Haitian Creole - Structure, Variation, Status, Origin - Albert Valdman
The Origin of the Haitian Creole Lexicon
Haitian Creole - Structure, Variation, Status, Origin - Albert Valdman
Albert Valdman [+]
Indiana University
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Albert Valdman is director of the Creole Institute at Indiana University and is a leading international specialist in French-based creoles. He is the author of one of the major works in the field, Le Créole: Structure, statut et origine (1978) and basic reference works for Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole, in particular, the Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary (2007).
Description
Chapter 6 opens with a section that stresses the fact that the input to the creation of HC by the African slave population was Colonial French, a variety of the language highly distinct from Standard French. The next section presents the phonological processes that link forms of HC and French cognates; these are in fact the processes that account for differences between Colonial and Standard French. The next sections discuss the survival, in HC, of regional or vernacular French forms and semantic processes that have led to differences in meaning between HC forms and French cognates. The last section deals with the lexicon that originates in languages other than French.