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What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks

5 96
12.07.2024

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By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

I don’t think anyone would be shocked to hear that linguists generally study languages, but there is a corner of the discipline that studies something slightly different: pidgins. That’s the word that linguists use to describe the mashup that can result from the collision of two or more languages, emerging amid circumstances such as overseas trade or even enslavement. These are not actual languages; they have small vocabularies and very little of what we could call grammar. They serve largely to allow people to make basic statements, ask simple questions and give commands. One example is Chinese Pidgin English, which was spoken on the coast of China from the 18th century to the mid-20th century. Thought by some to have granted us the expression “long time no see,” it had a vocabulary of a few hundred words and only shards of what we would call grammatical rules.

Some pidgins flower into complex and nuanced languages, as happened with Jamaican patois, Papiamentu, Cape Verdean and the Creole I am most familiar with, Saramaccan of Surinam, each one of which has grammar and vocabulary extensive enough to fill books.

Linguists who study this phenomenon tend to focus on how pidgins evolve into language, but language can go in the other direction, too — unraveling, you might say, into something simpler. I’ve been reminded of that as the nation tries to process President Biden’s jumbled syntax during his debate with Donald Trump and in his subsequent interview with George Stephanopoulos.

Biden has never been the most starchy of orators, but many observers, myself included, were struck by how far his sentences had strayed from the complexities and subtleties he once controlled effortlessly. It is........

© The New York Times


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