Can we… clone you?
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Pidgin is the language in a good portion (majority?) of Fela Kuti’s songs.
Fela had studied medicine in London so his English was good, but using pidgin was a deliberate choice to reach more people in Africa.
Language doesn’t stand still. I’m sure the British scholars who tried to formalize and define the English language hundreds of years ago would be frustrated at how we speak today. Nobody is even 100% sure how the word “okay/OK” entered the lexicon, but it seems to be nearly universal now.
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I have a strong affection for Tok Pisin. I think it, and all pidgins (yes, I know it’s technically a creole now, but it started as a pidgin), are testament to humanity’s ingenuity, stripping away everything unnecessary and superfluous from a (group of) languages, while still retaining expressive power: parliamentary debates are held in Tok Pisin, and there are Tok Pisin translations of Shakespeare, for example.
The main compromise seems to be in compactness: a passage in Tok Pisin is generally more verbose than the same passage in English. (To me, this appears analogous to the comparison of small and bare-bones but powerful programming languages like C and Scheme to their fuller featured cousins like Java and Python.)
Ken Campbell (the only man ever brave/stupid enough to stage the Illuminatus! trilogy) campaigned for the adoption of the closely-related Bislama as a single global language (“wol wantok”) on the basis that you can pick up enough of it to be useful in an afternoon.
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Ever had much of a poke at the linguistics of sign languages? There’s some really nifty stuff around spatial grammar.
Cool history, too:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harlan-lane-2/when-the-mind-hears-a-history-of-the-deaf/
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I have not. Sounds fascinating.
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I’m not a signer myself, and this is based on memories from a decade ago, but for example:
Native signers tend to do better on tests of spatial perception and memory [1] than non-signers, probably due to the involvement of spatial relationships in signed language. The grammar is primarily spatial; physical relationships between the placement of signs affects meaning [2]. You can move signs around or put them close to each other to indicate transformation, or time, or relationships, etc.
This makes it a bit less linear and time-bound, and allows some cool tricks.
For example, if the conversation involves a concept or name that is difficult or tedious to sign, a signer might make that sign once, then “grab” it and “place” it somewhere. From then on, they can refer to that concept just by indicating that location.
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[1] For example: run them quickly through a room, then ask them to describe where everything was.
[2] As well as alteration within signs for the signed equivalent of prosody; tone, “volume”, etc.
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BTW: the Sacks book is good easy-reading pop-science. The Lane book is a classic of historical fiction and Deaf history (the first half is fictionalised autobiography, the second half is straight history).
They’re both very worthwhile.
I like the use of subtitles.
You guaranz ballbaranz you gonna get cracked, you come down’a beach act all tantaran.
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