Five languages that came from English | Hacker News Reader

Five languages that came from English

bbc.com

159 pointshvo129 comments

A curious side note - hardly a language or even dialect, really - is the effect that having a large number of immigrants from one country can have on a region's language.

For example, in my own eastern Wisconsin, a large part of "Wisconsin-ese" is nothing more than German translated directly into English. So many people settled Eastern Wisconsin from Germany at the same time that their efforts to learn English all had the same mistakes, and became our local "pidgen".

For example -

- to soften an imperative in German, add "mal" - short for "einmal" (once) - there is only one word for borrow or lend - "leihen".

And so "Leih mir ein dollar mal" is "Could you lend me a dollar?" in English, but,

"Borrow me a dollar once"

in Wisconsin "accent". Many other small examples of this.

That's called a calque, I believe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque

Hiberno-English (the English dialect in Ireland) is similar. Lots of grammatical influence from Irish. e.g. plural you, additional tense ("do be"), verb repedition instead of yes/no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English

Growing up in Ohio, we always said "Gesundheit" in my house when someone sneezed.

When I was a kid, I asked my mom, "What does it mean? Is it another language or something?" She said, "It's just something you say when someone sneezes."

I have similar experience. My father's German-descended family lives in St. Louis, and they still say it. I asked my mother as a child, and she had a similar answer to your mom.

Also, the use of "by" in "Wisconsinese" seems inspired by German "bei" (at) -- as in "I'll meet you by the club tonight" meaning at the club, not nearby as the sentence would suggest.

The exact same thing is observed in Belgian French (wallonian) where they use "une fois" (same thing as "once") because of the dutch speaking influence locally.

Also in standard mandarin, where you can soften an imperative (I am told that the intuition is that the duration of such a modified verb is short) by adding 一下 "one time".

As far as I know (not authoritative), the construction is native.

"Une fois" means "once" in standard French ("il y avait une fois..."). Is there a specific context you're thinking of where it's used in a non-standard way?

But is it used to soften an imperative? "Once" is is not used that way in English, except aparently in Wisconsin.

Though I find it ironic, that in this context "mal" translates to "once". Since "mal" actually means "multiple times".

Oh, you mean like "Donne-moi une fois quelques minutes" - the exact same construction as the parent was pointing out exists in Wisconsin. Fascinating. Thanks for clarifying.

"Mal" means "time" (singular)

"mal" means time(s), but used that way in German is a shortened form of "einmal" (once)

Similar to Texa-duetche https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_German ... Contributed words like skunk to English.

Sounds like Penna Dutch... Sag mal -> say now (would cha have any ring bologna?)

Would like to add that Pennsylvania Dutch actually refers to Deutsch (i.e. German), not the language spoken in The Netherlands. The Dutch phrase for "sag mal" is "zeg eens".

Nitpick: Position of "mal" in the German sentence is wrong. "Leih mir mal ein Dollar" is the right one.

> our local "pidgen"

"pidgin"?

"pidgen" is "pidgin" in his pidgin.

:-)

it was late...

yep, another example of this is when Wisconsinites talk about visiting someone. "Let's go to Jeremy's house" becomes "Let's go by Jeremy", which is correct in German.

Though "Let's swing by Jeremy's" would be AFAIK pretty common across the US--although I suppose in that case there's a [house/place] implied by the possessive.

Make it possessive ("lets go by Jeremy's") and it would be perfectly normal English in my native south-east of England too.

I think it's just a more just an archaic usage in American English.

To which correct German sentence does "Let's go by Jeremy" correspond? Closest I can come up with is "Lass uns bei Jeremy vorbeischauen". Though in this case 'bei' has more of the meaning of 'at' and 'vorbeischauen' is an integral part of the sentence.

> "Let's go by Jeremy"

Non-native English speaker living in California. I've heard that construct in CA quite a bit.

In general, there are 2 ways to classify something as a language instead of a dialect:

1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]

2. Easier test is mutual intelligibility – dialects of one language are mutually intelligible – US English speakers chat and understand with the Brits (even when they can hear the extra ‘u’s in colour). Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Mutual intelligibility is problematic for languages with a dialect continuum.

Native speakers that live next to each other can understand each other without a problem but the farther apart the regions are the more likely it is that they can't anymore.

For example German. The Swiss Germans and the South Germans can understand each other but if you let somebody from the north of Germany speak with them in the local dialect, they won't.

Linguists usually don't even classify languages as dialects anymore. It's almost always a political minefield.

There's a very wide continuum in arabic as well.

In biology they would call that a "ring species". Sometimes two nearby populations can interbreed, which means they are the same species. But distant populations are so different they can't interbreed, and so must be different species. But figuring out exactly where to draw the line is problematic.

Mutually intelligible is not an exact thing. From my own experience:

A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. It worked OK, but not great, and not for anything technical (like science and finance, where the Germanic words are very different to the English).

With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away. Also, I found the TV Series "The Bridge / Broen" quite unlikely. Swedes and Danes don't talk that easily together, and certainly not with slang. The scenario of the cops from opposite sides of the bridge working together could still work, but mostly in writing. Also, the cadence is very different. Swedish is melodic. Danish is grunty.

Of course I have had no instruction in Swedish or Norwegian, but it wouldn't be hard, based on friends who have moved.

German is not mutually intelligible with Danish. But it is. I went to a handful of German classes, and it dawned on me that changing a few things around makes High German pretty much like old Danish, like what you'd hear in old black-and-white movies from around the war. These days Danish has a lot of English in it, and something about the way sentences are put together makes old movies seem very... old. But once you have a simple map in your mind, Danish appears to be German with some substitutions and simplified grammar. I can read the paper in German now, despite having had just those few lessons.

Swiss German, now there's a weird one. The sounds are different. I suppose I'm twice removed from it, but even native Germans I know will produce the WTF face when they hear a Swiss German. Words and grammar are similar, but different enough to be recognisably so by a foreigner like myself. But I suppose it's like Swedish and Danish.

Apropos the article, Singlish I found quite interesting. To me it's just English with sprinkled Chinese, and I think most English speaking people will not have a problem understanding it without instruction. One useful addition: English doesn't make much use of the modal particle, so it makes sense that Cantonese "la" is heard all over the place.

When I learned Norwegian, my teacher used to joke that all of Scandinavia spoke Norwegian. It's just that the Swedes were pronouncing things wrong and the Danish couldn't spell it correctly.

Heh, I had similar thoughs about Scottish -- my reaction to their Wikipedia was "is this an elaborate joke?".

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The novel Trainspotting is written like this if you're interested in more:

"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..."

That's pretty amazing, thanks!

and she just left out Finland because it didn't make any sense.

Finland is not usually considered to be a part of Scandinavia, though.

http://images.google.com/search?q=scandinavia Every image in googles image search says you're wrong.

Eyeballing Google Image Search? What an absolutely absurd way of figuring out what Scandinavia is. First of all, "every image" isn't even close to true, as many of them clearly highlight Finland (and Iceland) in different colors and many of them include non-Scandinavian countries for context (like Poland and the Baltics). If you actually click on any of those links, they don't "say he's wrong". From one of the first result's webpage (Wikipedia):

> The term Scandinavia always includes the mainlands of the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Norwegian dependencies, including Svalbard and Jan Mayen, are usually not seen as a part of Scandinavia, nor is Danish Greenland. However, the Danish Faroe Islands are sometimes included, as sometimes are Iceland and Finland

Finnish isn't even remotely related to the Scandinavian languages. If you're going to be needlessly pedantic and contrarian, at least put a little more effort in it than glancing at Google Images.

blah blah blah. Finnish is related to Scandinavian languages because it is a Scandinavian language. There are even similar words like appelsiini vs apelsin for Orange, in Finnish/Swedish respectively.

That's... not how languages are grouped together. Russian has the word "apelsin", meaning the same thing - is it a Scandinavian language also?

Finland is associated with Scandinavia by virtue of being dominated by actual Scandinavian countries (notably, Sweden) for so long, which influenced the culture. But it's not Scandinavian per se, any more so than, say, Georgia is Eastern Slavic. Ditto the language - influenced, yes; belonging to the same group, not at all.

I speak Finnish. Well aware.

Wikipedia[1] agrees with what I was taught in school. Finland is of course part of the (much more important and commonly used) Nordic countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia

Finland isn't in Scandinavia.

Hmm... When I asked my Finnish coworkers about that in the past they stated that it was.

This comic[1] from 'Scandinavia and the World' (particularly the explanatory text beneath it) might explain the situation.

[1] http://satwcomic.com/no-invitation

> A native speaker of Danish, I was able to speak with my Norwegian housemate. With my Swedish friends however, it was harder. Not sure why, since Sweden is visible from Denmark but Norway is a bit further away.

Between 1500ish and 1800ish Danish was extremely influential on Norwegian, by virtue of being... well... the formal language of the country.

Yeah but Denmark was also in possession of the southern bit of Sweden for a good long while.

Meanwhile you can read Holberg without too much trouble, even though he was born in Norway.

It's possible politics is the explanation. The newly independent/recovered lands need to be integrated, and one way to do that is language. So the Swedes made sure people spoke like them.

Nynorsk I can't get my head around, either.

Regarding the understanding of dialects, I wouldn't give much on the first impression of a German who only speak standard German.

They usually don't have to understand dialects unless it's within the family context. So they have almost no practice in understanding German that is different from the standard and even slight accents can already throw them off.

Compare that to Swiss or Austrian German where the dialects are used on every level of society and usually don't have a mark of being used by lower class citizens. It's not remotely strange to discuss quantum physics in Swiss German where Germans would most likely switch to standard German.

In such a case, you can also look on how long it takes a native to understand the language without any formal education. In the case of Swiss German, I'd say it takes at most 6 months to understand everything (as usual YMMV as there are some peculiar dialects out there).

But as you noticed with Danish<->German, even though there are some sight difference in grammar, there are some obvious transformations like "Haus" becomes "Huus" or "Zeit" becomes "Ziit" that can be generalized.

To add to this, dialect uses outside family context seem to be focused on adverting or special occasions like Carnival, radio competitions (describe your day in dialect), cabaret shows and similar.

There's also different grammatical rules with Singlish. In particular, they tend to omit the verb to be and tend to use the present instead of the past tense.

There are past tenses but modals tend to be used instead of conjugation. "I have eaten" => "I eat oready" or "I makan liao"

I studied in Copenhagen for a semester in college. I was shown this on day one about the difficulties of Danish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_iixmqSBQw

I love that video!! This one is also pretty awesome, I think it is probably funnier in some ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqgRC5sfCaQ

The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible. However, they have one critical feature: until about 150 years ago (when modern Chinese was adjusted to have a 1-to-1 correspondence with Mandarin) none of the dialects had a written form. Everyone spoke in their own tongue, but wrote in Chinese.

How about Italian? There are dozens of Italian dialects, many further from one another than, say, Italian is from Spanish. It was only during unification (in the 1800s) that Italians settled on the Florence dialect as their national language. But the regions all still proudly speak their own dialects. I'm particularly familiar with Romagnolo, spoken (and written) in the region of Ravenna, Rimini, and San Marino,and which has its own classic literature dating from as far back as the 16th century.

> The various Chinese tongues have long been called dialects, yet many are mutually unintelligible.

China, India, and Europe are on a continuum of separateness / unification, just fixated at different points in it. Europe is the most disunited, China the most unified. But basically the stories are the same. Areas of intense trade and cultural interchange, achieving different levels of political unity.

The first point reminds me of Croatian and Serbian. In Yugoslavia they were one language: Serbo-Croatian. Then after the war Croatia declared their language as Croatian and artificially made some changes to it to make it slightly different.

> Neither US English nor UK English speakers understand or can produce intelligible German.

I beg to differ:

"Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets. Relaxen und vatch das blinkenlights!!!"

> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]

Heh, sometimes a language is a dialect with someone else's army and navy.

All modern imperial powers have taken "divide et impera" to heart.

"1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"

Tell that to the speakers of 10s of languages of India, most of which are so different from one another that no definition would classify them as dialects. I wonder if that quip, even as a humorous one, makes sense when it fails for about 20% of all humans.

Well it was said (attributed, anyway) to Max Weinreich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...) who was a professional linguist.

Notice that it was said in Yiddish which, of course, did not have its own navy or army. So it may have been said with a tongue in cheek, especially if the story relayed by Weinreich at the link is correct.

I always interpreted it as meaning that there is no objective distinction between dialects and languages but that nations (which have armies and navies) declare their prestige dialect to be a "language" and claim related dialects to be subservient to it.

Yes, normative dialects are selected to be the language. Often based on the dialect of the capital city.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in the not too distant past, these Indian languages had armies.

Well, yes and no. Kingdoms and provinces weren't ever linguistically organized till 1957, 7 years after India was unified as a Republic (1950). Most kingdoms and provinces were multilingual, though they all had one or more court languages for which the respective governing elites patronized scholarship. An example is the Vijayanagara empire in southern India (1330s to 1565) which was ruled by different multilingual elites who patronized Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent, Tamil and Persian. There are also other types of counter-examples- dialects that were patronized by kings or leal chiefs with their own armies (e.g. Dakhani Persian/Urdu of the various Sultans and Nizams (1300s - 1900s) of the Deccan region of South/South-Central India)

I was under the impression that a dialect becomes a language when it has its own set of "official" rules and not those of the "parent" language.

There's no good definition of what makes a dialect a separate language. At least not one that is universally accepted.

Standardization is generally distinct from whether something counts as a language or not. English lacked standardization for centuries (almost a millennium if you count it right) after it became a distinct language.

Those are reasonable starting points, but in truth the classification is far more complex than that among linguists.

Classification of the natural world into separate bins is almost invariably a "leaky abstraction" anyways. A lot of problems just solve themselves once you remember that. That's why I don't find questions like "Is Pluto a planet?" or "When does a fetus become a person?" interesting.

I seem to get downvoted for comments like this, but.. thanks for sharing your perspective, I realized that's how I feel too :)

But, like those questions, this one also has important implications in practice.

Can you list some important implications of "is Pluto a planet or not?" and of "is Basque a language or a dialect?"?

> Can you list some important implications of "is Pluto a planet or not?"

I remember reading in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' that Pluto was the first and only planet discovered in the USA, all the rest having been discovered in Europe.

I don't know if that had any implications for the reactions to IAU decision to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet, but it's easy to imagine how it would have been an even bigger deal if the other planets had been discovered by, for eg., Russia back in the day.

Is Pluto a planet? No. Although various people have strong feelings about implications in education and elsewhere--in both directions.

Languages and dialects can with respect to policies like bilingual education. If it's just a dialect, then you may argue there's no need to treat native-speakers differently. If there's a genuinely different language then you may or may not decide that bilingual education is necessary but it tends to be a different discussion than in the first case.

Also language preservation - and there's a direct analogy to preservation of species. When we consider something a separate species, there's that much more impetus to preserve it from extinction, for the sake of maintaining diversity. Similarly, when we consider something a distinct language, there's similar impetus to preserve it. Dialects (usually) aren't extended the same deference, and are left to live and die on their own.

I think Basque is probably not a good one to question... it's in a language family all of its own

I'll leave Pluto to others but whether something is a language or not has tremendous political significance, which is obvious to anyone who's spent any time reading about China.

It doesn't, really. Chinese policy is to make sure everyone speaks Mandarin, to promote in-country unity. The rhetoric they employ to push that goal is independent of the goal; there is no question anywhere that English is not a dialect of any Sinitic language, but English was required in Chinese schools for policy reasons and they are now beginning to phase it out for (different) policy reasons.

There are no policy implications to using a different term for Cantonese (though the relevant Mandarin terms are 方言 "the speech (语言) of a place (地方)", which makes no distinction between "dialect" and "language" (though "linguistics" is 语言学, the study of 语言), and 粤语 "Cantonese", which is a term fully parallel to 英语 "English", 法语 "French", 日语 "Japanese", etc.). Regardless of term, the policy will be that schooling takes place in Mandarin.

No, that's not really true; the PRC's position is predicated on the claim that Mandarin is a degenerate dialect of Cantonese, and not a language in its own right. They also believe, rightly or wrongly, that acknowledging the multiple Sinitic languages would threaten their status as one cohesive nation. It's also rather disingenuous to take the two component characters of 方言 apart to argue it means something different than it does; telling me it means "direction-speak" is no more illuminating than telling me "telephone" means "distant voice."

> It's also rather disingenuous to take the two component characters of 方言 apart to argue it means something different than it does

What do you think it means, and why?

It means "dialect." It is not a synonym of language.

You missed "and why". "Dialect" is a conventionalized translation of the existing term 方言, not the other way around.

Can you find examples of French or Spanish being referred to as a 方言?

It's generally valid to say Thing 1 is more A-like than Thing 2. The problem is believing that everything is either A, or not A.

> 1. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy [0]

... which is quoted in the article.

I found this video of a woman reciting the opening to Genesis in Tok Pisin, and it struck me as really interesting. The repetition in the verses is likely what's key to this, but if at first upon hearing it you're bewildered, about halfway through you realize that you can understand what she's saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laTpd2ofjKg

The history behind the language is interesting, too. Interacting with English speakers created a language that unified a geographic area that was rich in individual languages with no common tongue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Development_of_Tok_P...

> if at first upon hearing it you're bewildered, about halfway through you realize that you can understand what she's saying.

As a non-native English speaker, this is basically my experience watching some movies (where the characters speak with regional dialects). The first 10 minutes I feel like the actors are mumbling and then after 20 or so minutes I have no problem keeping up anymore.

Also what it feels like when someone with an accent is holding a lecture at my university.

It took me longer for British accents to become intelligible; I think it took about a season of Top Gear before I no longer had to rewind certain portions or listen very actively to understand what was being said.

I'm kind of the same when watching Shakespeare. Takes about 10 minutes and then my brain snaps into the right mode to more easily follow what is being said.

The Bible text might have more loanwords from standard English than other texts in Tok Pisin do, though. For example, right at the beginning she says "spirit", which I suspect came into Tok Pisin through a conscious borrowing by a Bible translator or missionary.

If I look at this translation

http://www.bible.is/TPIPNG/Gen/1

it seems quite challenging to follow, even knowing a couple of Tok Pisin words. But maybe it would be different if it were read aloud, or maybe the woman in the video you found is reciting a version that uses vocabulary that's especially close to English?

Pulled my English<->Tok Pisin dictionary[1] off the shelf and took a look. For this context (referring to God) Spirit or Holi Spirit is correct.

Reading Tok Pisin is definitely harder than hearing it for the novice, IMO. The spelling is much more phonetic while your brain still wants to pick out the (sometimes heavily accented) English words it recognises.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4397275-the-jacaranda-di...

Ok, so ... "afternoon, morning, day number (1..7), sun must come up, moon must come up ..."

These five languages didn't 'come' or evolve solely from English - rather they are all English-based creoles[0]. Many of them are grammatically quite different to English, but they've all had heavy influences from other languages as well.

On the other hand, French, Romanian and Portuguese aren't Latin-based creoles - they're separate languages which have evolved from Latin (although you could make the argument that Portuguese and French are two ends of a dialect continuum[1]).

Really, the relationship between Tok Pisin and English is very different to the relationship between French and Latin. English hasn't had the time and geographical spread to diverge into different languages that Latin has had.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_languages [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Romance_lang...

Yeah, the article title (premise?) is flawed in that way. Otherwise an interesting overview of a few languages I'd never heard of

The geographical spread is certainly there.

Shelta, is a language spoke by the Irish travellers, came from Irish and English. It is pretty interesting : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta

huh, interesting that linguists would call it something totally different from what speakers call it (always called some variation of "travellers cant" from the speakers I've known).

Yes, I have no idea why...

How about all computer languages? They're largely subject to grammar constraints (e.g. LR, etc.), but they're quite subject to creolization and almost all the widely used ones are derived from english, nerd slang, slang tech terms, short tech terms, and shit that early programmers made up to express themselves. I've been wanting to do a study on the evolution, understanding, and psychology of programming languages (even wrote a blog post awhile back about it) but i haven't gotten around to it.

Computer languages are only very superficially similar to English. Like a whale is superficially similar to a fish. The syntax of ALL computer languages is completely unlike English. Computer languages don't have the phonology or morphology of English either (they don't have any phonology or morphology).

morphology I'm not so sure. looking at the evolution of keywords seems to suggest that the morphology is there. phonology, I'd have agreed with you a few years ago after I finished a minor in slavic linquistics, but now after seeing how people verbally communicate programming concepts over the last decade and how that communication has impacted language design itself...I'm not so sure. In either event, the structure of the english language has heavily impacted the design of languages used to program computers. Not so drastic a difference as whale to fish, more whale to dolphin.

As an aside, I wonder if anyone has studied how learning an English-based (at least wrt keywords and such) programming language before learning English affects the latter.

From personal experience (I am a native Russian speaker), I have a feeling that it does, to some extent. To this day, for me, the primary meaning words like "loop" and "string" is that of programming - the first mental association with "string" is text, not an actual string, for example. Surely this has got to change perspective somewhat.

This also has an interesting side effect, in that code doesn't look like mutilated English - it just naturally reads and feels like, well, code. This is not the case when I'm reading a program that uses keywords in my native language (e.g. the 1C language - http://www.asd-dnepr.com/images/v8/two_variants_of_embedded_...) - those just look weird as hell, and very awkward/funny. I have often asked myself if that's what C and Python look like to native English speakers; and if so, then what difference does it make in how we code.

> To this day, for me, the primary meaning words like "loop" and "string" is that of programming

In my case (another non-native English speaker), I had come across 'a piece of string' and such before encountering programming, and so that's the immediate association string brings to mind. 'Loop', however, I hadn't come across before I learnt programming, so it's very strongly associated with that sense in my mind, even though now I know the "other" meaning.

> This is not the case when I'm reading a program that uses keywords in my native language [...] - those just look weird as hell, and very awkward/funny. I have often asked myself if that's what C and Python look like to native English speakers; and if so, then what difference does it make in how we code.

Yep, I too wondered the same thing after finding a programming language in my native language (https://github.com/Ezhil-Language-Foundation/Ezhil-Lang), and seeing how even keywords that are meant to sound natural for their usage get bent awkwardly out of shape by the thousand different contexts we use them in.

>> now after seeing how people verbally communicate programming concepts over the last decade and how that communication has impacted language design itself...I'm not so sure.

This sounds interesting - can you elaborate?

I think that one important difference between natural and formal languages is that every time you use a natural language you are contributing to it's evolution. Reproducing a formal language is much more intentional and happens a lot less frequently.

Having lived in Papua New Guinea twice while growing up, I have a certain fondness for the language Tok Pisin. I can’t really speak much of it, but I can understand a fair bit.

You’ve got to love a language where “gras” means “hair”, “bagarap” means pretty much the same thing if you say it out loud in English, and while expressing how full your tummy is after a good meal you accidentally say you’re pregnant[1].

It’s charmingly idiosyncratic to an English ear.

And there’s even an edition of Wikipedia in Tok Pisin: https://tpi.wikipedia.org/

[1] True story. My dad did this and all the locals fell on the ground laughing.

[2] Brief blog post I wrote in 2009 which is the source for this comment: http://www.michevan.id.au/content/wikipedia-really-does-have...

[3] Another blog post about the Vanuatuian cousin, Bislama: http://www.michevan.id.au/content/by-any-other-name/

Really neat. Especially the idea that:

"English may come to have a global standard that is not exactly what is spoken in any local culture"

As others have mentioned, many of the examples in this article are creoles. A non-creole example of language descended from English (or rather Middle English) is Scots, which has its own dialectical variations that vary in intelligibility with Modern English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

Gullah is a neat language. I came across a website that had a Gullah translation of the bible -- at first glance it looks unintelligible, but when you read it out loud it makes complete sense (as a native english speaker):

http://www.gullahbible.com/e-GullahNT/index.htm

Creoles are fascinating. If we can assume that modern language came about with modern humans some 50,000 years ago, I wonder how many modern languages are creoles of extinct languages?

There are, of course, other languages that came from English. One that comes to mind is Bislama, a dominant language spoken in Vanuatu.

Also Hawaiian Pidgin (not a literal pidgin).

Out of interest, is American English considered a dialect of British English?

No, they are both dialects of English.

Both Americans and Britons would probably say no, but for different reasons.

Take this article with a grain of salt. Their description of Singlish is enough to disqualify the accuracy of the rest of the piece. Singlish is not a unique or separate langauage, or even an actual language. Comparing Singlish to English is no different than comparing Cockney to English. I don't think the different dialects of English within the U.K. are all considered separate languages, and therefore Singlish should not be either. An American English speaker will likely have much better chance of understanding a Singaporean than understanding some of the U.K. dialects.

Most Singaporeans still have a concept of "proper" English, and can code switch across the creole continuum, but interestingly the acrolect ("variation most associated with refinement") is basically standard UK or US English - though not everyone can get there. As a comparison, the closest similarity I can think of in terms of having a similar English creole continuum is Jamaican patois.

I doubt most native English speakers (despite my best wishes, I certainly can't) could decipher the Singlish basilect ("least refined") - the cadence is syllable-timed, the vocabulary is part Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay, grammar is nonstandard and a substantial part of emotion is conveyed through particle suffixes (the stereotypical Singlish "lah" is emphasis).

Here's an example of some of the continuum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI

and some more (from a film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4ufPKTq0E

and an explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8nM75AqUk

> Here's an example of some of the continuum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXRJiMkKpI

Wow, that accent shift is really striking.

Love the posts - "Indian-net" is a classic, as an aside man that scene in money no enough really blew me away - it's crazy to believe that my laptop (not even a desktop, mind you!) has a thousand times more RAM... to say tech moves quickly is an understatement.

You are spot on with your description.

To add to what everyone else has said: There's no dividing line between "accent", "dialect", and "language" any more than there's a dividing line between "pebble", "stone" and "boulder".

I'm American, but I've spent about a year in Singapore in various stretches. The Acrolectic Singlish/Standard English that my coworkers at a multinational spoke definitely converges with General American English, and I understood it without hesitation. But the basilectic variety spoken, say, between army buddies? About as comprehensible to me as Dutch.

Not to be the one to shit on your parade, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_size#International_scale

Americans will understand Singaporeans because English is the main language in both countries. Singlish is a separate language, and the article describes it somehow accurately. It is not mutually intelligible with English (Brits or Americans can't understand it), but most native Singlish speakers are Singaporeans who also speak English.

> Singlish is not a unique or separate langauage, or even an actual language.

As far as I know, Singlish is widely regarded as a creole language. Yes, a large part of the vocabulary is English words, but it is very different when it comes to grammar and it uses a lot of loan words from east Asian languages that aren't in English dialects around the world.

The idea that Singlish is just uneducated Singaporean English is purely a political one.

> An American English speaker will likely have much better chance of understanding a Singaporean than understanding some of the U.K. dialects.

I've seen a few dozen sentences of Singlish and I would understand it about as well as I'd understand any other English based creole - I'd understand the English words and not much else.

The problems that different English dialects have when trying to understand each other are accents and local slang - but the grammar and written language are largely the same. On the other hand, large parts of the Singlish vocabulary differ from English, and the grammar is substantially different, even when written.

I'm not sure one questionable exampe invalidates the rest - most of the versions are combinations of english vocabulary with another language's grammar and vocab or phonetics, which I think makes them distinct enough for a langauge.

I must admit I too find the idea behind singlish questionable, especially since the cited website doesn't contain the examples, or in any place I could find. But, if the examples they provided are accurate, “Wah lau, the movie damn sian”, from what I can tell based on the transation, the grammar structure is different enough from english that it's probably a good candidate for something new.

"A language is a dialect with an army".

What about Canadian? ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com