are usually written by female authors.

I will illustrate. Троицкий вариант: a newspaper mostly addressed to scientists, and mostly, I think, to researchers in hard scences and biology. It is distributed for free in research institutions, but it is – mildly, carefully – oppositional. There are dozens of people who write about langauges there and most are girls.

https://trv-science.ru/tag/irina-fufaeva/, writes about the same sort of things as McWorther.
https://trv-science.ru/tag/irina-levontina/ used to write about Russian, and published a book, based on her columns (presented here).

I will browse their site and link here authors of other language-related articles I see there.

https://trv-science.ru/tag/anna-muradova/ I know her in person. She is the first person to teach Breton language in Russia:) She is an Assyrian. Breton, Irish, Cornish (there must be Welsh too somewhere, I haven’t read all the titles). Revival. Assyrians and Assyrian langauges.
https://trv-science.ru/tag/mariya-xachaturyan/, two articles, one of them about history of field linguistics.
https://trv-science.ru/tag/mariya-molina/ about random topics (she is one of the editors and correspondents, so anything from global warming to DESY). Also Hittite langauge (“who needs a Hittite corpus?”, about Hittite poetry and its relations with that of Greeks etc.), women rights among Hittites, about a trilingual Persian-Elamite-Akkadian inscription, etc.

A man, finally:
https://trv-science.ru/tag/sergejj-ljozov/ about Neo-Aramean langauges. Titles like “keys to the history of Aramean verb”. I think Anya invited him first, and I think the cycle about Aramaen is motivated exactly by desire to write about something unpopular🙂

I think there are more men there. But I’m lazy:/ The point is: there are many girls doing this. But I think they (ladies:)) would accept my material if I wanted to have a column there and offered something intereresting. Girls like boys. No discrimination.

Me on May 2, 2019:

Too bad all the background and all the background info of /r/bædlɪngʊɪstɪx seem to have disappeared. The rules used to be introduced with: “We govern by the rules; you are bound by the parameters.”

Argh. “We govern by the principles”, of course.

Anyway, 3 months ago, a bad linguist actually showed up there and proclaimed at length that Scythian is ancient Ukrainian! And berated his critics for obviously not having read his previous wall of text in the entirety of its magnificence.

I once began writing a complaint (or a question here): I saw how people identify Slavic toponyms in works of al-Idrisi and others and I’m terrifyed. Delete dots in ب ت ث ن ي and then see if the resulting ـــــٮٮٮٮٮٮٮٮــــ matches anything. (but there are occasional قs…).

That said, I don’t know how many of the 70% ethnic Kazakhs have L1 Russian, either “broken” or Standard.
In my experience, almost all Kazakhs in Kazakhstan*) speak fluent Russian, and most of them without any non-standard accent; if you hear someone over the phone and don’t know their ethnicity, you can’t normally guess whether they are ethnic Kazakh or Russian. There is an intonation pattern used by speakers from Almaty and other, mostly Southern, Kazakh cities, that you recognize after some time of being exposed to it, but that is typical for all ethnicities.
*) The exceptions are ethnic Kazakhs resettled from China and Mongolia, who often don’t know Russian, and frequently are astonished that most Kazakhs don’t understand Kazakh, and, stereotypically, villagers from the South; in my experience, that stereotype is quite exaggerated – the ones I’ve met spoke good Russian, even those who prefer to speak Kazakh, but some of them had a specific accent. But my contacts in Kazakhstan are mostly in urban environments, so maybe there are many more people with no or rudimentary knowledge of Russian out there in the villages; I wouldn’t bet on it.

If Standard Russian lost all prestige in Kazakhstan, then it wouldn’t surprise me too much if the 15% ethnic Russian population adopted “broken” Russian in imitation of the dominant Kazakh population (assuming they didn’t give up Russian altogether).

A clearly better example is Afrikaans, where colonial Dutch-speakers abandoned their language in favor of a decreolized variety.

Don’t forget to spend time in little teeny southern villages.

“Those numbers for Kazakhs speaking Kazakh look very much exaggerated to me and probably are the result of aspiration being reported as fact.”

I checked a more detailed report , it is stranger.

·(people over 15)
“List”: can understand speech
“Read” can read with ease
“Write” can write [and read] with ease

______________ Kazakh ________ Russian _______ English ___
__________ List Read Write List Read Write List Read Write
All······· 74,0··2,9·62,0· 94,4··3,4·84,8· 15,4··2,6··7,7
Kazakhs··· 98,4··2,3·93,2· 92,1··4,4·79,1· 17,5··2,9··9,0
Russians·· 25,3··2,5··6,3· 98,5··1,0·96,7· 12,6··2,1··5,6
Uzbeks···· 95,5·12,5·61,7· 92,9·10,3·68,3· 10,7··2,3··5,4
Ukrainians 21,5··2,0··5,2· 98,9··0,9·97,1· ·8,0··1,3··3,7
Uygurs···· 93,7··9,7·60,8· 95,8··6,4·81,8· 15,7··2,6··7,2
Tatars···· 72,6··6,3·33,7· 98,4··1,7·94,7· 14,2··2,3··6,7
Germans··· 24,7··2,5··7,9· 99,0··0,9·96,9· ·9,1··1,5··4,4
Koreans··· 43,5··3,7·10,5· 98,0··1,4·95,5· 24,2··3,5·11,4


Hans, yes, please. I am quite curious: I thought that many Kazakhs (depending on where they live of course) don’t really know it but maybe I was wrong and they just don’t use it much?

Or else, maybe this data represents “having attended Kazakh lessons in school” which combined with Kazakh in media and occasionaly talking to L1 Kazakh speakers is not bad (because those lessons in school can mean many things, but combined with immersion can actually work)?

(also, hopefully some Kazakh readers could calrify the situation…)

I took it from here.

“В переписном листе «3С» по переписи населения Республики Казахстан 2009 года задавались вопросы о степени владения казахским, русским и английским языками, ответы на которые звучали так:
понимаю устную речь,
свободно читаю,
свободно пишу
Подразумевается, что лицо, умеющее свободно писать, как правило свободно читает и понимает устную речь; а лицо, умеющее свободно читать, как правило понимает и устную речь”

It is a reasonable assumption that someone who can write can also read (unless it is the character who said “чукча не читатель, чукча писатель!”)) but reading does not imply much about speaking/listening… Fortunately the table does not seem to treat it this way.

Then in the table:

понимают устную речь …., из них свободно: читают … пишут и читают ….

This confused me because из них (“among them”) must mean that the % of readers is given only for those who can understand устную речь (lit. “oral speech”. Russian teachers, educators and linguists speak about “written speech” as well, and this terminology does not really match the normal meaning of речь “speech”). But the following:

понимают устную речь – 8988,5 тыс. человек (74,0 %),
свободно читают – 348,6 тыс. человек (2,9 %),
свободно пишут и читают – 7528,5 тыс. человек (62,0 %).

Seems to imply this is not the case….

beautiful
That earns some sort of prize.

Weird reading stats aside, the fact that for Uzbeks and Uyghurs have comprehension rates almost as high as Kazakhs, suggest that the Kazakh numbers are not just inflated by ethnic pride. The three groups also stand out for lower Russian comprehension rates than others, and the Uzbeks and Uyghurs have the highest ‘read’ scores.

Could the reading numbers mean ‘read only, not speak or write’? It’s a bit of a reach, I know.

Some Putin, March 2023 (“То, что Вы говорите, это очень важно, потому что был момент…”): During the conversation, director Aidar Zabbarov noted that the theater in Tatarstan is also an institution for the preservation of the native language. Putin agreed with this assessment.

“What you say is very important, because there was a moment when, after the collapse of the Union, in Russia, a lot, unfortunately, was lost in terms of support for national languages. And we, well, count them differently , but somewhere around 170. 170-175. Some already have almost no native speakers. And it is very, very important to maintain this diversity”

July 2017 (“Заставлять человека учить язык, который…”): “Forcing a person to learn a language which is not his native is just as unacceptable as reducing the level and time of teaching Russian. I draw special attention of the heads of the regions of the Russian Federation to this”

“I would like to remind you that Russian for us is the state language, the language of interethnic communication, and it cannot be replaced by anything. It is the natural, spiritual framework of our entire multinational country, everyone should know it [Russian]. The languages of the peoples of Russia are an integral part of the original culture of the peoples of Russia, studying these languages is a constitutionally guaranteed right, a voluntary right”

August 2002 (“Полная дурь и бред…”): “It is utter idiotism and delirium if someone somewhere forbids to study the mother tongues in a multinational country or prevents it. Absolutely unacceptable, harmful to the country as a whole. Russia is the center of such national, cultural and linguistic wealth, which is not found anywhere else in the world. This is precisely the strength of our state … “.

Hans, thank you.

Perhpas if Kazakh children are exposed to Kazakh, their active skills can be well behind their passive skills…. I wanted to add that the question was about understanding, but this does not explain the census 2021:

Kazakhs, total 11906894
владеют (“wield”) the state language 11861645
use it in daily life 7550482

By the way: There was a government funded project where Kazakh teachers were teaching anyone for free online. I think paid lessons are better anyway (on that site you registered beforehand and generally language lessons online are 5-20$ a hour) but I like the idea.

I can support Vanya’s observation, at least concerning Uzbeks. Most Uzbeks I know speak fluent Uzbek and prefer to use it among themselves, and the languages are close enough for them to reasonably well understand Kazakh; from there, it is only a small step to actually speaking it at least as well as those Kazakhs who just know how to string together a couple of sentences. I know only a few Uyghurs, so I don’t feel I have a sufficient sample to generalize, but those I know seem to speak Uyghur among themselves, so the same would apply.
Concerning Turks, while the languages are as different as you say, there is a certain amount of shared vocabulary; and when a Turk can say qosh kelding, point to a milk carton in a shop and say süt, and count to hundred, he functionally knows as much Kazakh as a lot of Kazakhs. I have witnessed that myself – confronted with Turks who don’t speak Russian, Kazakhs dredge up the rudiments of Kazakh they have, and a very basic conversation becomes possible. So, whether that is can be called command or understanding of the language depends on your definition of the tems “command” and “understand”.

In fairness, what I have criticised as the “traditional” doctrine on noun-class suffixes vs prefixes in Niger-Congo was not due to Greenberg, who seems to have subscribed to the wholly reasonable idea that they all originated as clitics, and varied in position in the different branches. I think the idea arose from trying to rope in the initial mutations of some of the Atlantic languages. Given that different groups among the Atlantic languages themselves have either class suffixes or class prefixes, it may even be perfectly valid for some of those. (But not for “Gur.”)

And the fusion of once-proclitic articles has actually happened in some Oti-Volta languages, so the languages in question have concordant noun class suffixes and prefixes on each noun. So far, none has actually shed the suffixes, but Ditammari shows a lot of attrition of original word-final syllables, so it’s working in that direction. Konkomba too.