Piotr wrote
> For goodness' sake, John! To think that there used to be a happy
innocent nation without the "Communist Manifesto", and you came along
and gave it to them!
I am please to report that people reacted by saying "Em samting
bilong
olgeta waitman tasol" and ignored it completely.
>But surely you could have coined a
plausible Tok Pisin word for "proletarian" (say, proleteri) and
defined it in the introduction as "sampela samting bilong manmeri
etc." This simple technique has worked for all the European
languages.
19th-century Polish had no word for "proletarian", so it borrowed the
international neo-Latin term.
It is hard to determine neologisms in Tok Pisin. Partly because
there is a tendency to introduce "Englishisms", where whites and
educated Papua New Guineans sneak in English terms into their pigin,
much to the disgust and hilarity of true pigin speakers, who talk
about hapcas toktok (half-caste language).
I have heard it suggested that Germanic started as a pigin spoken
along the Amber Coast, and wonder if there are other examples when
Pigins stop easily accepting words from outside their linguistic
horizons. Are there any other Indo-European languages that started
as
a pigin?
Regards
John