Origins of a Creole

Origins of a Creole PDF Author: Bart Jacobs
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511071
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curaçao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax. Papiamentu is thus shown to constitute a case of 'language contact reduplicated' in that a creole underwent a second significant restructuring process (relexification). These explicit claims and their rigorous underpinning will set standards for both the study of Papiamentu and creole studies at large and will be received with great interest in the wider field of contact linguistics.

Origins of a Creole

Origins of a Creole PDF Author: Bart Jacobs
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511071
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curaçao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax. Papiamentu is thus shown to constitute a case of 'language contact reduplicated' in that a creole underwent a second significant restructuring process (relexification). These explicit claims and their rigorous underpinning will set standards for both the study of Papiamentu and creole studies at large and will be received with great interest in the wider field of contact linguistics.

The Story of French New Orleans

The Story of French New Orleans PDF Author: Dianne Guenin-Lelle
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496804872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

Creoles of Color of the Gulf South

Creoles of Color of the Gulf South PDF Author: James H. Dormon
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Eight essays explore the social and historical foundations of mixed-race people in Louisiana and along the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico, specific features of Gulf Creole culture, and ethnic and identity developments during the 20th century. The cultural features include Mardi Gras, zydeco music, and the place of the language in the larger New World French Creole. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Haitian Creole

Haitian Creole PDF Author: Albert Valdman
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781845533878
Category : Creole dialects, French
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Haitian Creole is the creole language with the largest number of speakers: about ten million in Haiti and two million in diaspora communities in North American, France, and the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the French overseas departments. Haitian Creole presents a comprehensive view of the structure and development of Haitian Creole. It provides a detailed analysis of the phonology and grammar of the language and points out key differences between these two fundamental aspects of the language and corresponding features of French, its original target language. The book contains a detailed description of the productive strategies of vocabulary development and deals with the origin of Haitian Creole, as well as its relationship to the other French-based creoles in Louisiana, the Caribbean, French Guiana, and the Indian Ocean. A signal innovation with regard to other descriptions of the language is the treatment of linguistic variation, both in geographical dialects and variation as determined by social factors, as well as the presentation of earlier forms of Haitian Creole, as attested by texts from the Colonial period. Another major contribution is the discussion of language planning and related issues concerning the use of Haitian Creole in education and its status relative to French, the other officially recognized language of Haiti.

Roots of language

Roots of language PDF Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author's most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).

A History of Creole Trinidad, 1956-2010

A History of Creole Trinidad, 1956-2010 PDF Author: Raymond Ramcharitar
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030756343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book offers a history of post-Independence Trinidad and Tobago. It explores how culture and politics have operated in tandem to shape the society. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including literature, government reports, official statistics, the press and the Carnival, it critically analyses the popular conception of creolization as the driving force in modern Trinidad and Tobago. Ultimately, the book examines the way in which Trinidad and Tobago's unique ethnic and political ecosystems contribute to its national character.

Roots of Creole Structures

Roots of Creole Structures PDF Author: Susanne Michaelis
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027252556
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai'i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.

Creole New Orleans

Creole New Orleans PDF Author: Arnold R. Hirsch
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807117743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early history of Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joesph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creole through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the themes discerned by Logsdon and Bell from the turn of the century to the 1980s, examining the transformation of the city's racial politics. Collectively, these essays fill a major void in Louisiana history while making a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, ethnicity, and race relations. The book will serve as a cornerstone for future study of the history of New Orleans.

Creating the Creole Island

Creating the Creole Island PDF Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333999
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma PDF Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807130362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities. Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation. A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe. A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.