productively in any variety of Québécois French:<raller> "to go again, to return",
<rabrier> "to cover (again/up)", <rajouter> "to add on", <ressayer> "to try", <rôter>
"to take off", etc.
than two exceptions to the /re/ generalization. That's conveniently chopping my
Bonventure County evidence which came right after the evidence from Saint-Thomas
French.
koine variety of Bonaventure County which is enclaved between the non-creole
non-koine Acadian dialect area and the non-creole koine varieties of Laurentian
(we already talked about), both these surrounding areas maintaining productive
schwa-insertion. In Bonaventure French, schwa-insertion in front of /r-/ is just
as exceptionnal as in Saint-Barth French and Haitian Creole.
County French I can't come up with a single example. This "indubitably strengthens
my case" that Bonaventure County French must have gone "trough an affixless stage"
because it beats both Saint-Thomas French and HC on exceptionlessness.
words? [...]
vowel: Haitian mid-low vowels normally are the result of French mid-low allophones
of vowels closed by /r/, which became phonemes in Haitian after the fall of
syllable-final /r/; otherwise the distinction between mid-low and mid-high vowels
was neutralized (cf. Haitian /pe/ from PAIX and /pè/ from PèRE).
reverse dictionary to show that French /er#/ is not the only source for HC /è#/. How
much full of fuddle duddle can you be?
of competing changes. Ever heard of lexical diffusion?
shown on comparative evidence that /vini/ and /tini/ in koine-derived varieties of
French are not items reflecting an earlier i-schwa. The remaining item /sila-a/
"this, this one" [Sylvain 1936:58 knows no /sila/, only /sila-a/] most certainly
reflects Québécois French /sula-la/ "this one" which Fournier (1981) shows to be the
agglutinated demonstrative <celui-là> followed by the determiner <là>. [I had missed
that one, sorry, but I'll correct the final version of the paper accordingly.]This
leaves us with the following question:Why should Goyette's i-schwa variant be found
in *any* lexical item of HC?
of French phonemes?
some extent in Wittmann (1996; with more details forthcoming) how the phonological
systems of the colonial "Frenches" vary geographically on a continuum from the utmost
North trough the Americas to the utmost South in the Indian Ocean.
the huge number of such "irregularities" found in Haitian. I therefore stand by my
earlier claim that this can only be accounted for by massive and continuous French
influence.
exact variety of French Haitian Creole borrowed "irregular" /re/ from?
debasilectalize "regular" affixless varieties or "regular" varieties with /er/ to
"irregular" varieties generalizing /re/. If Standard French is indeed the source:
(1) Why is it that Québec where debasilectalization is so much stronger than in Haiti
failed to convert to Goyette's /re/? (2) If HC adopted the /re/ rule from Standard
French, why aren't there in HC any /ré-/ reflexes before vowels such as in Standard
French <réactiver>, <réajuster>, <réécrire>, <réentendre>, <réessayer>, etc.? (3)
How do we explain that examples with /re/ from HC and other French creoles are
attested BEFORE the "correct pronunciation" of the Paris standard changed to /re/
considering that in the second half of the 19th century the (in Nisard and Bauche)
attested non-standard varieties of Paris French had /er/? (4) Why should an
anticlerically orientated "revolutionary" etymological revial movement of the French
Republic (= an ideology reviving for political reasons procunciations which are
historically dead) have any linguistic impact either in Québec or in Haiti?
of the debate on lexical diffusion. There is nothing to worry about, I just happened
to be away on a lecture tour. Color posters of the event in Ottawa are supposed to
be available at this site:
'sontaient' syndrome."
unfortunately unable to come.
lexical compounding for a number of varieties of "Frenches". Even the non-creole
French documented in Highfield has /pyé/ "tree, bush, plant" as well as /pyé de
bwa/ "tree".
document in another variety of French.
TO THE EXCLUSION of the monomorphemic term "arbre". Consultation of the ALF (Atlas
Linguistique de la France, in case Professor Wittman doesn't know...) shows that
forms related to ARBRE are quasi-universal throughout France as the word for "tree".
desk Patrice Brasseur's edition of Louis Bizeul's Dictionnaire Patois du Canton de
Blain (around 1850). On page 127, I see <piétaud> translated by a bimorphemic "jeune
<pied d'arbre> instead of monomorphemic <arbre>? Because, at that time, everywhere
in France <arbre> /arb/ "tree" was still homophonous with <herbe> /arb/ "grass".
This is still so in ALL varieties of basilectal Québécois French:/pyédarb/ is used
whenever it's crucial to convey that /arb/ doesn't refer to the grass of your lawn.
"pied" in French served as a model for /pye-bwa/ is something I do not doubt. But
for such a compound to be used INSTEAD of "arbre" definitely ranks as a *creole
innovation*, rather than an inheritance from dialectal French pure and simple.
forest" and (c) "N de N" is a productive model for creating semantically transparent
compounds in French, there should be a way testing whether <pied de bois> is a
possible word in the lexicon of native speakers of French. Here is what I got in
Trois-Rivières with a quick survey à la Labov as possible interpretations for <pied
de bois> (number of votes for each alternative within parentheses):
[According to one source, in the old days, "pieds de bois" were the forest trees
marked for felling the next day determining the work load for the day.]
leg".]
non-creole French indifferent which goes to show that "pied de bois" cannot
"definitely rank as a *creole innovation*".
For the benefit of the list owners and all those non-natives of French who
unwittingly but in good faith had recourse to any such data, I'd publicly submit
the following question:To what extent is it likely that a native speaker of
non-standard and standard varieties of French with a PhD in linguistics (everybody
I asked assures me this is actually so) would not know the botanical extensions in
the meaning of the French word <pied> "foot" and derived lexical compounds of the
type "pied d(e) X"?
someone who has claimed in print that people who believe creoles to exist as a
separate language type are racists would be able to coolly evaluate linguistic
evidence pointing to creoles indeed existing as a separate language type?
on the spot.
creolistics should feel guilty of (all of us regardless, of color, and in some of my
earlier publications too). Moreover, the accounts smack of racism, though I have no
evidence for accusing any of the creolists themselves of racism. Positions can be
racist while their proponents need not be. It's a matter of what is implied by what
we say.
affected the first research project I ever wrote up, around 1959 or so. The
substrate explanation for the frills of creole French seemed to be the only
reasonably attractive explanation and I would no doubt have persisted in that belief