Pidgin English«—Its Perspectives as Seen by Lin Yutang in the 1930s (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Russian-Chinese Pidgin An attempt at the sociology of grammar
Language Ecology 2 (1&2), 2018
For a long period in history, the border between Russian Empire and China was a place of constant and intensive cultural and language contacts, which resulted in the emergence of the Russian-Chinese Pidgin. In the 19th century it was used by no less than one million people around the border with China, in an area of more than 3,000 kilometers long. The grammatical analysis of Russian-Chinese Pidgin reveals several features (e.g. using the imperative as a basic verb form), which can be interpreted not only linguistically but sociologically as well, because they are intertwined with the social positions of the contact groups and their attitudes towards each other. Interestingly , features found in the pidgin's grammar have certain parallels in foreigner directed talk used nowadays by Russian speakers when communicating with Chinese speakers in the border area, which may indicate there are rather stable linguistic stereotypes associated with these contact situations.
Language and hybridization: Pidgin tales from the China coast
This essay looks at the history of pidgin and creole studies in the context of linguistic theory with particular reference to the study of ‘Chinese pidgin English’. It argues that, although linguistics makes the claim to be an objective and systematic science, an examination of the past reveals that its own discourses have been shaped by a range of powerful forces from outside the disciplinary study of language. In the case of pidgin and creole linguistics (or ‘creolistics’), one obvious influence is from European ‘race theory’ of the late nineteenth century, seen most clearly in the adoption of a vocabulary which includes terms such as monogenesis, polygenesis and hybridization. In the case of Chinese pidgin English, early accounts of the use of ‘broken English’ are found in the memoirs of sailors and merchants on the South China coast, and these were later supplemented by missionary and colonial accounts from Canton, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China. The most influential account was that of Leland (1876), whose ‘comic’ account of Pidgin-English Sing-song contributed to the formation of a cultural imaginary of Chinese people at a time of growing anti-Chinese racism in the UnitedStates and Britain. Although many pidgin and creole scholars have denied a direct link between racial mixing and language mixing, it appears evident that the fear (and attraction) of racial miscegenation was at the heart of many western responses to pidgin English in China.
English as Pidgin or Creole: one guise of English in the world
Research Reports of the Department of International Studies No 11, Kochi University, 2010 (国際社会文化研究第11号). pp 71-95
England and other world English language communities, including Japan. Issues and problems inherent with this guise of English are considered. Creole variety development evidences the primacy of communication functions over language form as a factor in language evolutionpeople mix language where and when they have to, intentionally and unintentionally. This is how new varieties of a language are formed, as a basilect normally departing from a standard variety. Further, people as individuals are also apt to mix languages as they negotiate their ways through different language communities and cultures. Finally the paper discusses creolization and English regarding language pedagogy. ピジン／クレオールとしての英語---世界で使用される英語の一変種 [ 柔軟性のある異文化間コミュニケーションの開発国際社会文化研究第. 平成 21 年(2010) 10 月 11 号 ] 本稿ではイギリスおよび日本を含む英語圏における英語のクレオール化について。 考察し、さまざまな地域で使用される英語に一貫して見られる諸問題について検討 する。また、クレオール化と英語について、言語教育の観点から議論する。
China Coast Pidgin: Texts and contexts
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2010
In this paper we revisit some long-standing questions regarding the origins and structure of China Coast Pidgin (CCP), also known as Chinese Pidgin English. We first review the historical context of the China Trade which formed the ecology for the development of CCP. We then review the available sources, focusing on newly transcribed data from Chinese-language instructional materials. These sources provide fresh evidence for grammatical structure in CCP, and demonstrate strong influence from Cantonese as the major substrate language. Comparison with English-language sources shows systematic contrasts which point to likely variation between Anglophone and Sinophone lects, as in the case of wh-questions which show regular wh-fronting in English sources and pervasive use of wh-in-situ in Chinese sources. This conclusion helps to resolve the debate over the Sinitic features of CCP.
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS) Oxford University Press. , 2013
Chinese Pidgin Russian was spoken between the last decades of the eighteenth and the middle of the twentieth century in the vast territories along the Russian–Chinese border in southern Siberia and the Russian Far East, in northern China in the city of Harbin. The article presents main grammatical features of the pidgin and a sample text.
2008
Chinese Transcription of Foreign Words Prior to the 19th Century Geoff Wade Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore Abstract Chinese languages have, since their emergence, been in contact with the languages of non-Sinitic peoples. The resultant language contact has meant both representation and borrowing of non-Chinese lexical items in Chinese languages. This article provides a number of vignettes showing how nonChinese languages have either represented or borrowed from non-Chinese languages over the last 2,000 years. The influences of Indic, Persian, Arab, and Mongol languages on Chinese and the way new lexical items were represented are addressed in a chronological format. This is followed by a brief examination of the attempts to formalize Chinese knowledge of foreign languages, culminating in the emergence of various vocabularies of foreign languages represented phonetically in Chinese characters. This was the format adopted when the Chinese began representing ...
Lin Yutang as an Advocate of the 'Discursive Classical Chinese' (yuluti) Language Register
Studia Orientalia Slovaca, 2018
(1895-1976) is one of the most noted intellectuals active in the reform of written Chinese, and belongs to the circle of influential figures of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s who were promoting baihuawen ('written vernacular') as the language (or rather: language register) for a new literature and as a medium of learned discourse. 1 However, the term baihuawen itself, despite having been a widely discussed issue for decades, was never easy to define since as a language with the aspiration to become a nationwide normative written language close to speech, it could only become a compromise within the diversity of various languages spoken in China. 2 In this respect, we should talk about diglossia-a hierarchical structured