So I'm learning Tok Pisin (Orait, nau mi lanim Tok Pisin)

[valency]

And it's going pretty well so far, I can read and understand 90% of what's in a newspaper, very slowly, and can understand basic speech if it's not too quick. If you're wondering, Tok Pisin headlinese looks like this:

Raskol kilim MTC fainol yia Bogenvil sumatin
[Rascal attacks MTC final-year Bogenville student]

Kwin i gat pasin bilong laikim na luksave long pipel
[The Queen has a profound affection for and a real understanding [luksave = to see-know] of people.]

Barack Obama win gen
[Barack Obama wins again]

Underneath this story, examples from two pictures of Mitt Romney supporters on election day, taken before and after the election results became clear:

Picture 1: Confident looking white people, with caption: Ol sapota i bin strong...
[Supporters were riding high]

Picture 2:
MIserable looking white people, with caption: Bel sore namel long ol Ripabliken sapota...
[Despair (lit.: sorry-stomach (seat of visceral emotions in PNG culture)) among Republican supporters]

So anyway, it's a blast, and really useful to study because of the fact that Tok PIsin is, in a very real sense, a real, functioning, occuring-in-the-wild conlang, one that has hit the big time and become an actual natlang. What I mean by this is that it served as an L2 interlanguage acquired mostly in adulthood for most of its history, with the first significant population of native speakers only arising in the past two generations. It was not a language designed by any one individual, but an interlanguage that was forged by the spontaneous and decentralized efforts of generations of sailors, plantation slaves, overseers, administrative officers and indigenous people, tracing a line from the trade languages of the South Pacific through to the plantation jargon in the Queensland cane fields through to the "broken english" of the Australian administration of the British imperial territory of PNG.

(I think the evidence of how Tok Pisin evolved for most of its history as an L2 language is a serious challenge to the "immaculate conception" theory of creolegenesis championed by Bickerton and his bioprogram hypothesis, where you just raise young children around a bunch of inconsistent blundering adults trying and mostly failing to speak a bastardised pidgin language and they will magically transform this impoverished stimulus, with their amazing faculty of universal grammar, into a real living creole language, in only one generation.)

For those who have posted about languages with minimal grammatical categories and minimalistic lexicon, Tok Pisin is an experiment in both: It has shrunk the number of prepositions down to three and is highly synthetic, with a very small stock of core lexemes with which it builds up its lexicon (traditionally at least -- not so much now due to wholescale and promiscuous borrowing from English.) Infamously, it has just three prepositions: LONG, BILONG and WANTAIM, with LONG and BILONG together doing 90% of the work. It is hence the most unbelievably "long-y" language in existence. To the untrained ear, it sounds a lot like this:

..... LONG... LONGLONG... .. BILONG ....LONG.............LONG.............LONG........BILONG...LONG...

But aesthetics were not the key objective: Tok PIsin evolved as a means of communication, and for that, it works fine. In a future post, I will discuss more of the syntax of this fascinating language.

[finlay]

It's not a conlang...

[valency]

I am not arguing that it is a conglang now. I am arguing that it arose out of a conlang. You got a problem with that?

[clawgrip]

That's what he is taking issue with. Tok Pisin developed from a pidgin, not a conlang. Conlangs and pidgins are fundamentally different, because conlangs are consciously planned and designed before they are put into use, while pidgins are develop from use without planning.

I would like you to share more information about Tok Pisin though since it's always been kind of interesting to me.

[Melteor]

It looks a lot like Bislama.

[Gulliver]

That's what he is taking issue with. Tok Pisin developed from a pidgin, not a conlang. Conlangs and pidgins are fundamentally different, because conlangs are consciously planned and designed before they are put into use, while pidgins are develop from use without planning.

Yes... I think you sort of mean the right thing but are using the wrong vocabulary for it. Creolization is a fairly specific and ridiculously well-documented process.

[valency]

Well, I should say that I am very unfashionable and I subscribe to the monogenetic/nautical origin theory of creolegenesis, which I understand is desperately unfashionable. I am happy to be proven wrong.
But I do have evidence for my conclusion. I believe that one can identify a "nautical core" in Tok Pisin, the lexemes that clearly derive from a simple shipboard and portside jargon. One piece of evidence: Tok Pisin (and similar creoles, such as the implausibly similar Bislama on Vanuatu) have a number of grammaticalized verbs that are used in a large number of serial verb contexts, as well as some prepositions and other function words. I believe these words, and not others, have been grammaticalized because they are some of the oldest parts of the language and hence the only parts that were salient and available for grammaticalization at its earliest stage of development. They include

Stat (=Start)
Stap (=Stop)
Kam (=Come)
Go (=Go)
Wok (=Work)
Les (=Rest)
Mek (=Make, Do)
Save (=Know, understand)
Laik (=Want, Desire)
Inap (=Enough)
Olsem (=All Same)

Tok Pisin's function words are extremely transparent in their spatial nature, and I believe these words are regular enough that they show evidence of systematic, conscious design. I realize this is controversial. But in short, when you look at Tok Pisin enough, it looks very "con-langy", with a number of systematic regularities that look very much like the result of a-priori design decisions, rather than the sort of warts and inconsistencies and irregularites that occur in natural languages (not the Tok Pisin doesn't have inconsistencies of course!)

I believe Tok Pisin was originally designed (yes, consciously designed) as a simple interlanguage for sailors to communicate aboard ship, in trade, and in port, when no other common language was available. The core function words are adapted to that purpose, and there are clearly major naval influences in Tok Pisin.

For example, a rope is (traditionally) a "lain" in Pisin, not a "rope", you "go about", you don't "turn around", there are lexical primitives for different kinds of sail, and so on. According to Mihalic's 1957 dictionary, sails have a special verb for being raised: Haisapim sel (=Hoist up), and a special verb for drawing in a sail: to Taitim sel (as in "Tight sail"), rather than, say, "liptimap sel" and "pulim sel i kam". None of this makes much sense if it arose in the Queensland sugar plantations! The jargon must have been adopted by Queensland overseers from a older naval interlanguage. A simple one perhaps comprising just of a few directional verbs, a few manner words, and a handful of "psuedo-modals" like "you [like]" and "you [save?]".

But all this is getting ahead of the discussion. I'm not ready for a dissertation defense! But I would like to talk about those core function verbs above and how they enter into serial verb constructions, because it really is interesting!

[valency]

It looks a lot like Bislama.

Yes, it does. I believe the similarity can't be explained except that both proto-Bislama (biche de mer) and Queensland plantation pidgin both descend from the same common ancestor, South Seas Nautical Pidgin. If we were inferring the existence of Indo-European, this would be uncontroversial. Although I don't doubt the Sprachbund effect and the fact that Vanuatu also had some blackbirded workers in Queensland, I simply find it hard to believe there was enough cultural cross-contract between the two countries during the colonial period to explain the similarities through simple language diffusion.

[Noriega]

Here's some modern, vernacular Tok Pisin, with English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRrGDERE3CI

[clawgrip]

Well, I should say that I am very unfashionable and I subscribe to the monogenetic/nautical origin theory of creolegenesis, which I understand is desperately unfashionable. I am happy to be proven wrong.
But I do have evidence for my conclusion. I believe that one can identify a "nautical core" in Tok Pisin, the lexemes that clearly derive from a simple shipboard and portside jargon. One piece of evidence: Tok Pisin (and similar creoles, such as the implausibly similar Bislama on Vanuatu) have a number of grammaticalized verbs that are used in a large number of serial verb contexts, as well as some prepositions and other function words. I believe these words, and not others, have been grammaticalized because they are some of the oldest parts of the language and hence the only parts that were salient and available for grammaticalization at its earliest stage of development. They include

Stat (=Start)
Stap (=Stop)
Kam (=Come)
Go (=Go)
Wok (=Work)
Les (=Rest)
Mek (=Make, Do)
Save (=Know, understand)
Laik (=Want, Desire)
Inap (=Enough)
Olsem (=All Same)

Tok Pisin's function words are extremely transparent in their spatial nature, and I believe these words are regular enough that they show evidence of systematic, conscious design. I realize this is controversial. But in short, when you look at Tok Pisin enough, it looks very "con-langy", with a number of systematic regularities that look very much like the result of a-priori design decisions, rather than the sort of warts and inconsistencies and irregularites that occur in natural languages (not the Tok Pisin doesn't have inconsistencies of course!)

I believe Tok Pisin was originally designed (yes, consciously designed) as a simple interlanguage for sailors to communicate aboard ship, in trade, and in port, when no other common language was available. The core function words are adapted to that purpose, and there are clearly major naval influences in Tok Pisin.

For example, a rope is (traditionally) a "lain" in Pisin, not a "rope", you "go about", you don't "turn around", there are lexical primitives for different kinds of sail, and so on. According to Mihalic's 1957 dictionary, sails have a special verb for being raised: Haisapim sel (=Hoist up), and a special verb for drawing in a sail: to Taitim sel (as in "Tight sail"), rather than, say, "liptimap sel" and "pulim sel i kam". None of this makes much sense if it arose in the Queensland sugar plantations! The jargon must have been adopted by Queensland overseers from a older naval interlanguage. A simple one perhaps comprising just of a few directional verbs, a few manner words, and a handful of "psuedo-modals" like "you [like]" and "you [save?]".

But all this is getting ahead of the discussion. I'm not ready for a dissertation defense! But I would like to talk about those core function verbs above and how they enter into serial verb constructions, because it really is interesting!

It seems obvious that the core vocabulary is influenced by sailors, but what specifically leads you to believe that it was consciously designed? What makes you think someone decided, for example, "We will call rope 'lain', and we will have a specific word for hoisting sails." You say that the spacial nature of those core verbs is quite transparent. What do you mean by that? Can you provide some concrete examples of the "conlangy regularities" that exceed the regularity of any natural languages? I am skeptical, but I would like to see what evidence you have.

That's what he is taking issue with. Tok Pisin developed from a pidgin, not a conlang. Conlangs and pidgins are fundamentally different, because conlangs are consciously planned and designed before they are put into use, while pidgins are develop from use without planning.

Yes... I think you sort of mean the right thing but are using the wrong vocabulary for it. Creolization is a fairly specific and ridiculously well-documented process.

What's the correct vocabulary for it?

[valency]

It seems obvious that the core vocabulary is influenced by sailors, but what specifically leads you to believe that it was consciously designed? What makes you think someone decided, for example, "We will call rope 'lain', and we will have a specific word for hoisting sails." You say that the spacial nature of those core verbs is quite transparent. What do you mean by that? Can you provide some concrete examples of the "conlangy regularities" that exceed the regularity of any natural languages? I am skeptical, but I would like to see what evidence you have.

OK, can I defer most of this? To some extent this is a semantic debate about to what extent a pidgin can be said to be "designed" by its speakers. I'm sure that South Seas Nautical Pidgin (or Interlanguage), which we have substantial evidence for (it existed as Biche-La-Mar in Vanuatu in the 1840s, and much earlier in a Portugese-lexified form throughout the south pacific, which is where "save", to know, present in most pidgins, comes from) was the work of multiple hands. But it certainly wasn't a natural language, nor was it a creole. But it couldn't have been merely guestures and haphazard stumbling efforts at communication. It was already at a quite mature stage in the 1840s, since Tok Pisin (in prevailing theory, originating from blackbirded Queensland laborers) and Bislama (originating from Biche-La-Mar jargon starting from the 1840s) are mutually intelligible to their speakers (with some effort).

By "transparent in their spatial nature" (I should perhaps say temporal-spatial), I mean that the core grammatical function words of Tok Pisin mostly have to do with carrying things around, or stopping, or finishing, or starting, or going, or coming. Or sometimes with desiring something, or something being equal to something else, or something being enough in exchange for something else. I believe it reasonable to claim that the core lexicon was developed by many hands, largely with conscious intent, and incorporated those words and concepts useful for trade.