Then there is the case of a very small vocabulary. Learn more about how sounds change in languages. Tones are hard to learn if your language doesn’t have tones. Fanakalo speakers tend to replace all those click sounds they just become ‘k’ in Fanakalo. They are very difficult to learn after you have passed a certain critical phase of language acquisition ability. One would predict that the first thing that would go in any click language would be those clicks. (Fanakalo developed among the people working in mines, who were brought from various places near South Africa.) This indicates that the pidgin probably developed in a situation of coerced labor. In pidgin, Fanakalo means ‘you go do that’. There’s a pidgin Zulu very commonly spoken in South Africa-Fanakalo, a very simplified Zulu. Zulu is one of the languages that has clicks. There’s the famous example of the clicks in southern Africa. Pidgins also drop the sounds that are harder to learn. The extra vowel sounds that we have in languages tend to be leached out in pidgins. But, pidgins actually do tend to drop down to only five basic vowels. The spelling system of English is notoriously awful, and we just learn to deal with that misfit between how we actually talk and what these alphabetic symbols are. The symbols are just a vague representation of the enormous complexity that is going on in languages. So, we have not just ‘ah’, ‘ay’, ‘ee’, ‘oh’, ‘oo’, but also ‘aa’, ‘eh’, ‘ay’, ‘ee’, ‘ih’, ‘uh’-we have all sorts of vowel sounds. But that actually is an abbreviation of the actual number of vowel sounds we have. English has five vowel symbols in its alphabet-a, e, i, o, and u. The sound system in a pidgin is very simplified. Let us first look at the sound system in pidgins compared to languages. (Image: Anna Kutukova/Shutterstock) Vowels in Pidgins Pidgins develop when people of totally different languages begin to communicate with each other. Let us look at what distinguishes pidgins from proper languages. What defines a pidgin is the massive simplification that occurs when it is formed from mixing other languages. , Columbia University Pidgins may appear to be languages, but they are actually not.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |