This forum established after an incident of witch hunts and tracing attempts was observed to occur against students who spoke out on a topic others wanted silenced, on another forum. Our site is dedicated to those students.
>

VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4], 5, 6, 7 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 12:06:05 02/28/00 Mon
Author: Anonymous
Subject: One theory why repetitive syllables occur in tokpisin- toktok liklik etc
In reply to: 's message, "Re: A RIDDLE FOR EVERYONE - DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY THEORIES?" on 13:41:18 02/25/00 Fri

> Our colonial masters treated us like babies and talked
> baby talks

I don't think so.

Tok pisin is a pidgin language - an interface language that allows 2 people who speak languages not intelligible to the other person, to interface and communicate.

A pidgin language is thus at the edge of effective communication.

To get our messages across, we often repeat syllables, words and sentences. Parents do this to their small children. People whose native languages are different tend to do the same thing.

All pidgin languages have words in them which consist of repeated syllables, such as toktok.

These repeated syllables may represent an institutionalisation of the way we naturally communicate to those with whom we're having a hard time getting the message across.

Saying a syllable twice in a word emphasises that syllable, and makes communication of the message intended more likely.

At least that's the theory.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.