Chinese Pidgin English

[Penelope]

Can anyone point me toward some resources on CPE? I've been messing around with pidgins and creoles lately and I'd like to know more about this one, but all I can find online is a lot of "did you know the phrase 'long time no see' comes from Chinese Pidgin English?!" with nothing on the grammar or anything like that.

[Drydic]

Do you mean Singlish?

[Salmoneus]

Do you mean Singlish?

I don't like to second-guess her (an wb Penelope, long time no see!), but from her post I suspect she's talking about Chinese Pidgin English.

Unfortunately, I can't do any better than point out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Pidgin_English, which I'm sure she's already seen.

I would note, however, that you're not necessarily looking for one language. There were Yue and Wu pidgins as well as the Mandarin one, with Cantonese being the original - and pidgins are in any case very variable, so you're probably looking less at one set of rules and more at general tendencies.

Which I guess could be summarised as: more isolating, simpler phonology.

[Penelope]

I did indeed mean the Chinese Pidgin English spoken around the Guangzhou area around the 17th - 19th centuries, although Singlish sounds very interesting and I wouldn't mind resources on that too, or on the Mandarin or other Chinese-English pidgins, especially if good stuff on the original Cantonese CPE is as hard to find as it seems.

(Hi Sal! I've been busy with grad school and everything for the last few years, but I do try to drop by occasionally and see what you guys are up to.)

[Drydic]

Shut the fuck up Sal.