Bastard Tongues Quotes

“English has a single verb "to be," which occurs in a variety of contexts. The Guyanese have three verbs for the same set of functions. Or rather two verbs plus what we linguists call a "zero form," a verb that is "not phonologically realized" and looks to the layman like nothing at all:

I am hungry = me hongry.
The boy is laze = di bai lazy.

This is typically what happens when the predicate is an adjective. If it's a noun, you get yet another a:

I am captain = me a kyapn.

However, if the predicate is an expression indicating location, de must be used:

I am in Georgetown = me de a Jarjtong.

If there is no predicate (as in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") then the meaning must be the same as "exist," and again de is used:

God is/exists - Gad de.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“But even without experiments, the evidence from bastard tongues show beyond doubt that a major part of language learning comes from the brain rather than experience. In those languages we see the unmistakable signature of a capacity all of us share, or rather have shared earlier in our lives-unless you're a really precocious reader, you've probably lost it by now. It's the capacity to acquire a full human language under almost any circumstances-even a language that could not have been learned, since it did not exist before the first generation that acquired it.

All of us have used this capacity once in our lives, when we acquired our first language. We didn't learn the language of our parents by rote, as is shown by all the "mistakes" children make-things that would not have been mistakes if what we'd been learning had been a Creole. We didn't really "learn," in the accepted sense of the word. Rather we re-created our parents' language. But in those rare cases where most of the community doesn't know that language, and there's no other established language they all do know, children will take whatever scraps of language they can find and build as efficiently with those scraps as they would with the words and structures of a long-established language like English.

What they build from those scarps won't be exactly the same everywhere. It can't be, because the scraps will be different in different places and they will incorporate into the new language whatever they can scavenge from the scraps-more in some places than in others. But the model into which those scraps are incorporated will reveal the same basic design wherever those children are and whoever they are, and similar structures will emerge, no matter what languages their parents spoke.

For Creoles are not bastard tongues after all. Quite the contrary: they are the purest expression we know of the human capacity for language. Other languages creak and groan under the burden of time. Like ships on a long voyage, they are encrusted with the barnacles of freaky constructions, illogical exceptions, obsolete usages. Their convoluted recesses facilitate lying and deceit. But Creoles spring pure and clear from the very fountain of language, and their emergence, through all the horrors of slavery, represents a triumph of all that's strongest and most enduring in the human spirit.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“The downside of higher education is that it gives you the confidence to maintain baseless fantasies in defiance of common sense. Ordinary folk are humble in the face of common sense; they have no agenda, and unlike academics, they know they don't know very much, so they act accordingly. But if you think you know a lot, and you've cemented that lot with a carapace of theory, you become immune to new facts and commonsense reasoning, and you have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that contradicts your agenda.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“History's mostly written by white folk. It's not so much that they're racist as it is that they naturally tend to see things through the spectacles of their own culture, and it requires a constant effort to get past this.

The history of language is no exception. Accordingly, when people think about pidgins they immediately think of Pidgin English, Pidgin French, Pidgin of some European language or other. The idea of the big white guy on top, and all the little nonwhite guys under him struggling to cope with the sophisticated complexities of his language, is so firmly fixed in our minds that the idea of a pidgin based on a language of nonwhites, clumsily and haltingly spoken by members of the master race, seems almost inconceivable.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“There had to be something near racial parity in the early stages because setting up the infernal machine required at least as many Europeans as Africans.

Consequently, the original contact language had to be not too far from the language of the slave owners. Because at this stage Europeans were teaching Africans what they had to do, the contact language had to be intelligible to native speakers of the European language. Because so many interactions were between Europeans and Africans, the latter would have much better access to that European language than at any later stage in plantation history. We should remember that Africans, unlike modern Americans, do not regard monolingualism as a natural state, but expect to have to use several languages in the course of their lives. (In Ghana, our house-boy, Attinga, spoke six languages-two European, four African-and this was nothing out of the ordinary.)

But as soon as the infrastructure was in place, the slave population of sugar colonies had to be increased both massively and very rapidly. If not, the plantation owners, who had invested significant amounts of capital, would have gone bankrupt and the economies of those colonies would have collapsed.

When the slave population ballooned in this way, new hands heavily outnumbered old hands. No longer did Europeans instruct Africans; now it was the older hands among the Africans instructing the new ones, and the vast majority of interactions were no longer European to African, the were African to African. Since this was the case, there was no longer any need for the contact language to remain mutually intelligible with the European language. Africans in positions of authority could become bilingual, using one language with Europeans, another with fellow Africans. The code-switching I found in Guyana, which I had assumed was a relatively recent development, had been there, like most other things, from the very beginning.

In any case, Africans in authority could not have gone on using the original contact language even if they'd wanted to. As we saw, it would have been as opaque to the new arrivals as undiluted French or English. The old hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with the new hands. And, needless to add, the new hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with one another.

Since new hands now constituted a large majority of the total population, the primitive pidgin soon became the lingua franca of that population. A minority of relatively privileged slaves (house slaves and artisans) may have kept the original contact language alive among themselves, thus giving rise to the intermediate varieties in the continuum that confronted me when I first arrived in Guyana. (For reasons still unknown, this process seems to have happened more often in English than in French colonies.) But it was the primitive, unstructured pidgin that formed the input to the children of the expansion phase.

Therefore it was the children of the expansion phase-not the relatively few children of the establishment phase, the first locally born generation, as I had originally thought-who were the creators of the Creole. They were the ones who encountered the pidgin in its most basic and rudimentary form, and consequently they were the ones who had to draw most heavily on the inborn knowledge of language that formed as much a part of their biological heritage as wisdom teeth or prehensile hands.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“You might think that in any contact between folk speaking mutually unintelligible languages, some of the few things that would surely get through would be question words: who? what? when? which? where? how? why? After all, people who have trouble understanding one another must be constantly asking questions. Well, you'd be wrong. Typically, a Creole will acquire just one question word from its dominant European language. It might be "who," or "what," or "which" - it makes no difference, that word henceforth will signify just "Q for question." Then to this you have to add another word: "Q person" for "who?" "Q time" for "when?" "Q place" for "where?" and so on. Often it's even more opaque. Haitian Creole for "who?" is ki moun. Moun is the Haitian version of French monde, "world," so you might initially translate this as "who world?" Then you'd remember that le monde is used by the French to mean "people in general," so ki moun really does mean "Q person," or "who?"

Not all Creoles have the full deck of two-piece question words-for a variety of reasons, some got lost or never took shape-but almost every Creole has at least one or two. In the oldest form of Guyanese, wissaid, derived from "which side," was the chosen for for "Q place." That meant that side could thereafter mean "place" and only "place" and therefore could no longer mean "side." But something meaning "side" still had to be said, so they co-opted "corner"; a road corner now means "by the side of the road."

And these are only a few kinds of thing that can happen to words. For example, nouns can and often do turn into verbs. You don't dust a room, you cobweb it; you don't steal something, you thief (pronounced teef) it. This creates new gaps, which in turn have to be filled; since thief is now a verb, a thief has to become a teefman.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

“When the infernal machine of plantation slavery began to grind its wheels, iron laws of economics came into play, laws that would lead to immeasurable suffering but would also, and equally inevitably, produce new languages all over the world – languages that ironically, in the very midst of man's inhumanity to man, demonstrated the essential unity of humanity.”
― Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages