Pidgin Quotes

The day your education makes you roll your eyes at your father. The day your exposure makes you call your own mother uncivilized, the day your amazing foreign degrees make you cringe as your driver speaks pidgin english, may you never forget your grandfather was a farmer from Oyo state who never understood english.

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry. If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.

The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.

- See those pidgins? - Yes. - Pidgins know more then they´re letting on. - Do they? - Delia said - You think they carried all those messages, and never read any of them?

Meowing is not counted here, since cats rarely seem to meow at each other. That type of vocalization is usually a "pidgin" language used for getting human's attention: the cat equivalent of "Just talk to them clearly and loudly and they'll get what you mean sooner or later.

The day your education makes you roll your eyes at your father. The day your exposure makes you call your own mother uncivilized, the day your amazing foreign degrees make you cringe as your driver speaks pidgin english, may you never forget your grandfather was a farmer from Oyo state who never understood english.

It was nigh impossible to understand Howard's speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. "They keep 'em hid like precious gold," Mabel said.

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But try as Phoebe might to blend with her peers, it felt like bluffing, mouthing the words to a song she'd never been taught, always a beat late. At best, she fooled them. But the chance to distinguish herself, impress them in the smallest way, was lost. At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class - Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath - such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked-up someone was at a party.

As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, “eroguro nan-sensu” (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”).

There are five species of Pacific salmon in North America: the chum, the coho, the sockeye, the pink, and the Chinook. Each has its own diminutive: the chum is the dog, or the keta, the coho the silver, the sockeye the red, the pink the humpy, and the Chinook is the king. The original Chinook are people of the Pacific Northwest, and their language formed the core of Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trading language that stretched from Alaska to the Columbia River, along what now forms the border of Washington and Oregon, and incorporated the words of many tribes, as well as French and English. Any Canadian will still say Chinook for king, the best and biggest of the fish that the Chinook people traded.

Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me.” Lee said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but it has happened so often to me and to my friends that we take it for granted. If I should go up to a lady or a gentleman, for instance, and speak as I am doing now, I wouldn’t be understood.” “Why not?” “Pidgin they expect, and pidgin they’ll listen to. But English from me they don’t listen to, and so they don’t understand it.” “Can that be possible? How do I understand you?” “That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

Among the world's full adult languages, there are no simple languages, or languages simpler than others. Even rudimentary pidgin codes that serve as linguae francae turn almost immediately into creole languages of great complexity if there are any children around learning those codes as native languages. We also see that many species have vocal skills but no language, and we see that human language can come in different modalities-spoken or signed-with equal levels of grammatical comlexity. Moreover, there are very many separate human languages, not just one, and they accomplish their tasks in ways that often seem surprisingly different. Human languages change over cultural time but do not as a result acquire increased complexity. Indeed, it seems that, at any given time, languages present the same kind of diversity and have the same degree of complexity.

I couldn’t remember what I’d once prayed for or how. It was as if prayer were a foreign language that I’d once known but could no longer remember even in the most pidgin way. I remembered the idea of prayer, the feeling of calm that I’d had even as a child, but it seemed very distant now.

In Amorous Creeping by Stewart Stafford I scaled a trellis in randy pursuit, A rose in teeth for my paramour, A thorn lurking by a naked stem, Palmy, engorged and prescient. A pigeon said to douse my ardour, A talkative fowl, plainly no pidgin, Snorts for this priggish counsel, Blind shoots, driving me upward. A wriggling worm to her chamber, Inside I crept as she lay sleeping, Sweeping a spectral sheet off her, To lay until the dawn chorus sings. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes.

The cork had come out with a ghost of a pop; it was a beautiful sound, regretful, grateful, kind. "There,

(The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.)

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.

Dopo i tanti discorsi accademici à la page di «Pidgin», la lettera di Choi arrivò come un pugno nello stomaco: con grande naturalezza, avvertiva la comunità degli architetti che gli architetti non contano nulla. Tutti progettano peni artificiali di vetro in cui non andrei mai né a vivere né a lavorare e che servono solo a ostruirmi la vista sul New Jersey. L’architettura non mi interessa. È vero. Ecco cosa mi interessa: i burrito, i porcospini, il caffè. Come vedete, l’architettura non è nella lista. Nell’elenco delle cose di cui m’importa, l’architettura sta tra i funghi che vengono alle unghie dei piedi e la colonscopia invasiva5.

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.

Pidgin, pidgin everywhere. A peculiarity of dropping the connective, the article, of translating literally, of using present for past, present for future. We Filipinos did not speak pidgin. Our English was straight from the grammar texts.

Centers of trade and colonialism—which tend to develop near large bodies of water for reasons both obvious and occulted—tend toward the polylingual and toward the development of pidgins (generally "simple" languages that develop when adults lack a common language with which to communicate) and, later, creoles (stable languages that evolve from intergenerational transmission of pidgins).

develop the 100 word vocabulary taught to the Lao tribesman to make the rudiments of combat conversation. A few nouns, some basic single tense verbs, names of weapons and directions made up the pidgin English. Like spice, flavor was added by whichever additional words the Special Forces teacher felt appropriate. The basic word denoting the reproductive act, and its many wondrous and colorful variations, was by far the most popular and common.

la mayoría de los gitanos del mundo habla la lengua del territorio en que habita, adaptándola mediante el fenómeno llamado pidgin

But the Irish are said to be a happy people, full of jokes.” “There’s your pidgin and your queue. They’re not. They’re a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving.

that night. There was no air in my lungs. “How come you never say anything when she beat me?” I asked in my pidgin English. “You say anything, who suffer? Your father.” “So what about me, suffer?” “You, you suffer? If we say, don’t do that, she would done more. She would beat more. Cheh! Not to say it stop. You think it’s like that?” In other words, “You think it’s that simple? That we’d just tell her to stop and it would end?

A gender is like a language. You learn to speak one since the moment you’re born, so you never even notice its complexities, its weird rules and nonsensical exceptions. You don’t pay attention to how it works, you just use it every day. In every interaction. Even silently, in your head, when you’re alone. Everything is instinct. I imagine that being genderfluid is like learning a second language, or a third or a fourth or a fifth, and then speaking a hybrid pidgin version of all these different tongues, depending on which one has the best words to express how you feel.

PAKALOLO

So I see people mocking my usage of patois… or Jamaican creole which is a form of pidgin created from Afrikaan, Spanish and English languages. This is a Jamaican page by a Jamaican author. The person in the video is Jamaican. It’s common for people to think English is an indication of intelligence albeit only 20% of the world’s population speaks English and only 5% are native English speakers. I mean English itself is a creole of sorts with words from Celtic, Slavic and Latin languages.. Smartest people in the world are Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Indians) their native languages are Hindi, Mandarin and Creole Cantonese. Swahili and Igbo are big creole languages in Africa. Linguistic discrimination is not even warranted based on how languages are developed. Glottophobics are as bad as racist with their linguicism. English is just a superstrate language due to Anglo- Saxon colonization and the British empire… English is still a superstrate because of large English speaking populations such as America, England, South Africa, Nigeria and Canada.

I’m in the wrong place. My parents never drank, and I’ve never stopped verbalizing my feelings. I have nothing in common with these people, and I dislike their awkward pidgin. I look at the clock. I have been here for five minutes, tops. I wonder if there’s a way I could find anyone in the school-chair circle attractive. (There isn’t.) I read the list on the back of the bookmark. Don’t: Be self-righteous. Try to dominate, nag, scold, or complain. Lose your temper. Try to push anyone but yourself. Keep bringing up the past. Keep checking up on the alcoholic. Wallow in self-pity.

All their antics have left them far from tired, though, to judge by the way they are dominating the conversation, with great animation and an unsortable pidgin of academic-use mixed with hipster jargon.

A creole, according to this model, is simply a pidgin that has—due to the innate ability of young children—evolved into a native language and, in the process, fleshed out and become stable. Creole languages were like evolution happening before our eyes.

Sreedhar noted that there needed to be more than two languages in contact for a true pidgin to be born: if there are only two languages in all, there is no language problem, as each of the two groups already has a language. A pidgin is only needed if there are diverse groups of little people who have no shared language, people who need to be integrated into a single group. A pidgin does not emerge in order to facilitate conversation with the rulers. The people who would eventually speak the pidgin had to come from ‘two or more different and mutually unintelligible language backgrounds’, and there needed to be a ‘dominant (and usually alien) language which supplies much of the vocabulary’.

Although I refer to it as ASL, Jen and Zach actually speak PSE—Pidgin Signed English. That’s true of most who learn sign language later in life. PSE uses English syntax, while ASL has a syntax all its own. For example, “I’m going to the store today” in PSE would be “I go store today,” but in ASL would be signed “Today store I go.

The Chief took my hand. His felt like leaves – cool and dry. And then he spoke in Bislama, the English-based pidgin that helps the people of the Vanuatu archipelago, with their eighty islands and their 118 languages, understand one another. ‘Bilip,’ he said. ‘Me wantem come.’ Philip. I want him to come. It sounded aggrieved, as if Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, King of the World and son of the local mountain god, was pushing it a bit and the Chief had had enough. Then he tapped the ground and pointed at me. What brought you here? ‘Long story,’ I said. They understood, because the words mean the same in Bislama. And they laughed at that, and settled down around us on logs and stones, in that windy, dusty meeting ground, rubbing their hands. Down Tanna way, they love a long story. It was 1982 when Prince Philip rode in a train to Manchester, passing right by my bedroom window, and waved at me.

Understandings on Tanna came about so often like the slow filtration of rainwater through rock. And nowhere did this happen more than in the realm of language. It was the white man’s desire to trade in sea-slugs – known by the French as bêche-de-mer – that had first necessitated the invention of a lingua franca pidgin, and Bislama, pronounced BISH-la-ma, became its name. The word is a pidgin form of ‘Beach-La-Mer’, itself a corruption of ‘bêche-de-mer’. And so many of Bislama’s terms sounded utterly foreign, until they’d been in my mouth long enough to lose the unfamiliar tang of Tanna. ‘Like’, for instance, was ‘olsem’ – from ‘all a same’. ‘What’ was ‘wanem’ – ‘what name’. And ‘just’ – I liked this best – was rendered in Bislama as ‘nomo’, which for me always evoked the scene of some hard-bitten sea-slug buyer bargaining down to just a shilling, no more. It was a simple language, encrusted with Melanesian habits of pronunciation, designed for commerce and work. Western visitors were tickled by terms like ‘rubba belong fak-fak’ for ‘condom’ and ‘bugarup’ for ‘broken’. Then there was the Olympian ‘bilak-bokis-we-i-gat-bilak-tut-mo-i-gat-waet–tut-sipos-yu-kilim-em-i-sing-aot’, which ensured nobody in the archipelago would ever bother referring to a piano, let alone shipping one in. But I often wondered if the stripped-down concepts of Bislama contributed to the disdainful Western view of the people who used it. Their language sounded charming, but daft, child-like even – just like the Prince Philip cult. No wonder people had trouble taking it seriously.