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Creole grammar

adapted from a 10 Jan 97 post by Mike Osipoff

Mark suggested that the sentence "I jus be jus wonderin'", or "I be jus wonderin'", has one too many copulas.

Mark might have been kidding, but it seems to me that "jus" means "only", and "be" is a non-punctual particle, like "stay" in Hawiian Creole English.

And if "Mark be ritin'..." means present time, and "Mark say..." means past time, then those features resemble how those things are dealt with in Creole grammar, as described by Bickerton.

I don't know enough about Ebonics to know whether the rest of its grammar, or even the rest of its verb grammar, resembles Creole. But Bickerton mentioned Creole use of double negaatives, and if Ebonics uses those, that's another similarity.

I should add that, as I suggested before, it turns out that Bickerton explicitly defines a narrower definition of Creole, for the purposes of what he was saying, compared to the broader definition that Mark mentioned.

I'm not saying that an argument that an IAL should be like Creole or child-grammar depends on Ebonics being like Creole, grammatically. But still, this current event involving Ebonics is, especially if the resemblence to Creole grammar turns out to be strong, a reminder that people's grammatical preferences can't easily be ignored, and, in this case, aren't being ignored by govt.

I finally did locate Bickerton's SciAm article, and his book Roots of Language. The Creole grammar, and the English child grammatical tendencies he describes, seem to have a lot more in common with Glosa than with Esperanto. Might that not be an argument for Glosa over E-o?
But there are differences from Glosa.

For instance:
Creole grammar doesn't have an actual past tense. It has an "anterior" tense, and applying that tense, via a particle, puts that verb's action at a different time, depending on whether or not it's a "stative" verb.

Likely most on this list knew this before I found those materials, but I should still elaborate:
A stative verb refers to a state, like liking or wanting something, as opposed to a non-stative "doing" verb like walking or going or hitting, etc.

Stative verbs are automatically non-punctual, and by default are present tense.

Non-stative verbs are by default past tense. They can be made to include the present as a possible meaning by usng the non-punctual particle. For instance, Bickerton's article gives the meaning of "He stay walk" as "He is/was walking".

Maybe the rason why "He like..." is strictly present is because stative verbs are made past by the anterior particle "He bin like..."

The articled points out that a small todler might say "Me sitting highchair", but won't say "Me wanting ice-cream". The child seems to distinguish between stative & non-stative verbs.

Maybe this can make more sense to us adults by saying that present tense has to be non-punctual, and so if there's a way to make things non-punctual (the particle "stay", for instance), then the word "walk", without that particle could reasonably be taken to mean completed action.

Then, the fact that you like something, or that there's a completed action of walking, those things are normally, by default, present conditions, unless a particle is used to say otherwise.

So then "He bin like..." or "He bin walk" simply puts both of those conditions into the past.


Anyway, that way of looking at verb tense is unaccustomed & strange to us adults, but if it would make an IAL more natural for future generations, then I'd vote for including it. But if others indicated that they'd reject the IAL proposal if it had that feature, then I'd favor not including it.

Another difference is something that could easily be fixed with a "retrofit", when the child reaches a certain point in school: the Hawiian Creole English particle "go" indicates future or conditional. It seems that it would often be important to distinguish between those. I don't doubt that Creole speakers have a way to do that when necessary, but a child who'd been raised with Creole grammar could be introduced, at some level in school, to a particle that would make that distinction.


For those who haven't seen that article or book, Creole has particles for Tense, Mode, & Aspect, and any combination of those can be placed before the verb, in the order that they're written in this sentence.

The tense particle makes applies the "anterior" tense to the verb. In Hawiian Creole English (HCE) it's "bin"

The mode particle makes the verb future of conditional. In HCE it's "go".

The aspect particle makes the verb non-punctual, if it isn't already (stative verbs already are). In HCE it's "stay".

Bickerton quotes a number of sentences that are identical, or differ only in some lexical detail. An example, form that list, is:

"I go full Angela Bucket". A 3-year old child in a natlang (English) family was heard to say that. It's also how the same thing is said in Guyanese Creole.

"Where I can put it" is a child sentence which differs from HCE only in that HCE says "Where I can put om?" The important thing of course is that neither switches order in a question.

A y/n question would be indicated only by the rising pitch at the end of the sentence, since there's no question word.


The reason why this is relevant to auxlangs is that there's a good case for using, in an auxlang, grammatical ways that are natural to people first learning to speak.

And it's pointless to debate about "innate". The important thing is that if it's known that kids tend to speak that way (and to continue to as adults in the absence of outside influences, being able to say what they need to say as adults), then there's certainly a case for including that grammar in an auxlang--subject to acceptance by the adults whose acceptance an auxlang needs.


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Copyright © 1997, Jack Durst,
Last updated: 7 July, 1997