Language X: A Controlled Experiment in Pidgin

Creation

Author: David J. Peterson

MS Date: 12-14-2001

FL Date: 07-01-2015

FL Number: FL-00002E-00

Citation: Peterson, David J. 2001. «Language X: A

Controlled Experiment in Pidgin Creation.»
FL-00002E-00, Fiat Lingua,
. Web. 01 July 2015.

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
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David J. Peterson
Linguistics 152
Prof. McWhorter
Due: 12/14/2001

Language X: A Controlled Experiment in Pidgin Creation

1.1 Introduction: Why?

One of the main problems with the study of pidgins and creoles is that there

aren’t any major ones being formed nowadays the way they were back in the Colonial

period. As an added impediment, records are sketchy at best until the early part of the

twentieth century, in many cases. What this means is that while there is quite a large

amount data on a few creoles and pidgins after they have developed over a period of

ﬁfty to one hundred years, there is no signiﬁcant record of what these languages were

like in their infancy1 . What I attempted to do with my experiment was to re-create

the conditions in which a pidgin is born, and to see what happened. In some ways, the

form of communication that developed (hereafter referred to as Language X) resembled

a prototypical pidgin; in some ways it did not. However, dozens of hypotheses can be

drawn from what resulted. Over the coming pages, I’ll be discussing the problems that

occurred, possible solutions, striking developments, features of Language X, and a few

of my own far-reaching, all-encompassing theories about pidgins and creolization.

1 John McWhorter, 2001.

1.2 The Setup

In order to communicate verbally, one needs words to articulate. Thus, I set

about to come up with a list of 200 or so words with corresponding phonetic forms2 .

As my basis I used Swadesh’s extended list of 200 words that every natural language

(allegedly) has. I added some forms and deleted some others and came up with just

over 200 words. In designing forms for these words, I came up with a romanization

system and sound system that I thought would be relatively easy for English speakers

to read and pronounce (see footnote 2). Some words were based on words from natural

languages (e.g.: zava from Russian /zovut/, azub from Arabic /zub/), some from

languages I constructed myself, and the rest were made up out of thin air. In addition

to this, I came up with a complex, nearly unrecognizable class system to see if my

subjects would ﬁgure it out and make it productive3 . After this was done, I be-gan

my search for subjects.

The process was long and arduous, but in the end, I selected six subjects based

on their availability to meet at a pre-speciﬁed time during the week. A brief description

of each shall follow:

2 See Problem Alpha below.

3 See Morphology Gone Awry.

(a)!

Cindy: Cindy is a ﬂuent English speaker, though she can understand Hindi. She

proved to be least willing to adapt to innovations or to innovate on her own. She often

monopolized conversation during our weekly meetings, though without raising the

level of comprehension. She was constantly using English, even when I expressly,

repeatedly forbade her. She has a slight background in linguistics, though no know-

legde of creoles or pidgins.

(b)! Mary: Another ﬂuent English speaker, her only second language experience is

with French. She proved to be passive when others were domineering, though was the

second most innovative member of the group. She adapted very quickly to changes

and had a good memory. She was my number two; I could always count on her.

(c)!

Laura: As with Mary, ﬂuent in English, some experience with French. More often

than not, she was having a “bad day”, and would excuse herself from making any

comments during our weekly meetings, though she always showed up. When lazy, she

would use false English cognates (e.g.: The Language X word for “four” to mean the

English word “for” in the benefactive sense). She would often use English, though not

as often as Cindy–only when in a bind. While she didn’t innovate, she adapted quickly.

(d)!

Peyton: The most active and most innovative member of the bunch. The one

week he didn’t show up, the meeting fell apart. He would never use English, had a

great memory, made a concerted effort to use the innovations already agreed upon and

came up with new ones. He continually stretched the boundaries of semantics to get

his point across, and more often than not was quite successful. Even if he didn’t

understand what someone else was trying to say, he would often try to help them, and

if no one else understood and he did, he would rephrase the sentence in Language X

that everyone else could understand. He’s a native English speaker, and has a similar

level of ﬂuency with Chinese as Cindy does with Hindi, though moreso (he’s

relearning).

(e)!

Kurt: He was my number three; kind of a wild card. He discovered and made

use of the word for “with”, while no one else did (unless they were following his

example), and was quite good at understanding and making himself understood. He

was given to periodic memory lapses, though, and would often get frustrated and sink

into silence if he couldn’t express himself in the exact terms he wished. He’s a ﬂuent

English speaker, and dabbled only in high school-level Spanish.

(f)!

Dan: If Dan ever said a word, I’m sure I didn’t hear it. That’s a bit of an exagger-

ation, but really, not much of one. For much of the experiment, he was Cindy’s boy-

friend, and she rarely let him open his mouth, though her inﬂuence seemed to continue

even after their split, for he never found his voice. When he did speak, it seemed as if

he understood what was going on just ﬁne and that he could keep up with everyone

else’s innovations. He’s a ﬂuent speaker of English, though it was his L2, Rumanian

being his L1.

All my subjects were between the ages of twenty and twenty-three during the

course of the project and of the same socioeconomic background.

The plan for the project (which spanned eleven weeks) was to meet for an hour

once a week during which time I’d prompt them to speak in various ways and then

record them on a handheld tape recorder while taking notes by hand. As compensation

for their time, I made (i.e., bought) snacks such as cookies, chips and candy. Originally I

had planned to “teach” the language in the format of an elementary class for any

natural language. Once I realized, however, that it was more fun for them and more

interesting for me to have them tell stories, this pretty much became what we did every

week, and the results were quite fruitful. At one or two points during the experiment, I

invented words that were needed for speciﬁc contexts, one of which proved to be very

interesting4 , but that was the extent of my tinkering.

4 See What the Heck Is a “Go Bag”?.

Also of note, I became quite ﬂuent in Language X and able to make myself

understood. What was interesting, though, was that the form of the language I used

differed from that of my subjects, even though I tried to make sure to use only the

innovations they themselves created (this will be discussed later). And now, without

further ado, my long list of problems and possible solutions.

2.1 Problems and Solutions: Introduction

Throughout the course of the semester I encountered many, many, many

problems of varying sorts. My intent with listing these problems and possible solutions

is to insure such problems don’t occur again, should my experiment be repeated in the

future.

2.2 Problem Alpha

The very ﬁrst problem that logically occurs didn’t occur to me until the very end

of the experiment. It can basically be summarized as follows: The Swadesh list was not

intended to be a basis for language creation. The following words occurred in the list of

words for Language X: heches “dust”; hezes “sand”; huches “smoke”; hoshes “fog”; ahosh

“breathe”; asaf “to blow”; ashas “to sleep”; atsash “to dance”; ginges “earth”. In most

modern-day languages, an argument can be made for having distinctions to separate

“dust”, “sand” and “earth”; in a pidgin–or, even more correctly, a set of words hoping

to become a pidgin–such distinctions are laughably unnecessary. Similarly, the dif-

ference between “fog” and “smoke” and “blow” and “breathe” are also unnecessary.

But beyond that, look at the forms I accidentally gave “dust”, “sand”, “smoke”, “fog”,

“breathe”, “blow”, “sleep” and “dance”. One slip and there’s a change in meaning, and

this proved to be quite a problem–especially with “sleep” and “dance”. People become

tongue-tied and frustrated, and communication takes longer, and such lapses are quite

destructive to a project whose life is only eleven hours long. In addition, some people

(I’m thinking of Cindy, mainly) would pronounce the diphthong romanized as /ay/ as

[ej], whereas others would do it the predictable way: [aj]. Then, because of English

orthography, there was varying pronunciations of /o/, /e/ and /i/, which led to

endless of confusion.

2.3 Possible Solution Alpha

When I was creating words, I tried to give them forms that reminded me of the

semantics. Given that the above-listed culprits are all, in one way or another, inter-

connected in my mind, it’s not hard to see how I came up with similar forms. Thus, in

the future, a concerted effort should be made to create words that are maximally

different phonetically.

What’s more, rather than basing the list of words on the

Swadesh list, a new list should be created speciﬁcally for this project, with probable

variations each time it’s repeated. I personally would do the following: More verbs,

fewer abstract nouns, more animal nouns, fewer adjectives. Also, the pronunciation

should be simpler than the target language: The three basic vowels, /a/, /i/, /u/; the

traditional row of stops, voiceless only; voiceless fricatives only; the alveolar and

bilabial nasal; one liquid, /l/; and, if necessary, the two glides, /j/ and /w/. Also, the

language should have a rhythm of its own. Because of the morphology I imposed upon

these words, I ended up with some words ending with vowels, some with consonants,

and this disrupted the ﬂow of the language and inhibited normal speech. CV syllables

are a must with no consonant clusters permitted.

2.4 Problem Beta

Because my six subjects were my friends, they really were doing me a favor by

participating in my project. Because of this, they didn’t feel obligated to show up if

there were more pressing matters, or to give their all at each meeting.

2.5 Possible Solution Beta

This project needs to be funded. There needs to be some sort of compensation

other than the occasional treat to cause the subjects to feel obligated to show up and be

active. My idea would be $10 per meeting, which (with six people and eleven meetings) 8 would come out to $660, $110 per person. If money was involved, combined with ulti-

matums and expectations, I’ve no doubt that full cooperation would be achieved.

2.6 Problem Gamma

I told everyone that they would never have to memorize any of the words at the

very beginning of the project because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to scare them off. My

idea was that they would memorize them unconsciously over time. This never really

happened, though. Each person memorized a small set of words, and while there was

much overlap, there wasn’t total overlap.

2.7 Possible Solution Gamma

The number of words should be reduced (particularly cutting back on the words

already mentioned) so that the list is less daunting. The words should also be basic, so

that they’ll be words that are actually needed. Additionally, it would probably help to

tell them to try to memorize the words. But this only goes part of the way towards

solving the problem.

2.8 Problem Delta

These are several related problems. First, there was never any level of speaking

ﬂuency attained. This is partly due to the lack of rhythm which I already mentioned,

but it’s also partly due to them not fully knowing the words, having to think before

each word, and because they had no motivation to try to speak, just to communicate–

two very different principles. Additionally, there was the reliance on English. The fact

is, all seven of us spoke English ﬂuently. If someone got fed up with trying to convey

what they wanted to convey, they could just say, in English, “The ﬁsh dives into the

ocean”. While this is not what they’re supposed to do, if they did do it, can the rest of

us pretend that we don’t understand what they mean? I could, because I’m the

coordinator, but the idea of communication amongst themselves is defeated, since

communication is easily achieved.

2.9 Possible Solution Delta

I have three proposed solutions to this problem, and while each is different, they

all involve changing the structure of this experiment:

(a) This option involves the same idea: A list of 200 or so basic words (modiﬁed

as the above solutions propose, of course), only with an added twist. Since here at Cal

we have the wonderful De-Cal program, I propose it be utilized. Rather than arranging

meeting times separately and meeting only once a week (a woefully inadequate amount

of time), the De-Cal class will run for an hour ﬁve days a week. The basic idea will be to

speak using Language X the whole time. There’s no doubt in my mind that after two,

maybe three weeks, everyone in the class would be speaking far better than any one of

my subjects was able to speak by the end of the semester. After ﬁfteen weeks, there

should be some data that would really say something. As for incentive, the fact that it’s

a class that will give the students credit should be incentive enough.

(b) This option also involves utilizing the De-Cal class system, though it would

be a little different. The coordinator would speak a language to the subjects ﬂuently,

and they would have to communicate with him/her as best they could. Ideally, the

language would be a natural language that no student knows, but, since learning a

language that a group of people don’t know and have no access to is quite difﬁcult, I

propose the language be a made-up language constructed by the coordinator. This may

seem a bit unorthodox, but I think it would (as nearly as possible) duplicate the

situation in which many creoles and pidgins arose: That being a person in a position of

authority having power over those in the subordinate position, who share a common

language, but who still have to communicate in the language of the authority ﬁgure. A

pidgin should naturally develop. The only problem would be that they shouldn’t

actually learn the language, by any means.

Gather a bunch of monolingual speakers from around the globe, pay them hand-somely,

and stick them on an island somewhere, à la the reality show Survivor. If everything

works out the way theorists have theorized it would, a pidgin should develop. Here,

however, the language would end up being an amalgamation, and thus, substrate and

superstrate theory would not apply (in theory).

2.10 Problem Epsilon

In English, there are shared metaphors that don’t cross over linguistically. For

instance, you couldn’t say “he goes” to mean “he says” in Spanish or French or just

about any other language I know of, whereas, in nonstandard English, you can. Simi-

larly, you also can’t translate word-for-word “he gets drunk” into any other language to

get the meaning in English (ex.: Sp. *él obtiene bebido). Yet, if you have words that are

translated as “to go” and “to get” and “to drink”, it’s not hard to imagine that English

speakers would use these words just as they’re used in English. And why not? They all

speak English; it gets the point across. It’s difﬁcult to explain to non-linguists just how

much metaphor invades their thoughts, since metaphor is everywhere.

2.11 Possible Solution Epsilon

I suppose one could try to explain the theories behind metaphor to a group of

non-linguists, but that would take time and effort on both the part of the linguist’s and

the non-linguists’. A better solution would be to take people of different language

backgrounds so that they don’t share metaphors. This would be quite difﬁcult to do,

however, especially in America. An imperfect median solution would be to deﬁne the

words in very speciﬁc ways. So, for example, the word lusa would not mean “to get”,

but, rather “to obtain”, and the word ayas would not mean “to go”, but “to move from

one location to another”. These deﬁnitions are clunky and could lead to other prob-

lems, but would lead to fewer metaphor mishaps (especially with words translated as

“to come” and “to blow”). Ideally, the subjects would come up with their own meta-

phors as they went along, and, to some extent, this actually happened by the end of the

semester with my group.

3.1 The (Eventual) Structure of Language X

I’ll be breaking this down into the following groups: Phonology, Morphology,

Syntax and Semantics. Some will get more attention than others.

3.2.1 Phonology: Who Could’ve Guessed?

When I originally envisioned myself writing this paper, I didn’t see myself

saying a word about the phonology. Why? Because I invented a romanization system

that had a one-to-one correspondence, and which is highly predictable, based on the

basic knowledge of the English spelling system. How wrong I was. If anything, what

follows should prove that pidgins (at least initially) really do have a simpliﬁed sound

system in comparison to their superstrate language.

3.2.2 Predictable Stuff

I could have predicted that voiceless stops would be aspirated word initially,

and, they were. This came over directly from English. Same with the velar /l/, long

vowels before voiced segments and vowel reduction, where possible. This I predicted,

and it all came true.

3.2.3 Unpredictable Stuff

Oddly enough, all voiced consonants save glides, nasals and liquids became de-

voiced word-ﬁnally.

What’s more, they were treated as voiceless segments.

For

example, the word kuz was invariably pronounced /kus/ without a long vowel, which,

were it pronounced with a [z], would have a long vowel in English. The simpliﬁcation

seemed to come naturally, and occurred even when they were looking straight at the

spelling of the word.

3.3.1 Morphology

There’s quite a lot to say about morphology, so it will be split up into a few

sections, one dealing with inﬂectional morphology, and the other two dealing with deri-

vational.

3.3.2 Morphology Gone Awry

As previously mentioned, I included a class system with my words. It went as

follows:

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(i) Animate nouns: -i
(ii) Natural, non-animate nouns: -e
(iii) Manufactured nouns: -ev (clothes, building, etc.)
(iv) Time nouns: -ay (time, day, night, etc.)
(v) Sub-stance/mass nouns: -es
(vi) Other nouns: monosyllabic, beginning and ending with a consonant
(vii) Color adjectives: -o
(viii) Adjectives with the meaning “covered with” or “full of” x substance: ye-
(ix) All other adjectives: e-
(x) Transitive verbs: -a
(xi) Intransitive, non-experiencer verbs: a-
(xii) Intransitive, experiencer verbs: o-
(xiii) Ditransitive verbs: -u
(xiv) Adverbs: i-

This was my system, and it was a ﬁne system, yet it all came to naught; they

didn’t use it. Maybe someone picked up on adjectives beginning with /e/, since they

were so difﬁcult for them to say, but they never, for example, took the verb ayak, “to

win”, and formed the noun yaki, “winner”. This never, ever happened, and I don’t

anticipate that it ever would have.

3.3.3 What the Heck Is a “Go Bag”?

While the class system method of derivational morphology didn’t work out, my

subjects devised a way to derive new words from other words semantically. To go

along with a viewing of the Bugs Bunny cartoon Herr Meets Hare, I created a word for

bag, duwev, because they would need it to describe a speciﬁc scene, and I didn’t want to

have them sitting there scratching their heads trying to ﬁgure out a way to come up

with a word for “bag”. I ﬁgured that, after that week, the word would never see the

light of day again. They, however, had a different idea altogether. They wouldn’t let it

go, and they kept bringing it back pretty much any time they needed a word for

something they didn’t know–in other words, a word for “thing”. That was interesting

enough, but the shock came in week 9, when they started using it in combined forms.

The ﬁrst was for the word “television”. I had told them at the beginning that, in cases

where there was no clear way to express the meaning of a particular English word, they

could just use the English word and be done with it. Praise the heavens they forgot, for

they came up with the gem osim duwev for “television”, which means “see bag”. Then,

right after that, in order to describe a picture where a family gets into a car and drives

off, Mary invented the word ayas duwev for “car”, which glosses as “go bag”. While one

could argue that there’s a metaphorical connection between a car and a bag (things go

in a bag; people go in a car), there’s very little to suggest a connection between a

television and a bag, and that innovation came ﬁrst. This proves that duwev had all but

lost its meaning as “bag” and had merely become “thing”, and functioned similarly to

the “-er/or” sufﬁx in English (e.g.: “to radiate”>“radiator”; “to freeze”>“freezer”). This

change is something like the change of English “sh*t” to sit in Tok Pisin5 .

5 John McWhorter, 2001.

3.3.4 Inﬂectional Morphology: There Is None

That’s the simple answer: There is none. They never once distinguished between

the past, present, future or irrealis tenses. Every so often someone would try, usually in

the beginning of a story by saying something like “one day”, but once they saw they

could convey the meaning just as easily without having to think, they gladly did it the

easy way. There are a couple ways to account for this. One might say that they were all

just lazy and didn’t care enough, and that if there had been any real incentive involved,

they eventually, grudgingly, would have come up with something that re-sembled a

tense system. This might very well be true, but that would be ignoring the mighty role

of the substrate language: English. The English tense system, whether anyone will

admit it or not, is dying. It’s dying only in speech, but it’s dying, nonethe-less. I’ll

digress brieﬂy to give my account of this.

In casual speech (and this means all speech unless one is giving a speech), the

present tense is used to express the past and the future. The future came ﬁrst with the

help of the verb “to go”, so when, for example, the Southern California English speaker

of today says something like “I’m’a go ta store; you comin’?”, we know it evolved from

“I’m gonna go to the store” which evolved from “I am going to go to the store”. The

phrase “I am going” is quite noticeably a present tense verb. Nevertheless, it expresses

the future. It was only a matter of time before this spread to the past. So now, in casual

speech, it’s more than common, even if one starts out in the past tense, to resume in the

present. Example:

“So what did you do yesterday, Dave?”

“I went to pick up a present for my girlfriend.”

“Oh? How’d that go?”

“Okay, so I go to the mall, right, and, of course, there’s this enormous line of

people stretching out of every store that I could possibly want to visit. So I get in one of

those lines, and…”

In this exchange (which is 100% normal), one will note the switch to not only the

present tense to indicate the past, but the little used present indicative tense, which was

slain by the present progressive tense in the department of what is labeled as “the

present tense”. How I think it came about was as follows: (i) In story telling situations,

one often uses the imperfect, which is, for example, “he was going”, “he was eating”,

etc.; (ii) this imperfect tense, in speech, is often reduced: “he’s going”, “he’s eating”, etc.,

where there’s a short, almost imperceptible schwa in between the end of the word “he”

and the beginning of the [z] to differentiate the “he was” “he’s” from the “he is” “he’s”;

(iii) this is reinterpreted as actually being the “he is” “he’s” since the schwa is often lost

in fast speech; (iv) from this point, the semantic shift has already occurred, and the

switch from progressive to indicative can occur. Thus, the narrative tense is born.

What I mean to prove with all this is that the omission of overt past tense mark-

ing is not a sign of laziness on the part of my subjects, but, rather, the natural form,

since, in most casual speech, and always in narrative tone, there is no overt marking of

the past tense in modern English (American English, anyway). Since no overt tense

marking was needed, no overt marking appeared, and my subjects understood each

other the same way they do in English: by intonation. Generally when the present or

future tense was needed, there was a break between the subject and the verb, and the

ﬁrst syllable of the verb drew emphasized stress. In narrative tone, the distinction was

less marked, and the sentence portrayed a falling intonation pattern.

One obstacle to tense markers arising, however, was the fact that Language X

was merely a list of words and not a real language. Generally, tense markers in pidgins

arise from other expressions in the superstrate language6 . In Tok Pisin, for example,

the past tense marker bin clearly came from the English word “been”, which can be

associated with the past tense in English, as with “Where have you been?” The future

marker, bai, derived from baimbai, came from English “by and by”, which can be used as

a future marker, even though it’s not terribly common in Modern English. In this

project, however, the only full language they were hearing was English, which they

were not allowed to use. And, of course, their substrate language was English as well,

so they wouldn’t be able to take something from their L1 and use it as a tense marker.

6 John McWhorter, 2001.

Thus, it’s highly unlikely that a tense marker would have developed after any given

period of time.

There is one other bit of inﬂectional morphology that occasionally popped up,

and that’s the plural marker. There is no ofﬁcial plural marker, but an impromptu plu-

ral marker became be, the word for “two”. Generally, the marking of the plural was

considered unimportant, but when they felt it necessary, they inserted be. In the

sentence “Bob put his two feet into a bag”, Bob sambu zali (be) kuz (is) duwev, the number

two is used because the natural plural of one foot is two feet. It’s in parentheses, along

with is, because they were revisions, meaning somebody said the sentence without the

words in parentheses, and someone else added the words right afterwards. In most

cases, the nouns that were pluralized had natural number plurals associated with them,

and thus, my subjects used the number words. Later on, though, since be was the most

common word used to pluralize nouns, since most of the nouns pluralized had two as

their natural plurals, be became used as a general plural, though only to get the point

across. Be never lost its status as “two”; people just understood that it had been used to

indicate the plural before, and so assumed that it could be again, even if the natural

plural wasn’t “two”, and “two” wasn’t what was meant to be indicated. Once, the

word for “twenty”, zo, was used to indicate the plural. It was used to describe a whole

bunch of ﬁsh, and the phrase was Zo zo zo kusi, “twenty twenty twenty ﬁsh”. In general,

though, plurality was not considered important enough to give weight (or voice) to.

3.4.1 Syntax

In this section I’ll be mainly talking about some word order issues, the genitive,

conjunctions/relative clauses and prepositions.

3.4.2 Word Order: Order Word

The word order employed by my subjects mirrored English exactly: SVO. It

seems unlikely that anything else would happen in the elementary stages of any pidgin,

since the ﬁrst attempts at communication would likely be either imitation or code

switching, such that the one attempting to communicate, for example, learns the words

for “I”, “eat” and “food”, and then simply puts them into the slots in which they belong

in his/her own language. There were a few variations, though.

In noun/adjective phrases, the order was completely arbitrary.

Note the

following uses of “big man” in this utterance (epsiz is “big”; sangi is “man”): Barnacle

osim sangi epsiz. Epsiz sangi pek azub. Epsiz sangi gen elif. Barnacle gen keza iso sangi

epsiz pek azub. Here one sees a 50/50 split as to whether the noun or the adjective

comes ﬁrst. Adjective initial phrase order would be what was expected, since that’s the

way it is in English. A couple things can account for the switch, though. All six of my

subjects took either Spanish or French in high school, and so all of them are familiar

with adjectives following the nouns they modify.

What’s more, few have had

signiﬁcant contact with non-Romance languages. Thus, if they thought of Language X

as some sort of a “foreign language”, they might most easily associate it with one of the

Romance languages, in which it’s common to follow the modiﬁed noun with its

modiﬁer. In addition to this, the construction of the adjective itself favors initial stress

with its initial vowel and ﬁnal consonant. The stress pattern of each form would be as

follows (accent ague=stress; accent grave=unstressed): épsìz sángì; sàngì épsìz. (By the

way: I’m basing this solely on what I heard my subjects say, not on any kind of rule, by

any means.) In the second version there’s only one stressed segment, and so the

adjective phrase feels more like a solitary unit, whereas in the ﬁrst version, there are two

stressed segments, and it’s more difﬁcult to have them feel like they go together. Plus,

in general, if one puts the adjective ﬁrst, there will be two consonants that fall next to

each other. In this case they happen to be the same manner of articulation and in the

same place of articulation, but that isn’t always the case. If one puts the adjective after

the noun, though, the noun is generally going to end in an [i], since most of the nouns

that got modiﬁed were animate nouns, and the adjective is either going to begin with [e]

or [je]. While it’s unpredictable what kind of a consonant cluster you’re going to get if

you put the adjective ﬁrst, the vowel/glide/vowel part is very predictable if you put

the adjective second.

Another variation came with questions. In English, the noun and its auxiliary are

inverted in questions: “Are you going to the store?” “Yes, I am going to the store.” The

same is also true of French, which two of the speakers were very familiar with. Unlike

French7 , however, English requires some sort of an auxiliary verb to come be-fore the

noun, and not the main verb (“Go you to the store?” is not something a Modern English

speaker would say if s/he didn’t wish to sound archaic). In Language X there are, of

course, no auxiliaries, and so it could be argued that the subjects merely copied English

question order as nearly as they could, picking up directly after the missing auxiliary.

Example question: Yani sanya “tali”? (Meaning “Do you have ‘sister’?” They were

playing Go Fish, and the cards were labeled with Language X words, so they would ask

for a particular word–in this case, tali.) The only thing that would be missing in this

question for it to be good, standard English would be the “do”. However, even that’s

unnecessary, since now in speech one can drop any and all auxiliaries in questions and

still be understood: “Where you going? You going to the game?” “No, I’m going to the

library to learn more about Sranan. You going?” Thus, this type of varied word order

can still be explained by the substrate inﬂuence of English.

3.4.3 The Mysteries of the Genitive

I mentioned in the word order section that adjective/noun order in noun phrases

was relatively free. This was not entirely true. In cases of possession, the possessing

noun always came before the possessed noun. This was seen more often with the

7 This is changing, with the “Est-ce que” question form becoming more and more common.

pronouns: zali kuz (his foot); ani giskwe (my stick); sangi meb (the man’s leg). Some other

interesting things happened, though, in terms of possession. As shown above, sanya,

meaning “to hold”, came to be used for the verb “to have”. It pretty much got used in

every way “to have” is used in English (except for the perfect, of course), but then came

this particular sentence: Sangi epsiz ya giskwe is sangi meb. What this comes out to is

“man big with stick at man leg”, and what it means is “The big man had a stick in his

leg”. The fact that “sangi” is used rather than “zali” in “sangi meb” leads me to believe

that Cindy was the one who said this, though I can’t tell for certain8 . At any rate, here

in English we would use the word “to have”, though the semantics differ, and in the

Language X sentence, the speaker evidently was sensitive to this semantic disparity.

The man certainly doesn’t consciously, or, rather, willingly possess the stick if it’s stuck

into his leg and hurting him, and so the speaker highlighted this by saying the stick was

with him and not being possessed by him. This came as a bit of a surprise, since, on the

whole, the preposition ya was vastly unpopular, for whatever reason. This wasn’t the

only instance in which it was used for possession, though. In the following insults, ya is

used to indicate possession of a body part: Yani demi ya etas giskwe. Yani demi ya won

even. (Interlinear: You person with small stick. You person with heart afraid.) What

these were meant to mean is “You small-penised person” and “You fearing-heart

8 See my section on gesture, and why videotape is more reliable than audio tape.

person”, or something equivalent. There’s one more issue with possession, but it shall

have to wait until I get to the section on relative clauses.

3.4.4 Relative Clauses and Conjunctions

There were no conjunctions to begin with in Language X, and I was quite inter-

ested to see how far they’d get without conjunctions. As it turns out, not very. On the

very ﬁrst day a word for “and” popped up, mainly as a continuation of the previous

syllable: dangi i bashi (husband and wife). It didn’t stick, though, and it was soon for-

gotten. Then, however, as we began to focus more on story-telling, the word “and”

became more and more necessary. They could get by without “but” and “however” and

“if” (e.g.: Sangi zava David losa elif shiles sanya egzam melay. “Guy named David drinks

alcohol [because] [he] had a bad day.” Here, there was a space between “elif shiles” and

“sanya”, and there was renewed stress placed on the ﬁrst syllable of “sanya”, indicating

a new but related thought), but “and” was another matter entirely. The form eventually

and unconsciously decided upon was /e/, realized as [E], [e], [i] and [ej], by turns–more

often than not [E]. Initially it was used for conjoinment of two noun phrases (I found

one instance of ya used in this manner, but discovered later that it was my usage): Papi,

mashi e landi (father, mother and child). Soon, however, it was used everywhere: Blandi

glasa David e Blandi meva David (The dog bit David and [then] the dog ate David). There

was one usage of ya for an “and”-like construction, and that occurred in the sentence:

Pistachio ya David meva coconut (Pistachio and David ate the coconut). In this sentence,

the idea was that they shared the coconut together, so they really felt that ya was needed

as opposed to plain old e.

I’ve already mentioned one instance of a relative clause–the one which began

with “because”. Other than that one sentence, most places where a relative clause could

have appeared, one did not. Generally my subjects gave simple, declarative sentences,

one right after the other. There was one interesting sentence, however, given by Cindy:

Yani landi sanya mashi blandi (you child have mother dog). What she was trying to

convey was the insult, “You son of a b–––h”. What she said, however, was “You child

who has a mother-dog”, or a dog for a mother. This was the only time any type of

construction like this was used and should probably be considered an isolated inci-dent,

since it wasn’t spontaneous.

3.4.5 Prepositions

There are only two: is which I deﬁned for them as “at” and ya which I deﬁned for

them as “with”. As has already been mentioned, ya got the short end of the stick, and

was used mainly by Kurt, who was as fond of it as I was. I could actually make a pretty

short catalog of every instance in which ya was used, but I won’t. In speech it was only

used in the sense of “with”, such as Ani atsash yebish beves atsash ya yani ta baks mashi,

which comes out to, “I dance the dirty meat dance with your four-breasted mother”,

word-for-word. It was used quite a bit when I had them translate a quote by Doris

Lessing, but with that they prepared their phrase beforehand and presented it later.

Pretty much all of them, in various ways, used ya when translating the phrase “think for

yourself”: omem yani ya yani; omem ya yani demi; omem ya yani. Here it takes over the

benefactive role. It would have been interesting to see whether this would have held

up, but the occasion never arose. The most common benefactive situation that came up

was with livu “to give”, but in all cases they duplicated English word order: Zali livu

David blandi (she gives David a dog). The preposition had a highly restricted usage and

was directly associated with the English deﬁnition.

Unlike ya, is, the other preposition deﬁned as “at”, had an extremely broad

usage, and was used quite frequently. The one way it was almost never used, though,

was as it was deﬁned–that is, the simple locative adverb “at”. There are four phrases

where the meaning of “at” could be construed. One is simply the phrase Is yenev Bob,

that being “at Bob’s place”. Here is where one would think the word would be used the

most, but this type of fronting is rare, and it was prompted, since they were trans-lating

the sentence “at Bob’s place”, not coming up with their own. The next came when they

translated the phrase “when he…”, which they translated as Is lay zali… (at [the] time

he…). This was just about the only time when they used a combination to express one

of the WH words. The third was the phrase “They eat at Denny’s”, and here there was

pretty much no other way of wording it. The last would be conveyed using the word

“on” in English: David osim mape is ginges (“David sees a tree on the land”). This phrase

is rather awkward when it stands on its own, though, and the last two words were

added primarily to indicate that David was swimming in the ocean when he saw a tree

on an island. The rest of the usages vary, though they all seem to involve movement or

agency of some kind:

a) Zali hosi alos is zali (“his brother says to him”–metaphorical extension)

b) Zali bacha ekop kuz is zali duwev (“he takes new feet out of his bag”–movement

out of, exlative)

c) Zali sambu busi is zali meb (“he puts them onto his legs”–movement onto with

the idea of attachment)

d) Epsiz kusi agan is kwame (“the big ﬁsh comes to the moon”–movement to-

wards, allative)

e) Kwame ayas is ginges (“the moon crashes to the ground”–movement towards

with the idea of concussion)

f) Busi alank is shiles (“they sit [down] in the sea”–submersive movement into,

inlative)

g) David aluv is shiles (“David swims in/through the sea”–movement through)

h) Sangi vaza meva beves is shazes (“The man burns the food-meat [turkey] into

ﬁre”–metaphorical; change in status)

i) Sangi epsiz ya giskwe is sangi meb (“The big man has a stick in his leg”–indicates

ﬁnished motion, breaking of the skin–they didn’t mean that there had

been some sort of stick surgically implanted into his leg, and such a mean-

ing would never have been construed)

j) Barnacle keza iso sanya giskwe is epsiz sangi meb (“Barnacle knows how to get the

stick out of the big man’s leg–the opposite of insertion)

k) Barnacle ayas is indo (“Barnacle goes to the left”–directed movement)

l) Laura osas is David (“Laura laughs at David”–malefactive)

m) Laura vaza is shazes (“Laura burns within the ﬁre” or “Laura’s burned by

the ﬁre”–oblique/middle voice)

Some of these may not seem related, but I think they are. The proof is a bit

roundabout in coming, though. In letters a, b, c, h, i, j, l and m, the word is is used be-

cause it seems as if some sort of word has to go there or the meaning wouldn’t be clear.

A few examples: *Laura vaza ø shazes (“Laura burns the ﬁre”?); *Sangi epsiz ya giskwe ø

sangi meb (“The big man with a stick man-leg”?); *Sangi vaza meva beves ø shazes (“The

man burns the food ﬁre”?). However, this was their judgment of the meanings. In

letters a, b, c and l I’ll argue that they used is only because in the sister phrase in English

there is some sort of preposition. The phrase in a is the beginning of a quote and not a

stand-alone sentence. I translated the verb as “to say”, and so, no doubt, they thought

of it as the Language X version of “say”, and not just talking in general, which is what I

intended. For, while you’d have to say in English “He says to him”, you could simply

say “He tells him”, with no preposition. Thus, I’ll posit that they used is because they

were accessing the English category of how they thought the word should be used, and

not the semantic category of speaking. In l we see a similar situation. There need not be

some obligatory preposition in the idea of one person laughing at another, but there

happens to be in English, so is is used. The usages in b and c are a different matter,

though. The ideas expressed are “pulling x out of y” and “putting x onto y”. If two

arguments are used with the ideas of “pulling” and “putting”, it seems to me that the

natural association would be just those used: pulling something out of or away from

something else and putting something onto something else. It would seem that an extra

preposition would be needed to convey something like “putting x into y” and “pulling x

close to y”. So, if a language has only one preposition, I would have supposed that

they’d used it only where necessary, and thus, only in the most special-ized locations.

Thus, I would expect a sentence like Zali bacha ekop kuz zali duwev or Zali sambu busi zali

meb. These, however, prove ungrammatical, and I believe it’s because of the substrate

inﬂuence of English.

The rest of the examples require a bit of explanation. Examples d, e, f, g and k all

involve some sort of volitional movement in relation to something else. In order to

understand why these particular phrases required is an examination of the word ayas,

“to go” will be necessary.

I catalogued every instance of the usage of the word ayas, and I discovered

something rather surprising. With only one argument, the verb ayas means “to go

away” or “to leave”: Zo zo zo kusi ayas (“Many ﬁsh go [mass exodus]”); Bob ayas elas vala

(Bob go far ﬂy: “Bob runs away really fast”–elas and vala are used as intensiﬁers); Heni

ayas (“The rabbit leaves”). With two arguments, ayas means “to go into”, when the

second argument is an established, recognized, bordered area: Zali ayas gale (“He goes

[in]to the forest”); Bob ayas duwev (“Bob goes into a bag”); Pa melay heni ayas Taxidermy

(“One day, the rabbit went [in]to a Taxidermy”) Heni ayas Germany (“The rabbit goes to

Germany”); Heni okesh ayas Las Vegas (“The rabbit wants to go to Las Vegas”); Ebwiz

sangi omem zali ayas Las Vegas (“The fat man thinks he’s going to Las Vegas”? [It’s

possible the speaker misunderstood the context, since the fat man was thinking about

how one gets to Las Vegas. The usage stands, though]); (Busi) ayas shifto gale (“They go

[in]to the Black Forest” [the speaker originally said ayani meaning “you all” and then

corrected her mistake]); Veni lusa heni ayas duwev (“The bird puts the rabbit in[to] a

bag”); Ani ayas yenev (“I go [in]to a building”). This last sentence was uttered recently

when I asked Peyton, days after the conclusion of the experiment, how he’d say “I go to

the building”. He replied with that sentence and said it was pretty obvious. Yet why no

is? When I was prompting them, if I didn’t give immediate feedback, a silence would

ensue, and someone would usually say is afterwards, as if it were an answer that I was

looking for–and, most likely at that time, I was. Nevertheless, in these specialized

circumstances, using is seemed counterintuitive to them, and they would always use

ayas by itself ﬁrst. In examining these examples, you can see that each thing that the

subject goes to can be something that one is in: A country, a building, a city, a bag, a

Taxidermy (in this case, it was in response to Bugs Bunny running into a room that said

“Taxidermy” on it) or a forest. Because of this, is is unnecessary. There are other cases

where it would be necessary, though, and would distinguish meaning. In the sentence

Kusi ayas is mape (ﬁsh go at tree), the ﬁsh are jumping towards the tree. The sentence

Kusi ayas mape would still be grammatical, but it would mean something like, “The ﬁsh

go into the tree” or “the ﬁsh climb the tree”.

Further evidence of this can be seen in the metaphorical extensions of ayas. In the

sentence David ayas heches plinye, Mary was trying to convey the meaning “David (after

completely combusting) turns into dust which fertilizes the ground which gives birth to

a ﬂower” (it took a picture on her part to get the meaning across, but this really was

what she meant to say). The metaphor she was accessing was the “Inward move-ment

is change” metaphor. So, she was thinking “David turns into a dust which turns into a

ﬂower”, and so she used ayas, trying to convey the idea of inward movement which

would give rise to change. Another metaphorical extension was the insult Ayas aslan,

which is simply, “Go die”. While this could be a word-for-word translation on the

speaker’s part, it’s another illustration of the “inward movement is change” metaphor.

Ayas really did mean for them “to go into”, not just “to go” when it was used with

multiple arguments.

This brings us all the way back to examples d, e, f, g and k. The problem with de-

ciding that ayas only takes care of inward movement is that people are still going places,

even if they’re not going into places. So, in examples e and k, the word ayas is used with

is. In e, the moon is crashing into the ground, but it’s not really going into it (it’s rather

interesting that the speaker noticed the semantic difference between the two usages of

“into” and wasn’t hung up on the English category of “into”). The phrase kwame ayas

ginges would mean something like “The moon goes underground”. In order for the

collision idea to be conveyed is is needed. In k, Barnacle’s running to the left. In

Modern English, if someone’s going to his/her left, it’d be more common to say “S/he’s

going left”, and thus would be simpler than the Language X sample shown. This would

be one example in the argument against the theory that my subjects were trying to

communicate in the simplest way possible. But anyway, since indo–the adverb meaning

“left”–isn’t a deﬁned place, the rule would predict that is should be used, and it is. In d,

f and g, ayas isn’t used, and, for reasons beyond my comprehension, this fact was

apparently important to my subjects. Any other motion verb never obeyed the rules of

ayas even if the motion was similar. Thus, agan doesn’t mean “to come into” with two

arguments, and any time it was used with two arguments, is was used before the

second. In cases like these, is really resembled long from Tok Pisin, since it governed

any object that was relationally involved in some sort of movement in verbs other than

ayas.

There’s one last comment that I’d like to make on ayas that has absolutely

nothing to do with prepositions. There was one instance of serial verb usage and it

occurred only with ayas. Since there was only one, the occurrence could be written off

as a ﬂuke. I think, though, that it was far from a ﬂuke, and would be repeated every

single time such an idea needed to be expressed. It just so happens that the only idea

the serial verb construction expressed was the idea of “x moving y into z”. This is a

rather specialized usage, so it shouldn’t be hard to see how it would come up only

rarely. The only time it was used was the bird putting the bunny in the bag, as listed

above (Veni lusa heni ayas duwev). I was so amazed by this unexpected development that

I tried to get a repetition the next week. I’m afraid my sentence was a bit confusing,

though, and was not understood. The idea was this: A guy named Bob meets a woman

whom he likes but who does not like him. In order to woo her, he takes off his feet, puts

them into a bag and then takes out new feet and puts them on and starts to dance. This,

of course, pleases the woman, and so they get together. This sequence of events seemed

perfectly logical and commonplace to me when I dreamt it up the night before, but

when I proposed it to my subjects, they really couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Thus,

they translated the sentence “Bob puts his feet into a bag” as Bob sambu zali be kuz duwev.

What I think they thought I was trying to convey was Bob stepping into a bag, not

actually physically detaching his feet. Thus, the idea wasn’t agentive movement of one

thing into something else, but just Bob stepping into something. This is unfortunate,

since the serial verb construction remains an isolated incident (I gave up looking for it

after this since there were plenty of other interesting things to test out). Semantically, I

say that it was probably used because ayas was associated with the English preposition

“into”, and is was thought of as more of a stative preposition. I maintain that it would

probably be used again.

3.5.1 Semantics

The semantics of ayas have already been discussed, and it was one of the largest

semantic mysteries in Language X, and in addition to that, there have already been

some comments about derivational morphology. Outside of that, though, there was not

much deviation from the deﬁnitions I gave to each of the words, which, to me, was

rather disappointing. I told them all at the very beginning, and periodically throughout

the course of the project, that the respective deﬁnitions I wrote down for the words

should be thought of as general, overarching categories rather than exact deﬁnitions.

Nevertheless, they tended to stick to the deﬁnitions. The only place where there was

signiﬁcant metaphorical play was in the realm of sexuality, and before I get into that, I’d

like to put up the following disclaimer.

3.5.2 Disclaimer in Regards to Sexuality

My project consisted of meeting with six college students, three female and three

male, and getting them to communicate using made-up words with no overt grammar.

While my subjects knew this was a serious project on my part, they used the hour each

week to have fun and goof off, which is ﬁne, because they goofed off in Language X. As

such, one of their favorite subjects was sex (this was enhanced by the fact that we met

from eight to nine at night, which I’ve been known to refer to as “The Giggle Hour”).

They had the most fun and said the most interesting things when they were talking

about sex. That said, one of my subjects felt that the sexual banter was inappropriate,

since s/he viewed any sexual joke as a form of aggression. This person felt it important

that the complaint be lodged, and so, here it is.

3.5.3 Sex

My subjects had a plethora of sexual terms they pretty much coined on the ﬂy.

Any object that could be construed as sexual became so by adding the word elif

“happy” to the front of it. Thus, elif became sort of a taboo classiﬁer. The ﬁrst terms

showed up in the second week: elif giskwe (“happy stick”–penis) and elif plinye (“happy

ﬂower”–vagina). And so, there came pick-up lines like Yani okesh nal ani elif giskwe (You

want tongue I happy stick) and Ani sambu ani posh is yani eslim kwame (I put I hand at

you smooth moon–“Let me put my hand on your smooth bottom”), where basically

they carried over the metaphors already in place in English. They would sit there for

twenty minutes at a time just making up sex jokes–they really would. The interesting

thing that came of it was that when you combined elif with shiles, you got “alcohol”.

Alcohol doesn’t have anything to do with sex, and certainly didn’t in the context, but

the idea that it was the version of the thing described (water) that couldn’t be enjoyed in

public, or at least wasn’t as socially acceptable. So, a possible new derivation might be

something like elif moshi (“happy woman”) for “prostitute”.

4 Gesture and Supragesture

One probably would not encounter a discussion of gesture in a book on a pidgin

or creole. I believe, however, that it’s extremely important not only in day-to-day,

natural language communication, but also in situations where a common language isn’t

shared. In Language X there was an exorbitant amount of gesturing accompanying

each statement. Not surprisingly, there was more in the beginning than there was at the

end. However, it’s not the level of natural gesture that I’m talking about (e.g., moving

one’s hand down when one is making a point or stating a fact), but what I call

supragesture. Supragesture is the animated, excited gesturing one uses in place of

actual language, especially when one can’t think of the appropriate language to express

one’s idea.

One of the most common supragestures I came across was what I call the “like,

you know what I mean” gesture. This typically involved a number of movements: (1)

Nodding the head, (2) Smiling, (3) Moving the hands in a circular motion away from the

body, (4) Leaning forward. This gesture accompanied, for example, the sentence Sangi

ayas wet kuz yenev. What this was trying to describe was a man falling off a building.

The way it was actually said was as follows: “Sangi ayas…like, wet kuz…yenev”. The

ellipses show a pause where the speaker became most active. It also accompanied a

furrowing of the brow of myself and my other subjects who were trying to understand

what the heck “man go head foot building” could possibly mean. In this case, the

gesture failed, since what the gesture is really supposed to accomplish is it’s supposed

to indicate to the listener that they really understand what’s being said, and if they just

think about it quickly, they’ll get it, at which time they can say, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh, yeah, I

get it”, and the speaker can stop struggling. Other times it works–sometimes so well

that the speaker and listener don’t even have to speak. This, however, didn’t happen in

any of the Language X sessions.

Another common gesture is the “help” gesture. It’s similar to the “like, you

know what I mean” gesture, except that only one hand is propelled, and it’s pointed

towards a particular person–the person who the speakers wants to help him/her. In

Language X, the helper was almost always Peyton, and the one gesturing was more

often than not Cindy. This, however, is something I don’t have an example of. I have

an example for the previous gesture because I remember that speciﬁc incident. This

latter, though, I can’t remember a speciﬁc incident, so, having used a tape recorder only,

I can’t list an example; this is merely the impression I got. This is why, in the future, a

video recorder should be used at all times–that is, if the experiment is to be done right.

Gesture is tremendously important, and there’s no way to get it saved with a video

camera. The fact that people’s voices–especially guys’–tend to sound the same if you’re

not that familiar with the individuals speaking is also a problem when using a tape

recorder, since there are times when you can’t tell who is speaking. It isn’t always

important, but sometimes it is, and it’d just be nice to have a video camera at every

session.

5 Language X Has No Copula

Language X has no copula: Sangi e Barnacle elif (Man and Barnacle happy: “The

man and Barnacle are happy”).

6 Theorizing: So, What’s the Point?

I’d like to spend the rest of this paper talking about what I think this experiment

means to the study of pidgins and creoles.

First off, I’d like to restate all the differences this experiment has between the

actual creation of most pidgins and creoles:

(1) Language X speakers were not my slaves or servants.

(2) My subjects and I shared a common language.

(3) My subjects didn’t feel coerced into speaking Language X (for the most part).

(4) We were not trying to accomplish a task, like plowing a ﬁeld or mining.

(5) The superstrate language wasn’t a complete language.

(6) This really wasn’t a contact situation.

That said, I still think this experiment was important.

As I said in the very ﬁrst paragraph, there is no signiﬁcant documentation of

what the various pidgins and creoles were like in the ﬁrst twenty years of their creation,

let alone the ﬁrst few months. Fifty years is practically a lifetime, and yet those are the

earliest records we have, which themselves aren’t exactly anything like “A Complete

Grammar and Examination of the Pidgin Spoken by the Slaves on My Plantation”9 .

Who knows how on earth these people communicated in the ﬁrst few months of their

cohabitation? By now, it’s impossible to tell. This is where my experiment comes in.

In an actual contact situation, the subordinate group probably wouldn’t try to

learn the language of the dominant group right away. I would think there would be

little communication at all in the typical plantation situation: The master barking out

9 Not a real book.

orders in his native tongue and the slaves not understanding until someone got down

and showed them exactly what they wanted them to do. It would seem to me that

communication would be undesirable and avoided altogether at ﬁrst. When it ﬁnally

did get going, it would probably be with code switching or imitation, as I said. And, of

course, there would be large amounts of gesturing and exemplifying, demonstration.

The mode of communication that would develop wouldn’t even be pidgin, or even a

jargon. It would just be whatever worked to get by with each particular situation. The

rules would change constantly, and the only correct form would be the form that

conveys the correct information or produces the intended result. This is pretty much

what happened in my experiment from week to week. There was no discussion or talk;

just communication. As soon as one person conveyed the idea that they wanted to

convey, they were done. So, some of the ways my subjects expressed ideas may be

closer to many pidgins in their earliest stages.

An interesting experiment which would require both Bill Gates and Donald

Trump as its sponsors would be to keep one of the experiments I listed going for about

ﬁfty or sixty years. In other words, to create a pidgin. If, after sixty, seventy, maybe a

hundred years, the language that developed looked like other pidgins and creoles at

their seventy year mark, then whatever the language originally looked like might

closely approximate the early stages of the pidgins and creoles of the world. It’s highly

unlikely that this would ever come to be, but it’s worth mentioning.

I think one of the things this experiment exempliﬁes is the switch from what I

call Hemingway to Fitzgerald language usage. In the beginning, my subjects merely

tried to convey their idea in as quick and cheap a way as possible, much like Ernest

Hemingway does with his short, jerky, to-the-point prose. Later on, they were still in it

to get the job done, so to speak, but rather than trying to utilize what was quickest or

what was easiest, they started to look for what was best, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald,

whose books are about the same length as Hemingway’s, but whose sentences do a lot

more. It was when they stepped up to Fitzgeraldian communication that the various

rules with ayas and is arose, and I’ve no doubt such rules would have continued to arise.

I think the reason that the switch eventually occurs has to do with pride, and the fact

that it’s not empowering to be able to say any old thing and have it mean whatever you

want. It’s as if the rules–any rules–are a sign of advancement.

The long and short of it is this: I did see Language X becoming a pidgin and

doing pidgin-like things. Perhaps a better word is feel. As I was looking through my

pages of notes to ﬁnd examples of things, I would notice that, every time I found a

counterexample to some rule that I had proposed, it usually showed up in my speech.

A quick example: In the middle of a story (we took turns speaking), I said Laura ayas is

kwame (Laura go at moon). This totally breaks the rule I proposed, since the moon is a

speciﬁed place. Yet, it’s not as if they were going to correct me. They understood what

I meant; it’s just something they wouldn’t say. And so it was at places like this where I

noticed that what I perceived to be Language X was not what they perceived it to be. It

hadn’t gotten to the point where they would see it as a language and start to correct my

grammar, though I’ve no doubt that if it would have kept going, it would’ve come to

that. Based on what I’ve seen throughout the course of this experiment, I’d like to posit

a hierarchy of development from pidgin to creole:

1.) Bare Communication: Speakers of the substrate language slowly learn a few

words or ﬁxed expressions of the superstrate language. To communicate,

they put words from the superstrate language into the grammar of their

own language. There are no rules. Whether the correct idea is conveyed

is the basis for determining correct or appropriate usage.

2.) Pidginization: Substrate speakers begin to systematize the language they

speak. A few general rules which don’t so much necessarily correspond

to any rules in the substrate or superstrate languages, but feel right begin

to take shape. These “rules”, however, are totally mutable, since the em-

phasis is still placed on information conveyance. So, it doesn’t matter if

every speaker uses every rule every single time; it’s just a pattern that

seems to simmer under the surface.

3.) Pidgin Birth: A pidgin is born. All the rules that had been growing come to

fruition in this stage. However, there aren’t many rules, and there doesn’t

necessarily have to be a rule for everything in the pidgin; just a few rules

that speakers recognize as being valid. There may still be some misuse,

and possibly competition between various types of rules pertaining to the

same thing. The language is still used only for communication, and so the

vocabulary is small. It’s now simply a system for communication that can

be used reliably.

4.) Creolization: The language becomes a language, used not just for communica-

tion, but for leisure and art, as well. The vocabulary expands, rules are

ﬁnalized, the language is standardized. From this point on, the changes

that the language will undergo are the same changes that every language

undergoes.

I won’t go so far as to put a timeline on this, but I would guess that a pidgin moves

from stage 1 to stage 2 rather quickly, given how soon rules developed in Language X,

even though it was only spoken for one hour once a week. This, however, would be

largely dependent on the need for communication, though, and the importance placed

on it. Though we only met for an hour once a week, it was clear that we were coming

together to speak the language and to do nothing else, and so there was more emphasis

placed on speaking and innovation, and systematicity more quickly became a necessity

for them. That said, I’d never claim that Language X got beyond stage 2. I believe the

jump from stage 2 to stage 3 would take much longer, especially with the random

communication that would occur on a plantation (one slave speaks to the master once

during the week and uses some construction, but no one else hears it, and by the time

he has the opportunity to use that construction again, maybe he’s forgotten it, maybe

another strategy has developed, etc.). And, of course, the jump from stage 3 to stage 4 is

the longest jump of all.

7 Concluding Remarks

On the whole, I think this experiment was a rousing success, despite the fact that

one of the sessions was canceled and two or three weeks of tape were, for all intents and

purposes, lost. I think if I were to attempt this experiment again I would be more aware

of what to do and what not to do. I’d like to thank my sponsor, Prof. John McWhorter,

who provided me with the opportunity and gave me advice and much encouragement.

The experience is one I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to take part in

it.

Ani okesh yani sanya eyan melay!

Language X Word List (This is what each subject had to work with):

English-Language X!!

len!

yof!

!
losh!

!
afraid!!
even!
!
all………………………….eyos!
!
animal!
lavi!
!
at……………………………is!
!
!
back (body part)!
!
bad………………………..egzam!!
!
!
belly! !
big…………………………epsiz! !
!
bird!
veni!
!
!
to bite!……………………glasa!
shifto! !
black! !
!
!
blood…………………….pifes!
!
asaf!
to blow (breath)!
!
blue……………………….ishlo!
!
bone!
!
breast, chest…………..baks!
!
ahosh!!
!
to breathe!
!
brother………………….hosi!
!
!
vaza!
to burn!
!
!
!
!
!
child! !
!
landi!
!
clothing…………………yonzev!
!
!
cloud! !
cold……………………….enish! !
!
to come!
agan!
!
!
to cook…………………..zela!
correct!
enats! !
!
to count………………….andal!!
!
!
to cut! !
daya!
!
!
!
!
!
to dance!
atsash!!
!
day………………………..melay!!
aslan! !
!
to die! !

fuve!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

Language X-English

to fall

to count (as in “one, two…”)

to turn (e.g., to turn around)

to lie (prostrate, not “ﬁb”)

abim!
ablag…………..to vomit
achak!!
achul…………..to work
agach! !
agan……………to come (movement only)
ahosh!!
to breathe
alank…………..to sit
alos!
to say
aluv…………….to swim
andal !!
ani………………I
apan!
!
asaf……………..to blow (using your lungs)
ashas! !
aslan…………..to die
atsash!!
ayak……………to win
ayan!
to play
ayani…………..you (plural), you all, y’all
ayas!
ayaz…………….to sing
aywa! !
azub……………to urinate, to relieve oneself

to go, to move, to walk

yes, yeah

to dance

to stand

to sleep

to pull

bacha!!
baks…………….breast, chest
bande!!
star
bashi…………..wife
two
be!
beves…………..meat
bezda!!
blandi…………dog
blaza! !

to ﬁght

to scratch (e.g., to relieve itching)

!
!

!
!
!

ge!

dirty………………………yebish!!
blandi!!
dog!
!
!
to drink………………….losa!
!
efes!
dry!
dull……………………….ebez!
!
!
heches!!
dust!
!
!
!
!
ear!
!
zay!
!
earth……………………..ginges!!
meva! !
!
to eat! !
egg………………………..wome!!
!
eight! !
!
!
eye…………………………pek!
!
!
!
!
achak! !
to fall!!
!
far………………………….elas!
fast!
!
eﬁs!
!
fat………………………….ebwiz!!
!
paki!
!
father!!
few………………………..enek!
!
to ﬁght!
blaza! !
!
ﬁre………………………..shazes!!
!
!
ﬁsh!
ﬁve………………………..de!
!
plinye!!
ﬂower!!
!
to ﬂy……………………..vala!
hoshes!
fog!
foot……………………….kuz!
!
!
!
four!
fruit……………………….hashe!!
esuf!
!
!
!
full!
!
!
!
!
!
!
to give!
livu!
!
!
to go/move…………….ayas!
!
eyan!
!
good!
!
grass………………………seles!
!
hino!
!
green! !
!
!
!
!
!
mayes!!
!
!
hair!

kusi!

ta!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

bleza…………..to kill
bos!
busi…………….they

tail

chaga! !
chises…………..salt

to hit

husband

dangi! !
daya…………….to cut
de!
demi…………….person
mouth
dol!

ﬁve

fat

old

dull

ebez!
ebiz……………..warm
ebwiz!!
edaf…………….many
efes!
dry
eﬁs……………..fast
egal !
other
eglash…………slow
egosh!!
egwish………..thick
egzam!!
bad
ehin…………….this
new
ekop!
eksin…………..thin
ekwim!
wet
elas……………..far
elif!
elik……………..wide
what
emi!
emits……………some
enats! !
correct
enek……………few
enen!
near
engid………….heavy
enish! !
eniz…………….straight

happy

cold

!
hand………………………posh!
!
happy!!
elif!
!
!
he…………………………..zali!
!
wet!
!
head!
!
to hear……………………oniz!
heart! !
!
won!
!
heavy…………………….engid! !
here!
isnap! !
!
to hit……………………..chaga! !
sanya! !
!
to hold!
!
hot…………………………ezats!
how!
!
!
husband………………..dangi! !
!
!
!
I!
!
!
ice………………………….sayes! !
!
!
it!

!
ani!

zali!

iso!

!
!

bleza! !
to kill!!
!
knee……………………….fun!
!
keza!
to know (facts)!
!
!
!
!
yande!!
!
lake!
!
to laugh…………………osas!
!
left (side)!
indo!
!
leg…………………………meb!
!
to lie (down)!!
abim!
to like/love/enjoy…owis!
!
owem!!
to live!!
!
long………………………evag!
!
!
!
sangi! !
man!
many……………………..edaf!
!
meat!
beves! !
!
moon……………………..kwame!
mashi!!
mother!
!
!
mountain……………….gibe!
!
!
mouth!
!
!
!
!

dol!
!

!
!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

big

small

epsiz! !
eslim…………..smooth
eslit!
narrow
esuf…………….full
etas!
evag……………long
afraid
even!
eyan……………good
eyos!
all
ezats……………hot
eziz!

sharp

year
folay! !
fone…………….stone
fun!
knee
fuve…………….cloud
wind
fuyes! !

no, not

forest, woods

gale!
ge………………..eight
gen!
gibe…………….mountain
earth, soil!
ginges!
giskwe………..stick, wood, branch
glasa! !
to bite
gwega…………to tie (together, for example)

ha!
nine
hashe…………..fruit
heches!
dust
hezes…………..sand
green
hino!
hoshes…………fog
hosi!
brother
huches…………smoke
huwes!!
!
!
!
ifay!
indo…………….left (side)

snow

there

ha!

pa!

egal!
!
demi!

!
zava!
to name!
!
narrow…………………..eslit!
!
near!
enen!
!
!
neck……………………….shed!
new!
!
ekop!
!
night……………………..molay!!
!
!
nine!
!
nose……………………….yas!
!
!
gen!
no, not!
!
!
!
!
!
to obtain!
!
lusa!
!
old………………………..egosh! !
!
!
one!
one hundred………….zuyu! !
!
!
other! !
!
!
!
!
person!
!
!
place/building………yenev! !
!
!
to play!
to pull…………………..bacha! !
to push!
tusha! !
!
to put/place…………..sambu!!
!
!
!
!
sezes! !
rain!
!
!
reason/purpose……..yom!
!
zeso!
!
red!
!
right (side)…………….inko!
river!
!
yole!
!
road/path………………konev!!
rope!
!
!
to rub…………………….vamba!
!
!
!
!
salt!
chises!!
!
sand……………………….hezes! !
!
!
to say!!
to scratch……………….bezda!!
spuse! !
sea!
!
!
to see……………………..osim!
!
!
seven! !

lesev!

ayan!

alos!

ka!

!
!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

right (side)

!
inko!
is…………………at
ishlo! !
blue
isnap…………..here
how
iso!

seven

to throw

ka!
keza…………….to know (facts, information)
klasa! !
konev………….road, path, street, thoroughfare
kusi!
ﬁsh
kuz………………foot
kwame!

moon

child

landi! !
lavi……………..animal
lay!
time
lekso…………..white
bone
len!
lesev…………..rope, cord, twine, string
livu!
to give
losa…………….to drink
losh!
lusa…………….to obtain

back (where your spine is)

mother

to shoot

macha!!
mape……………tree
mashi!!
mayes………….hair
meb!
leg
melay………….day
mesha!!
meva……………to eat
mi!
three
misha…………..to squeeze
miyes!!
molay………….night
woman
moshi!!
mubo…………..yellow

to wash

skin

ni!

tali!

vales!

!
to sew (w/needle)….slesa!
!
sharp! !
eziz!
!
!
she…………………………zali!
macha!!
!
to shoot!
!
to sing……………………ayaz!
sister! !
!
!
to sit………………………alank! !
six!
!
!
skin……………………….miyes! !
!
!
sky!
to sleep………………….ashas! !
eglash!!
slow!
!
!
small……………………..etas!
to smell !
!
onet!
!
smoke…………………….huches!
eslim! !
!
smooth!
snow………………………huwes!
some! !
emits! !
!
to split…………………..skaza! !
misha!!
to squeeze!
!
!
to stab/pierce…………zitsa!
to stand!
!
apan!
!
star…………………………bande!!
giskwe!
!
stick!
!
straight!
eniz!
!
!
eniz!
!
straight!
!
sun…………………………zeye!
!
aluv!
!
to swim!
!
!
!
!
!
!
tail!
bos!
!
!
!
ten…………………………sa!
!
ifay!
there! !
they……………………….busi!
!
thick! !
egwish!
!
thin………………………..eksin! !
omem!!
to think!
!
!
this………………………..ehin!
!
three! !
!
to throw!

mi!
klasa!

!
!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

mup!

tooth

nal!
ni…………………six

tongue

to want, to need, to desire

okesh!!
omem…………..to think, to cogitate
onet!
to smell
oniz…………….to hear
osas!
osim…………….to see
owem!!
to live
owis…………….to like, to love, to enjoy

to laugh

one

pa!
paki…………….father
pek!
pifes……………blood
ﬂower
plinye!!
posh……………hand

eye

ice

ten

man

sa !
sambu………….to put, to place, to position
sangi! !
sanya…………..to hold
sayes! !
seles……………grass
sezes! !
rain
shazes…………ﬁre
shed!
sheka………….to wipe
black
shifto!!
shiles………….water
skaza! !
slesa……………to sew (w/needle and thread)
spuse! !

to split (in two, for example)

neck

sea

four
ta!
tali………………sister

to tie (together)…….gwega!!
!
time……………………….lay!
!
tongue!
nal!
!
!
tooth……………………..mup!
tree!
mape! !
!
to turn (oneself)…….agach!!
!
zo!
!
twenty!
!
two………………………..be!
!
!
!
!
!
!
to urinate!
azub!
!
!
!
!
!
to vomit!
ablag! !
!
!
!
okesh! !
to want/need!!
!
warm……………………..ebiz!
mesha!!
!
to wash!
water……………………..shiles! !
we!
!
!
wet………………………..ekwim!!
what!
!
!
white……………………..lekso! !
wide!
!
!
wife……………………….bashi! !
to win!!
!
!
wind………………………fuyes! !
sheka! !
!
to wipe!
with……………………….ya!
!
moshi!!
woman!
!
woods/forest…………gale!
!
achul! !
to work!
!
!
!
!
!
!
folay!
!
!
year!
yellow…………………..mubo! !
yes!
!
you (sg.)………………..yani
you (pl.)!

ayani! !

ayak!

wani!

aywa

elik!

emi!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!

tusha! !

to push

to ﬂy

vala!
vales…………..sky
vamba!
vaza…………….to burn
veni!

to rub

bird

we!

wani!
wet……………..head
wome!!
egg
won…………….heart

you (singular)

ya!
with
yande………….lake
yani!
yas………………nose
yebish!
dirty
yenev………….place, building, room
yof!
belly
yole…………….river
yom!
yonzev………..clothing

reason, purpose

he, she and it

zali!
zava…………….to name, to call
zay!
ear
zela…………….to cook
red
zeso!
zeye…………….sun
zitsa!
zo………………..twenty
zuyu!

one hundred

to stab, to pierce

*stress ideally is on the last syllable

Pronunciation:

This was designed to be easy to pronounce for English speakers. Nevertheless,

!
here’s a pronounciation guide:

a=“a” in “father”; e=“e” in “get” or the “a” in “gate” (either way); i=“ea” in “seat”;
o=“o” in “vote”; u=“oo” in “boot”; z=“z” in “zoo”; g=“g” in “gate” not “giant”;
sh=“sh” in “shoe”; s= “ss” in “boss”; ch=“ch” in “chimp”; y=“y” in “yet”;
ay=“i” in “kite”; the rest should be pretty self-explanatory.

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