The Decline of British English

"Jannock" can mean 'fair', 'correct', 'proper', 'genuine', 'decent', 'pleasant' 'honest' etc. It can also be used as a verb, meaning 'act properly' or 'behave'. It's a good old word, probably from Lancashire.

It's best not to talk about the qualities of the bread.

 

Thanks :smile:

You can see the meaning I used, (not fair) here. http://www.yorkshiredialect.com/lexis.htm In the same list is mbwa shenzi's "goin' dahn t' nick."

J.

 

Yeah, Huddersfield and Halifax!

"Jonnock" is an alternative spelling of "jannock", both are in use in Northern England and Scotland.

 

"Yorksha! God's back garden!" :smile:

J.

 

Interesting article on language
BBC - Culture - How English gave birth to surprising new languages

 

Indeed. Like an old-time sailor, English has left its children all over the globe.

Na condition wey make crayfish bend. :smile:

J.

 

True, we dey talk pidgin for here. English, dat one na grammar, yeee!

 

Many pidgins are English-based, but there have been exceptions, such as Russenorsk, which was used by Russian and Norwegian fishermen for well over 100 years, up until World War I.

 

Some people who spoke Russenorsk must have lived in hard, violent times. I read - I mean skimmed - several articles and I kept running into sentences like:

(1) "Prinsipal grot pjan I paa kaana kludi." - The captain is drunk and is beating his wife.

(2) And this gem - several times : "Moja tvoja på vater kasstom!" - I will throw you in the water!

The vocabulary seems somewhat accessible to me. Words like "reisom" (travel or go) are understandable from German and others, like "klaeba" (bread) are familiar through Ukrainian. Or maybe I was an Arkhangelsk trader in a past life. :smile:

In other news, I was watching "Follow The Money," original title Bedrag (Deception) - Danish with English subtitles. They use the straight English F-bomb in the Danish script with depressing frequency. And I was getting to like the sound of Danish...

J.

 

And yes, mbwa shenzi, you are - as always - 100% right. There are other non-English pidgins, quite a few of which involve Russian. Quite natural, as Russia borders on many lands. One variant is Kyakhta, named for a border-town where it is spoken. It's also known in English as CPR (Chinese Pidgin Russian).

Article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyakhta_Russian%E2%80%93Chinese_Pidgin

Have I led us far enough afield, yet? :smile:

J.

 

Probably, although there certainly are a number of other pidgin languages that are not English-based pidgins. I read in the article linked to by Phdtobe (thank you, by the way) that the word pidgin comes from a modified version of business but although that may be the most commonly accepted etymology, there are other etymologies for example the Portuguese word for 'child', pequeño, and in Nigerian Pidgin, 'child' is pikin.

In reality, no one knows, and it's probably impossible to find out for sure. When as was a PhD candidate, I had, for various reasons, to study pidgin languages and although I'm in no way an expert, I have spent quite some time reading pidgin grammars and texts. They share a number of characteristic features and some scholars even think all pidgins have a common origin. I don't, I think they have their origins in linguistic processes common to all languages and the reason English-based pidgins are singled out for mention so often is that those are the ones most studies deal with. English is a rather dominant language in general linguistics, the field pidgin research belong to and many of the linguists were native English speakers to begin with. An English-based pidgin is more accessible and easier to study for many people in general linguistics. It's a bit similar to Anthropology in Kenya: a number of anthropologists have written extensively about the Moran, the Maasai warriors. Small wonder, the Moran are in a way thrown out of Maasai societyto become warriors and roam about on the plains but they are a sociable bunch of young blokes who don't mind the company of strangers, telling tales of lion hunts and bravery. It's a much more complicated thing to study Maasai women.

To assert a common origin for all pidgins is probably tempting but as I said, I don't think it's correct. On the other hand, since most pidgins don't have written languages (which, by the way, many non-pidgin languages don't have either) and there's a limit to how far back in time reconstructions of stages of languages can take science, I have no idea of knowing if I'm right. It's like the perpetual question about whether human language has one (monogenesis) or many (polygenesis) origins. Both theories have equal value because there's really no way of finding out.

 

Thanks, Kizmet, mbwa shenzi, and Phdtobe. You've made this thread extremely enjoyable. :smile:

J.

 

The Caribbean is an interesting place for pidgin anything from French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese. On the island where I was born, the language spoken by blue collars there is barely understandable by my wife who is French & English Canadian. However the creole spoken on the island is a mixture of English, French, perhaps African and Spanish. English is the official language. However, by studying French, I got a better appreciation of the creole of my parents.

 

Can the words pidgin, patios, and creole be used interchangeably?

 

I will defer to the experts but I believe the answer is no. Pidgin is a simplified mix of two languages. Patois is a kind of dialect and Creole is a specific Caribbean culture/language.

 

In my opinion, it's accurate to say that creole languages develop from pidgins. Others, however, have argued that creoles can develop in a language contact situation without being preceded by a pidgin. I haven't really followed what's happening in pidgin research for quite some time now so I don't know how accepted the latter theory is.

They are used interchangeably but patois is a generic term referring to both pidgins and creoles, and also to dialects and language varieties that deviate from a standard. A very simplified explanation of the difference between pidgins and creoles (linguistically speaking, as the term can also refer to cultures) is that pidgins are structurally simple contact languages with no native speakers, while creoles develop from pidgins, gradually becoming complex , but are spoken as native languages. As the creole evolves and is exposed to increased influence from one of its parent languages, it can be decreolized, that is, it becomes standardized. I guess some linguists would cry out loud if the saw me use the term standardized in this context, but I use to make this a little less technical. Linguistic patois is sometimes to be avoided.

Decreolization is not a one-way proces though, nor is it stable and the whole thing can be inverted, so that a decreolized creole becomes recreolized. This can happen if a parent language loses its prestige for some reason and I don't know but I can imagine recreolization can also result from deliberate attempts at creating a linguistic and cultural identity differing from that of both the creole and one, both or all of its parent languages. The main driver behind all languages is the wish to understand and to be understood but as humans, we also use language to exclude others. And frankly speaking, although I am a trained linguist, I sometimes have serious problems reading grammars of languages with no writing systems written by general linguists. Even if you understand the terminology, they are simply too technical and abstract, to the extent that you'll end up wondering if the author really wanted you to understand anything.

 

Here's the first paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nigerian Pidgin

Unifasiti is a good example of what can happen to the word 'university' in a pidgin situation, but as a pidgin, Nigerian Pidgin is not really standardized at all and in some varieties it's ulivasity.

 

Here is the lyrics of the "controversial" Rihanna's song. I understood everything because that is how i spoke until high school. My parents never went to high school. My guess that will be lost in a hundred or so years because more people are going to high school and beyond.
Rihanna - Work Lyrics | MetroLyrics