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8. Against Creole Exception...
So what we've seen is that there's this belief, right?
So now it sounds very familiar that Creole language has emerged through these abnormal breaks, structural breaks that, according to many linguists-- perhaps, most linguists-- put Creoles outside the realm of quote, "normal languages." And I have to insist on the quote because I don't believe that.
I want to say it upfront.
I don't believe that Creoles are to be excluded from the realm of normal languages.
And from your Mud Card feedback, it's clear that you yourself are feeling very unhappy with this classification.
So what are we doing now?
We're doing something very-- which I hope is scientific.
We're looking at the claims, what do they imply for the actual structures of Creoles as I speak them, as Karen's parents speak them, as real living systems.
So what do these claims mean for those real languages that people actually speak in their homes, in their schools, et cetera?
So this is the basic question.
So are these, quote unquote, "dicontinuities" that we find in the history of Creoles, are the deeply distinct from what you find in the history of English?
And this is what we're looking at the last time.
And then, once we have the results of this comparison, then we can ask, so what does that mean in terms of what we should believe about Creole languages.
So this is just a summary of what we discussed last week.
So what we saw in that summary is that both in its lexicon, in its vocabulary, but also in terms of its syntax-- and we focused on one particular aspect of English syntax having to do with where you pronounce the verb, without the adverb.
And there's some examples where English has a very different order now than it had in middle English, like the 14th, 15th century.
Not only that, we also saw that English, in a way, has broken the morphology, the conjugation of middle English.
So what we see in the history of English is a set of comparative facts that show that the history of English, in a way, is very much like the history of Haitian Creole as it emerged from French.
In fact, what we saw is that, if you look at the vocabulary of English, it's much more, quote unquote, "macaronic." It's a much more mixed vocabulary in terms of words coming from French, from Latin, from other languages as compared to the vocabulary of Haitian Creole, which is at least 90% French.
So on one hand, you have a Creole language with the, quote unquote, "well-behaved" vocabulary, where most of the words come from one language.
And on the other hand, you have English, which is supposed to be a normal, genetic language that nobody disrespects.
English is a world language in a way.
It's a [INAUDIBLE] But yet, English, in its vocabulary, is much more macaronic, much more misbehaving, than, I think, words from all over the world, so to speak.
So what we did conclude-- and we're going to actually see more data that will support this conclusion-- is that, with respect to the syntax and the morphology of verbs and also in terms of its lexicon, there is no key difference between creolization in the history of Haitian Creole versus language change as in the history of English.
In fact, if there's any difference, it would make English out Creole Haitian Creole.
English would be even more Creole in a particular way than Haitian Creole.
And now what I want to show you very quickly is that these facts come up throughout the grammar of English.
So here, we're going to look at one other set of facts having to do with where you pronounce object pronouns.
So I'm going to give you some examples from Haitian Creole.
So by now, you should-- Bouki and Boukinet should be very familiar.
They are folk characters in Haitian tales that, when I was a kid, I would listen to.
Bouki is supposed to be like a not very smart character.
And then, there's Boukinet, which is his wife.
So Bouki konnen Boukinet.
and then if you replace Boukinet by pronoun, you say Bouki konnen li.
Now what's striking here is something which is, as an English speaker, you would accept without hesitation, which is that the object, whether it's a name, like Boukinet, or whether it's a pronoun, like him or her or it, it comes after the verb.
You see Bouki konnen li, like in English, you would say Bouki knows him, or Bouki knows her, or Bouki known it.
You cannot have the pronoun come before the verb.
You cannot say Bouki li konnen.
Now some of you know French.
So if you know French, you'll say, well, gosh no.
Here again, Creole has broken the syntax of French.
Because in French, the order into Bouki li konnen is what you get in French.
You have this rule where if the object is a pronoun, then you have to move it to the left of the verb.
OK, this is what we get now.
You say, Bouqui connait Bouquinette.
And you say, Bouqi la connait.
So now the pronoun "la" refers to Bouquinette.
And it better come before the verb.
You cannot say, Bouqui connait la.
So that's a very robust contrast between Haitian Creole and French-- whether you pronounce the object when it's a pronoun.
OK, so this is our summary.
In the summary, you see clearly where the differences are in terms of not only the object pronoun, but also in terms of what we saw last week in the last three rules in terms of where you pronounce the adverb, negation.
These are the final verb.
So Vfin is verb final.
In these two cases, what you have here and there, you have a reversal of the order.
So in Creole, you have verb, pronoun.
In French, you have pronoun, verb.
In Creole, you have adverb, verb.
In French, you have verb, adverb.
And then, something else we saw is that in Creole, unlike French, suffixes are expressed as pre-verbal items from last time.
If you look at this particular pattern here, which is like what we saw earlier, where the object-- this is the case of me saying, I eat rice.
So in Creole, you say, Mwen mange dvi, where you have rice after the verb.
You should say, I'm eating rice.
You say Map manje dvi.
Do you remember that theory about explication?
What's the claim, Nick?
NICK: It's just that Creole languages are the lexicon of the [INAUDIBLE] overlaid onto the grammar of the-- MICHEL DEGRAFF: That's right.
That's right, very good.
So that's a very nice, one-sentence summary of this theory.
So basically, the Creole grammar is a mix between, say, in the case of Haiti, between French and Gbe grammar.
So you take the words from French.
And then the words are imposed on the grammar of an African language.
In the case of Haiti, it would be the grammar of Gbe.
So now, one should ask, in the case of this particular order that we saw is different from French, we could ask, where does it come from?
Well, maybe it comes from the Gbe languages.
Because, in fact, in Gbe, you have this SV order.
You do subject, verb, object, where the object is pronounced after the verb.
Like here, you say, I eat rice.
This is how you say-- I won't try to pronounce it, because it's a tone language, very complicated.
So I don't know the tones.
But I have a colleague that I wrote paper with, Enoch Abo.
And Enoch speaks Gbe language.
So these are data from Enoch.
I eat rice, very much like here-- subject, verb, object order.
But yet, there is a twist.
And this is where we cannot say that Creole grammar is the explication of Gbe grammar.
Because, in fact, like in French, you do get OV order in Gbe.
So you get it here.
When you have an aspectual marker, meaning that you go from saying, I eat rice, to I'm eating rice where you express the progressive, the way you express the progressive, you have I and something like the verb to be.
And you get rice eat.
And then you have this other marker at the end.
So here, you can see clearly that this pattern in Haitian Creole is different, both from French and from Gbe.
Because both French and Gbe have OV order-- object verb order-- but Haitian Creole doesn't have that.
So this is just a quick data point to actually show you that those theories that either claim that Haitian Creole is lexified from some African language and those theories that claim that Haitian Creole is broken French syntax to some degree, they are both inaccurate.
So what are going to do now, we're going to actually look of a case of language change.
And we're going to go back to English where you'll find the same pattern.
We have, at some point in the history of English, we also had OV order.
And then at a later point, this OV order was lost.
And we can actually do it pretty straightforward using data.
These are data from older English.
So what you see here, this is a sentence in Old English that would express this idea of the Permians told him many stories.
And what you have to focus on here is the fact that the pronoun, him, is pronounced before told.
So many stories him told the Permians.
And this is fine Old English.
So if you are living in Old English time, this is the way you would say it.
And it was very productive.
So here, too, you see, that he would give him 15 pounds in gold-- that he him gave.
You see where you have the pronoun, him, before the verb.
Now that should ring a bell when it comes to the history of Haitian Creole.
Because, again, in French, pretty much like in Old English, you had a similar pattern.
If we take the same examples in English, and you say it in French, we have a similar pattern, where the object, him, is pronounced before the verb, to tell.
So you would say, quelles histoires lui raconteront ils?
You see you have lui before raconteront.
And then here, this is similar examples from the Old English.
Il lui donna quinze livres d'or, where lui-- the him pronoun-- is pronounced before the verb, to give.
So what is that telling us?
It's telling us that, in fact, pretty much like what we showed before in the history of the adverb, verb pattern, that modern English, like Haitian Creole, has shown a drastic change in word order.
You had before, adverb, verb order arising from verb, adverb order.
In this case, you have object, verb order making place for verb, object order.
So if one were to say that Haitian Creole broke the syntax of French, then you would have to also claim that English broke the syntax of Old English and modern English.
And then, you can see that it doesn't make sense.
Why would one case be "creolization" that's supposed to be abnormal change, and the other cases, well, it's just language change?
In fact, what we see is that, even if you look at the history of French in North America, you find similar patterns.
So there are various varieties of French which are not called Creole languages, which are just called Missouri French or Louisiana French.
And what you find in these varieties of French are similar patterns.
Again, in European French, you would say, ils me verront.
They will see me.
Here, you will say, je te mettrai tout en blanc.
This is Parisian French, where you have the object comes before the verb in those two patterns.
Or you would say, je l'enterrerai dans les feuilles, where you have the pronoun, le-- which is elided as l'-- coming before the verb.
Now I picked these examples because I found instances of these same patterns in Cajun friends and Missouri French where you have a different order.
so here you see, you say, il v'ont voir moi.
This is Cajun French.
What's striking here is that the object pronoun, moi, is pronounced after the verb-- il v'nont voir moi.
Actually, there isn't much difference.
It's just that the verb, the non-finite form, you say, voir, which means to see.
It's not finite.
It doesn't take agreement on it or tense.
The tense expressed, by the way, the verb that comes before.
It's like, I will see you, or I will see me, or they will see me.
You get the marker before the verb to express the future.
And then, you get the object after the verb.
And the same is true here.
J'vas mettre tou** tout en blanc.
Again, the key form here is the object pronoun, tou**, which comes after mettre, which is not like European French.
It's very unlike European French.
And here as well-- m'as enterrer elle dans les feuilles.
Again, elle is the pronoun.
It comes after the verb.
So in all three of these patterns, you'll find something which is very Creole-like, right?
Like in Louisiana, there is a Creole.
But this is not the Creole.
This is French.
This is Cajun French.
This is Missouri French in the last two examples.
So what does that mean?
It means that Cajun and Missouri French, like Haitian Creole, they exhibit the same sort of patterns.
Where European French has object, verb order, those French varieties have the reverse pattern.
The conclusion for now is that, here too, we have the clear appearance of Creole-like patterns in those varieties which are not called Creoles.
So it is pretty much the same argument as before that you find those linguistic types of changes in non-Creole languages.
So then, what's the value of positing that you have particular changes that are specifically Creole, like creolization?