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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   205 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

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

During this holiday season, are you interacting with any far-flung relatives who speak strange creoles/patoises/pidgins of your language? Do you think that such modes of speech should be considered proper languages in which their inhabitants can take pride, or merely disgusting bastardized dialects suitable only for reassimilation into the mother tongue? As a USAian with several relatives (mostly from Trinidad and St. Croix) who speak English with a very thick accent, and at least one (IIRC, from Antigua) who probably can be considered a speaker of creole rather than of English proper, I am inclined toward the latter opinion.

(I'm putting this in the Thursday thread rather than in the Friday thread because it seems like a culture-war topic. See, e. g., the laughs that /pol/ extracted from BBC Pidgin a while ago.)

No, although I have a few cousins and uncles and stuff who can speak cajun. I think cajun deserves to be preserved as a distinct language and not just parisian french in Louisiana schools, but that's probably not going to happen.

Fascinating things are going to happen with near dead languages in the age of generative AI. I'm fairly certain I could already choose to have an AI translate the wall street journal every morning into Pennsylvania Dutch. Or AI create music and videos in Pennsylvania Dutch. Once such a choice becomes cost effective, language in media becomes an aesthetic choice.

Do you speak PA dutch well enough to know if the generated language is accurate? I know a little from my grandparents and great grandparents, but not enough to be fluent, or judge the skill of others.

Irrelevant possibly but I was given a stack of essays in Japanese recently, some of them handwritten, that I was supposed to be able to understand. I asked ChatGPT 5.1 to translate one based on an image (it was handwritten) , which it did. In reading the translation I was startled by what appeared to be an alarming misapprehension of the person who wrote the essay. I asked ChatGPT about the word choices used and where the writer was going, as well as several follow-up questions about it, and the LLM agreed with my assessment that the person was grossly uninformed.

I then decided to look myself at the essay (which I should have done to begin with but had been lazy.)

Nothing in the translation was in the essay.

On confrontation ChatGPT crumbled, apologizing, saying "because the text was hard to read" it simply pattern-matched the writing with similar writings it had been exposed to and extrapolated the entire remainder from that. In other words a massive hallucination.

I haven't had anything this wrong from ChatGPT in a while and it definitely gives me pause when it comes to requesting translations without scrupulously double-checking it.

The most annoying thing? It then requested I reupload it, promising to "really be careful and be sure only to translate accurately" and....it then gave me what passed for a much more accurate translation. Why this didn't happen to begin with was mystery, but asking it that just got the usual "You're right to be annoyed" type groveling.

edited for typos

I don't have an answer to your question because its framing is foreign to my way of thinking, but it reminds me of the fierce reaction to when BEV/AAEV (Black English Vernacular) got its 15 minutes of fame in the 90s as "Ebonics."

The point of linguists was/is that BEV has its own sets of rules and even a consistent grammar (in the same way as other dialects). Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

As I'm sure you're aware, both "pidgin" and "creole" are neutral, descriptive linguistic terms.

Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

This slippery slope should not be totally written off. Creoles have been made co-official languages by a few Caribbean governments (Haiti and the Dutch "constituent countries" of Aruba and Curaçao), and politicians have seriously proposed doing the same in the most populated Anglophone Caribbean country, Jamaica.

In the case of Papiamento at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is the mother tongue of pretty much everyone in Aruba and Curacao. It's also not readily mutually intelligible with any other language. Aruba and Curacao have devolved governments - which other language should they pick? It's not as if they don't learn other languages in school.

You can't really compare it to 'Ebonics', which is mutually intelligible with standard English and which is only spoken by a minority, and an already politically fraught one at that.

Though it probably helps that it is a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Dutch territory. Not being a Portuguese colony or ex-colony, they have no specific attachment to standard Portuguese, and it not being a Dutch-based creole means that nobody can pretend it's merely broken Dutch.

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