I've been learning French on Duolingo for 746 straight days now, and can read simplified French novels and stories. I'm hoping to read real novels at some point -- Dr. Skull did French for his PhD language requirement, so we have all these French novels around the house, from when he was reading for his comps.
Anyway! Duolingo just added Haitian Creole in Beta to their available languages, and I have been messing about with that. When a language is in Beta, it's missing a lot of things -- like, so far there is very little help with grammar, or explanations of why things are right or wrong. I did find this page on Wikipedia which is some help.
But in any case I am mainly interested in looking at it as a creole language. Most of the vocabulary comes from French, but much of the grammar derives from West African languages. Further, like most Creoles, it was a mainly oral language for some time, so the spelling / grammar reflects that. The lexicon split from French back in the 17th century, and the two languages are no longer mutually intelligible. This sort of thing is fascinating to me. If I had the time and the money, I would love to do a degree in linguistics somewhere.
For now, I'll just mess around on Duolingo.
3 comments:
I wrote my two term papers in linguistics 1 on pidgins and creoles. So fascinating how language evolves. (Also it made Jar Jar Binks even more awful and racist because there's no reason at ALL for the people where he comes from to be speaking a pidgin or creole-- it is only there to be racist, not because of any linguistic need.)
This goes off your topic, but I find Duolingo's illustrations interesting. The person in your post's picture looks judgmental, saying "You drink wine."
That's Bea! She's bisexual and a bit of a control freak. In her French version, she does indeed drink wine.
All the characters on Duolingo have backstories and relationships. Eddy and Junior (a single father and his kid) are my favorites, though there is also a bear whose story I don't know yet.
(A real bear, not a gay-guy bear.)
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