#pidgin english

[okierazorback]

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,735

yeah I know you did not ask! You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts. There is a deeply profound quote by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld that goes: “Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don’t stare at it. It’s too…

[rastronomicals]

10:27 PM EST January 1, 2025:

Elvis Costello - "Pidgin English" From the album Imperial Bedroom (July 2, 1982)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under:    Angry Young Men, starting to mellow out, maybe just a      little bit

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

niche ass post feel free to disregard:

as a linguistics nerd, it’s always fascinating to me how dan and phil both manage to mispronounce so many words but always in a different way to each other. like “consummate” in the most recent dapg vid? dan pronouncing it consjumate/consyoomate and phil pronouncing it conʃumate/conshewmate and neither of them acknowledging they said different words? adding a palatal approximate (/j/ or “ya”) i can excuse kind of but i cannot find a single instance of adding a postalvelar fricative (/ʃ/ or “sh”) being accepted pronunciation. oh to be a fly on the wall in the phouse getting to gather linguistic data on them, then making a corpus of phanology (phorpus, if you will) <3

[kemetic-dreams]

The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Although its vocabulary largely derives from 18th-century French, its grammar is that of a West African Volta-Congo language branch, particularly the Fongbe and Igbo languages. It also has influences from Spanish, English, Portuguese, Taino, and other West African languages. 

It is not mutually intelligible with standard French, and has its own distinctive grammar. Haitians are the largest community in the world speaking a modern creole language, according to some sources. 

However, this is disputable, as Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based Creole language, is attested by some sources to have a larger number of speakers than that of Haitian Creole and other French-based Creole languages, particularly if non-native speakers are included.

[m1dori-eyes]

Be wary of linguistics rant, Elden Ring ahead

Ok so I just made a different post about this but I need to elaborate: The Elden Ring messaging system is legitimately such an interesting microcosm about how language is used as a tool and shaped to suit the needs it's being used for. I could actually make an entire study about how this can be used to better understand the formation of pidgin languages in the same way that epidemiologists studied the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft to better understand the mechanics of how disease affects human behavior. Video games as an academic lens into peoples' minds has always been a fascinating topic to me, and by the end of this, you'll see why.

First off, message.

So for those not indoctrinated into the series/game, Elden Ring is a big open world game made by From Software, which won game of the year 2022 among some other awards (if you've played it or know anything about it, just skip to the next header). Each player plays as a Tarnished and explores this massive environment called The Lands Between individually, but if another player is walking in the same area that you are, you can see their "ghost" moving through the world, and you can "invade" or "be summoned" into another player's iteration of the world in order to briefly interact with it before returning to your own iteration. This occupies a weird space in between singleplayer and multiplayer, with these heavily limited and kind of random methods of interaction between players, but that's not the most interesting way of communicating with your fellow Tarnished; that title goes to the messages system. You can write a message onto a small stone, and leave it on the ground, and then that little stone with the message on it will have a random chance to appear in any player's iteration of the world for them to read. This is a tradition which has been going in From Software's games long since before the inception of Elden Ring, although I'm mostly going to be focusing on the message system of that title, because documenting the history of the 13+ years running Soulsbourne franchise is way too much, even for a nerd like me. The point is that messages are a lot more likely to be seen than any other method of player-to-player interaction, and you can even leave little "gestures" to go with them, where the reader can see your character striking a pose while they read the message. What a neat little mechanic, which definitely doesn't have any hidden layers of depth, and certainly wouldn't spawn an entire emergent system of pseudolinguistics, right?

No message ahead, be wary of mimicry

Well, when I said that messages are written by other players, that was a lie. To make a message, you don't type it out with your keyboard, you select what you want to say, from a big list of preset phrases. It works that way for a lot of reasons, foremost of all as a profanity filter, but also to prevent too many spoilers and maintain atmosphere. The sets of phrases are incredibly limiting, famously requiring players to use weird fake old-english diction in order to express a simple thought (Strong foe ahead, be weary of death. Look carefully ahead, visions of item. Suffering, o suffering, why is it always bad luck? etc). This seems like a limitation which would put a serious damper on anyone trying to actually communicate their thoughts, but gamers are a persistent sort, and have a lot of trouble taking no for an answer. They also have way too much time on their hands, and like to solve puzzles, a terrifying combination of traits, and the perfect one to accidentally create a conlang. With the unexpectedly massive audience that this game picked up on launch, millions of people left messages desperately trying to get something across, and if the game's preset vocabulary didn't contain the phrases to express it, they would forge their own path. Any big fans of linguistic history can already tell the direction that this might be going, as we move on into the next chapter:

Teacher, Liar, Lovable Sort

When the game released, there was chaos. The Lands Between are fraught with hidden passages, deception, and blatant bullshit, and the first kind of players leaving messages tried to helpfully communicate what you could trust, and what you couldn't. This is what the message system was intended for after all, giving advice to your peers, and what many people still use it for today. The second kind of players tried to do the opposite, deliberately leading people to their doom, just because they could. The third, and most numerous sort, were simply awestruck at everything the game had to offer, and left a series of remarks on the beauty and humor of the world. The messages left by each group are pretty easy to differentiate to the trained eye, which is the main feature causing me to point out this division of players. Let's call these groups the teachers, the liars, and the lovable sorts. A teacher can be recognized if their messages suggest something within reason, and being backed up by the peer-review of nearby messages to the same effect. If three messages are all sitting on the ground next to eachother, each saying something along the lines of "seek up, look carefully ahead", then a local collage of teachers are trying to let you know about a secret path ahead leading you up towards a hidden objective. However, a single message next to a bloodstained cliff-edge stating "jumping required ahead" is almost certainly a liar, trying to deceive an unsuspecting player into making a dubious leap. Liars sometimes use slightly simpler grammar than teachers do, being less committed to getting their point across. Wait a minute, linguistic variance based on intent? No no, this is just a video game about fighting monsters, surely such an interesting emergent system wouldn't arise from something like that. Lastly, the lovable sorts have the most ranging grammar, spanning from a simple word such as "dog" (a word used colloquially to describe all creatures, from turtles to dragons), to complex sentences requiring the combination of many phrases. However, a lovable sort can be differentiated by the fact that they merely remark upon the world as it is, instead of trying to offer advice to other players, as a teacher or liar might. Some of their most iconic phrases are "Elden ring ahead", used to sarcastically denote a dead end where a player might have been expecting treasure, "you don't have the right, o, you don't have the right" which indicates a locked door, or the world-famous "try finger, but hole", a phrase which explains itself. The most incredible thing about the words of the lovable sort, is that they all require a little bit of thinking to understand their actual meaning, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes like a second language to you! Wait a minute, a second language?

Message? Wasn't expecting introspection

As time went on, the three main groups of message-writers still kept chugging along, creating new works of writing every day, but advancements in understanding of the game's inner workings allowed these messages to become more and more complex. Compound words started to be formed to represent concepts outside of the preset vocabulary, like "skeleton, house" for coffin, "dung, key" to describe the donkeys accompanying traveling merchants, and "edge, lord" being used to refer to the NPC Ensha, a man wearing flamboyant armor made out of bones who takes himself way too seriously. It's worth noting in this section that for a specific period of time, The Lands Between were overtaken by a horde of messages stating only the words "fort, night". Despite the crude and humorous nature of the entire thing, it was clear to see that the linguistic patterns of the Elden Ring community were evolving into their own beast, far beyond the usages that the developers had intended. Words had shed their original meaning, to instead take up contextual meanings based on how players used them, effectively becoming different words entirely. Depending on how you define this, it's either a microcosm of incredibly fast and severe linguistic drift, or the emergence of a new pidgin or conlang entirely. If you really stretch things, you could almost call the message system of Elden Ring an entirely new language in and of itself.

Well done, victory ahead!

I think that video games are an excellent way to observe human behavior under conditions which are controlled, accelerated, and completely recordable, and this is the closest that we've ever seen to an entire language growing completely from scratch. People are always the same, whether you want to call it instinct or just cyclical tendencies, but normally the formation of a new language can take incredible periods of time, hastened only by tragic events like diaspora or massive losses of cultural knowledge (research what's been happening to Gaelic as a spoken language for more info about this sort of thing, it's kind of depressing but is also important to learn about, and there's a lot of people on this site talking about it who can do the topic way more justice than I can). Even for other topics which either require great passage of time, or great tragedy in order to research (I.E. geology or epidemiology, respectively), there are a lot of simulations and predictive models which can tell us how these systems behave without actually experiencing them. Linguistics has never had this sort of thing...until now, perhaps. Obviously there won't be any academic breakthroughs based on a bunch of people online all writing "rump ahead", but it's an incredibly interesting thing to see happening for a field which is so hard to actively advance, and it could lead to actual scientific methods of generating new languages via human interaction for research purposes. Of course, there's always the sizable chance that this goes nowhere and I just wrote this insane rant because I like to type, but if nothing else, I at the very least exposed some of my mutuals to "try finger, but hole".

[streetplants]

Im trying to learn sign language but idk which is "better" (more used)

*When signed using the English grammar system (sign language has its own grammar system)

[vintage-tigre]

[divorcetual]

Jamaican patois my beloved U are suxh a helpful referwnce

[tovaicas]

anyways my friends activated my conlang brain and I've made smth insane as usual

red is influences, blue is Elezen-family languages, green is like a mix bc I see the Alliance cities as having a trade language (that critically is limited to them).

I see Duskwight as a separate language from Black Shroud Elezen (but sharing a lot - easy enough to learn for those speakers). Coerthan and all its derivatives are a whole different language under the Elezen umbrella and isn't mutually intelligible with BSE. Because they split so early, they probably don't share much more than root words and etymologies; within the same family so not difficult to learn for other speakers of Elezen languages, but very distinctly different.

(also I'm not listing them but the branches extend to include other diaspora Elezen languages)

[okierazorback]

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,735

yeah I know you did not ask! You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts. There is a deeply profound quote by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld that goes: “Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don’t stare at it. It’s too…

[rastronomicals]

5:52 AM EDT October 26, 2024:

Elvis Costello - “Pidgin English” From the album Imperial Bedroom (July 2, 1982)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under:    Angry Young Men, starting to mellow out, maybe just a      little bit

–

[concorp]

ive been seeing several posts go around about about sign languages on the qsmp and which different eggs and people would use.

and im thinking… its pretty likely a sort of pidgin sign language has started evolving on the island by now, right? everyone adapting and borrowing and learning different signs from each other.

[choupimaki]

Early season 2 of DOCTOR STONE SPOILERS

I've only seen the beginning of S2 so please no spoil in the notes

-------

So the village people.

They're Senkuu's dad's children yeah ? Well grand [...] grand children.

So first off

You guys are astronauts ! And the dad was a TEACHER ! WHY CANT THE CHILDREN WRITE

LIKE PLEASE

3 yo is old enough to show an interest in writing

Now you've made writing lost knowledge, well done.

I GET that the priority is surviving but it's a lot easier to remember information (ESPECIALLY 100 STORIES) if you can write them down

And the dude would clearly have been able to tear off some bark and carve it

Now the thing is, his direct children (and the other astronauts') probably already speak a weird ass English-Japanese with a bit of Russian sprinkled in pidgin/creole

Maybe that's why he didn't feel like finding new signs for phonemes he doesn't know

Cos there isn't the L from "lollipop" in Japanese nor the very common Russian ы in any of the other 2 languages

But ? That's ok ? I mean, Senkuu's dad doesn't speak that weird creole, only Japanese and English

Although not ideal he can teach them roman letters, even just phonetically (eg the letter i would always be "ee" and never "ay")

And on the subject of the language these children are speaking

There HAS to be stuff they simply didn't have words for, and language HAS to have evolved by the time Senkuu meets the village

How tf do they understand each other ?

To them Senkuu is speaking a weird super old form of their language with a strange accent

To Senkuu they're using words and phonemes he's not used to

Ofc Senkuu speaks Japanese and English, that seems obvious to his character

But I'm not sure of how well he speaks Russian

Adding onto that

Tf does the language look like ???

English, Russian and Japanese are COMPLETELY different from a grammar standpoint

English has subject-verb-object composition, Japanese has subject-object-verb, and Russian has huh .... Cases

Arguably so does English with who/wom but that's besides the point

I don't know much about Russian, I just started learning it so I'm not well versed in it but I've been studying English for 12 years and Japanese on and off for 7 years

Even dumb stuff like talking about the past in a simple way... How would they do it ? English has all these exceptions like "be, was/were, been", and simple past in Japanese is just ます to ました

A mix of these three, evolving for THOUSANDS OF YEARS, would be hardly possible to comprehend even for someone initially fluent in all 3

And even if I can suspend my disbelief to accept that Senkuu speaks all 3 and is smart enough to understand how these might've evolved and communicate with the village ... I can't believe it for other characters.

So far I haven't seen Taijuu and the other girl interacting with the village so I'm ok with it, but the mentalist guy ? Nah ain't no way bro

[geoazie]

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Nigerian Pidgin

Nigerian Pidgin is an English Creole language spoken by 120.7 million people over Nigeria. It is not an official language anywhere, but is used as a lingua franca in Nigeria.

[weirdfishy]

i was thinking abt this bc my cousins and i went out to eat and when we placed our order my cousin used "lee" -- i hadn't thought abt it before even though ik she's been using it for awhile, but recently i've been getting coffee and i've been using "sam". i asked her brother while we were waiting, and he uses "v".

all of our names are Hawaiian, and i personally mostly only really use Sam when i'm on the continent, though if i'm in honolulu/waikiki i do have a tendency to use it

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Make Yu open my eyes to si di wonderful tins wey dey yor law.

Open my eyes [to spiritual truth] so that I may behold Wonderful things from Your law. — Psalm 119:18 | Holy Bible: Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) and Amplified Bible (AMP) Holy Bible: Nigerian Pidgin English © Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc. 2020 in cooperation with The Nigerian Pidgin Translation Committee and The Amplified Bible Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved. Cross References: Psalm 119:17; Psalm 119:19; Psalm 119:129; Isaiah 29:18