At 11:09:13 AM on Friday, March 28, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:
> In the books I read, the hallmark of a creole is the loss
> of grammatical categories. Check up on Afrikaans.
Traditionally a creole arises from a pidgin when it becomes
a birth tongue. This rules out English, French, and
Afrikaans. Some writers have attempted to extend the term
to cover all languages with features similar to those
generalized from creoles; this, in my opinion, robs the term
of its primary and most useful meaning. (There is also some
question as to what features should be included.) Others
have used the term 'creoloid' in this sense. This is less
objectionable, but it's not clear that any special term is
needed for this type of contact phenomenon. For those of us
who retain the traditional meaning, 'creole' describes the
genesis of the language, not its structure.
Brian