How close are Creole languages to their parent language?

safety pin   Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:10 am GMT
How close, and mutually intelligible, are creole languages to their parent language?

I have heard Cape Verdean Creole and to me it sounds similar to some Brazilian Portuguese accents that I've heard, and most words are recognizable, but I've also seen it written and it looks very different. To me it looks like Portuguese spelled phonetically. I have no more trouble understanding it than Brazilian accents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q79bZB-1vA
anjanette   Tue Jun 16, 2009 8:00 am GMT
Chavacano is difficult for Spanish speakers to understand. It is Spanish creole (with English thrown in for good measure) spoken with a strong Filipino prosody.

http://now.abs-cbn.com/ondemand/premium/tvpregional/zamboanga/20090612-tvpzamboanga-high.asx
user   Tue Jun 16, 2009 1:06 pm GMT
Creole languages are not the part of the Romance linguistics!
safety pin   Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:14 pm GMT
I know, but the closest language to a particular creole language is usually the parent language from which it comes from.
userus, -i, m.   Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:30 pm GMT
yes, it's true, but only in the vocabulary.
Paul   Tue Jun 16, 2009 6:03 pm GMT
<<Creole languages are not the part of the Romance linguistics! >>


Why? I don't understand the logic behind linguistic classification.
Paul   Tue Jun 16, 2009 6:11 pm GMT
<<yes, it's true, but only in the vocabulary.>>


The same could be said about Romance languages with respect to Latin. They are just lexified with words of Latin origin; barring that, there are few other similarities.
user   Tue Jun 16, 2009 7:36 pm GMT
blah, blah, blah....

it's the linguistics, not me. It's true that Romance languages are quite stupid comparing them to Latin, and they're very simplified nowadays. Just like the Germanic languages, except German and Icelandic. Take a look at the English or Scandinavian morphology, it looks like Esperanto.
On the other hand, Slavic languages are still (almost) the same es the Old-Slavonic.
Amanda   Wed Jun 17, 2009 2:12 am GMT
<< They are just lexified with words of Latin origin; barring that, there are few other similarities. >>

That is exactly the case of English which has 60% of Latin and French vocabulary but nothing else. It is a Latin-French creole. Romance languages still retain much of the Latin verbal system and French also had noun cases not a long time ago.
Commonaswhole   Wed Jun 17, 2009 3:37 pm GMT
Suriname Dutch is very easy to understand to me.
Commonaswhole   Wed Jun 17, 2009 3:39 pm GMT
Then again, people from Suriname don't like to be called creole, don't even like their language to be called such. They're the first people to want to be included within the Dutch Taalunie, which they finally are.
394387   Wed Jun 17, 2009 4:27 pm GMT
Languages shift from being inflexionally complex to becoming more simple...and then back again. It's a cycle. English (or its decendants) in another 400 years may be as hard to learn as Proto-Germanic.
Linguist   Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:49 pm GMT
Okay, first of all, there is a LOT of linguistic misinformation in this thread.

<<Languages shift from being inflexionally complex to becoming more simple...and then back again. It's a cycle.>>

This is not true. While it IS true that some languages go from being morphologically complex to morphologically simple, it is not necessarily true that they will go back to being morphologically complex again. All the meaning that is lost when they have simple morphology is picked up by other areas of the grammar: syntax, lexicon, etc. Also, the reverse is also true: languages can shift from being morphologically simple to being morphologically complex, but it isn't necessarily the case that they will go back again. There is absolutely not a definitive cycle that all, or even most, languages go through.

<<Then again, people from Suriname don't like to be called creole, don't even like their language to be called such.>>

That's because Suriname Dutch is not a creole. It's a dialect of Dutch that no doubt has been influenced by the other language in Suriname, but it is still most definitely Dutch.

<<On the other hand, Slavic languages are still (almost) the same es the Old-Slavonic.>>

This is no more true than French, Spanish, Italian, Romansh, etc. are "the same" as Latin, or that German, English, Swedish, Danish, etc. are "the same" as Old Germanic. They are similar to them in some ways because that is where they came from, but all languages are changing all the time in different ways.

And back to the original question:
<<How close, and mutually intelligible, are creole languages to their parent language? >>

This depends on a LOT of different factors. Most creoles are based off of two parent languages. Generally what happens is that there is one language called the "lexifier language", which is the language the creole draws its sounds and words from. Then there is another language which generally donates the grammatical aspects of its language: how sentences are formed, etc. One language may give more than another in creating a creole; this is one major factor in whether native speakers of one of the parent languages can understand (or think they understand) it. In the end, it is important to remember that creoles are separate languages, and are thus not immediately recognizable or understandable by a native speaker of one of the parent languages. You may recognize all the sounds and words, but you are not necessarily understanding them the same way a creole speaker does.
cycle   Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:44 pm GMT
Eventually, given unlimited time, they would cycle back.
nonperiodic   Fri Jun 19, 2009 9:49 pm GMT
<<While it IS true that some languages go from being morphologically complex to morphologically simple, it is not necessarily true that they will go back to being morphologically complex again.>>

If languages are always changing, it seems like there's a good chance that the level of morphological complexity would change, too. Obviously, there's a limit to how morphologically simple it can get. As the language approaches the point where almost every part of the language has maximum morphological simplicity, doesn't it become more and more likely that the next set of changes would start bringing back some morphological complexity somewhere. It seems like, given enough time, the averaged morphological simplicity of a language must go both up and down. Nothing says there's a periodic cycle for this, though.

In English, we may be losing the -er and -est endings, and [maybe] what's left of the subjunctive. But what's happening with "shoulda" "woulda", "coulda", "shouldna", etc. in real life day-to-day informal speech. Is the -ee suffix (usually converting a verb to the object of that verb) growing in influence and popularity?