This entry was posted in Sociolinguistics, Video on by Elizabeth Pyatt.

That’s a positive development in most ways, but I think Anglos have somewhat forgotten how different things were…which is why Rosie O’Donell got into serious trouble for invoking this pidgin stereotype. accents (even on shows like Hawwaii Five-O. For the most part Chinese Americans are depicted as being fluent English speakers with native U.S. What also amazes me is that this language has virtually disappeared from the modern U.S. As it turns out though, Chinese Pidgin English has given English useful phrases such as having a “look-see”, “long time no see” and “chop chop.” I didn’t realize the origin of these phrases until pretty recently. But if it weren’t, this would now be considered extremely offensive. This video is from the University of Hong Kong, so the dialogue should be accurate.

There are some amusing phrases such as “numba wun (#1) ledda” for “your best leather”. This video is helpful because it shows the dialogue as a caption (and I admit I need it). At this time a pidgin developed to allow the Cantonese speaking residents of Hong Kong to communicate with the English speaking British. This video recreates a 19th century Chinese Pidgin English dialogue from time when Hong Kong was a British colony. This paper thus contributes to our understanding of potential diachronic sources of the cross-linguistic category of apprehensive as well as to an analysis of this function in the Kriol modal system and its origins, and a more nuanced picture of regional variation in Kriol temporal and modal expressions.This is the second “Video of the Week”, but this makes up for missing last week. We conclude that these two motivations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but that both are consistent with the idea of instantaneous grammaticalisation through substrate influence in creole genesis. The plausible link between the two functions is the semanticisation of an invited inference from ‘event about to occur’ to ‘event to be avoided’. The possibility of independent grammaticalisation cannot, however, be excluded, since parallel developments of temporal markers to apprehensive markers are attested in a number of geographically distant and unrelated languages. In fact we show that the apprehensive function of 'bambai' is more widely distributed in pidgin and creole languages of Australia and the Pacific than previously assumed, which could even point, potentially, to an earlier development in Australia. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, there was also Chinese Pidgin English spoken in Cantonese-speaking portions of China. Apprehensive markers are also found in languages which could have influenced the precursor pidgins in New South Wales and Queensland as they expanded northwards towards the Northern Territory. Chinese Pidgin English (also called Chinese Coastal English or Pigeon English is a pidgin language lexically based on English, but influenced by a Chinese substratum. The first is plausible insofar as dedicated apprehensive markers are a common trait in Australian languages, including in those that are currently in contact with Kriol and/or have previously been considered potential substrate languages, such as in the account of creolisation for Roper Kriol by Munro (2004). The most influential account was that of Leland (1876), whose. We consider two potential motivations for this functional extension: substrate in'uence and independent grammaticalisation. In the case of Chinese pidgin English, early accounts of the use of 'broken English' are found in the memoirs of sailors and merchants on the South China coast, and these were later supplemented by missionary and colonial accounts from Canton, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China. This use is considered an extension from the temporal/sequential function of this particle that is widespread in creole languages of the Pacific, including Kriol. a main clause modal marker indicating that an event will potentially occur but is undesirable, with associated pragmatics of warning or threat.

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the use of the Kriol particle 'bambai' as an apprehensive, i.e.

Chinese pidgin english