196: Creole discussion: Poincy replies to Lucien

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: Jean Poincy <caineve@idt.net>

Charlot, don't worry about your lateness in linguistic 101, Professor
Linguist decided to withdraw the course he introduced; you will not be
reprimanded for being late. Students are on their own, like it always
happens in Ayiti even with the professor in the class :-).  As a
dedicated student willing to learn the hard way without the precious
guidance of the professor, I want to comment on your note on broken
French, what Ayitian used to be early on, at its inception. Please,
allow me.

	Your examples are pure phonetical distortions of a language and can't
be assimilated as broken French. Yes! this sort of distortion is what
gives birth to a different language and is at the heart of new idioms
which are used to mean different things from their intended meaning. It
is the evidence of one people's ignorance of a foreign language and lack
of means to find out what the words/phrases mean. It's a situation when
two different people speaking different languages are met and must
communicate, a fertile ground for creole to be born.

	The broken language stems from the fact that a people is using key
terms of a foreign language to mean the correct thing, but messing up
the whole syntactical structure, by misplacing or eliminating completely
some components in phrases without betraying the idea to be conveyed.
The absence of these characteristics from your examples prevents them
from being broken French.


Ayiti has lived, lives and will live
Mozeb