The Mother Tongue Read Online Free Page B

of Hawaii, who noticed that creole languages all over the world bear certain remarkable similarities. First, it is important to understand the difference be-tween pidgins and creoles. Pidgins (the word is thought to be a Chinese rendering of the English word business) are rudimentary languages formed when people from diverse backgrounds are thrown together by circumstance. Historically, they have tended THE MOTHER TONGUE
    to arise on isolated plantation-based islands which have been ruled by a dominant Western minority but where the laborers come from a mixed linguistic background. Pidgins are almost always very basic and their structure varies considerably from place to place—and indeed from person to person. They are essentially little more than the language you or I would speak if we found ourselves suddenly deposited in some place like Bulgaria or Azerbaijan. They are makeshift tongues and as a result they seldom last long.
    When children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen. Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class, as was almost always the case with African slaves in the American South, or they will develop a creole (from French creole, "native"). Most of the languages that people think of as pidgins are in fact creoles. To the uninitiated they can seem prim-itive, even comical. In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the word for beard is Bras belong fes (literally
    "grass that belongs to the face") and the word for a vein or artery is rop belong blut ("rope that belongs to the blood"). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as bak sit drayva ("back seat driver"), wesmata ("what's the matter?"), and bottom- bottom wata waka ("submarine"). In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas is bad briz, while to pass gas is to pul bad briz. Feel free to smile. But it would be a mistake to consider these languages substandard because of their curious vocabularies. They are as formalized, efficient, and expressive as any other language—and often more so. As Bickerton notes, most creoles can express sub-tleties of action not available in English. For instance, in English we are not very good at distinguishing desire from accomplishment in the past tense. In the sentence "I went to the store to buy a shirt" we cannot tell whether, the shirt was bought or not. But in all creoles such ambiguity is impossible. In Hawaiian creole the per-son who bought a shirt would say, bin go store go buy_ shirt while the person who failed to buy a shirt would say, "I bin go store for buy shirt." The distinction is crucial.
    So creoles are not in any way inferior. Infact, it is worth re-membering that many full-fledged languages -- the Afrikaans of 28

    THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
    South Africa, the Chinese of Macao, and the Swahili of east Africa—were originally creoles.
    In studying creoles, Bickerton noticed that they are very similar in structure to the language of children between the ages of two and four. At that age, children are prone to make certain basic errors in their speech, such as using double negatives and experi-encing confusion with irregular plurals so that they say "feets" and
    "sheeps." At the same time, certain fairly complicated aspects of grammar, which we might reasonably expect to befuddle children, cause them no trouble at all. One is the ability to distinguish between stative and nonstative verbs with a present participle.
    Without getting too technical about it, this means that with certain types of verbs we use a present participle to create sentences like
    "I am going for a walk" but with other verbs we dispense with the present participle, which is why we say "I like you" and not "I am liking you." Very probably you have never thought about this be-fore. The reason you have never thought about it is that it is seemingly instinctive. Most children have mastered the distinction between stative and nonstative verbs by the age of