Pidgins, being unstable and noncanonical, witness the ectosystemic nature: the foreign languages don’t integrate. Creoles, however, could be dubbed “systemopoetic novelty”—like parasystemic novelty, in nucleating a system, but more radical, lacking a broader system to integrate into.
The way I think about it: ectosystemic novelty in the form of approximately unintelligible language-(community-)systems living by each other necessitates the development of an interface (pidgin), which constitutes parasystemic novelty. Initially, it has much less structure, is much less self-standing than any of the prior fully structured languages but children growing up with it imbue it with structure, developing into a creole, which becomes a new system, independent of its “parent languages”.
Is this different than what you wrote or is it basically the same thing and I’m missing something?
Hm, I’m not sure. I would say that pidgins are weird. (TBC I know very little about pidgins; I’m basically just believing the general descriptions given by Bickerton, which are controversial.) I would say that a pidgin doesn’t constitute much of any stable novelty. There’s lots of little sparks of novelty: whenever a speaker creates a new phrase in the shared-enough basic vocabulary to communicate a subtler thing, that’s a bit of novelty. But by the nature of pidgins, that novelty then often mostly disappears. A pidgin on this view is a froth of little connections forming and breaking between speakers of different languages. The pidgin-activity gives the connection that makes the more established languages / communities be parasystemic w.r.t. to each other rather than ectosystemic. But the pidgin-activity is unstable and so is harder to speak of as system or system-part on its own? I guess I’d call [the speakers’s capacity to generate nonce forms on the fly] a stable part of the multi-language system?
Like, by “parasystemic novelty” I mean that if you have two systems S1 and S2, and each of them is fairly integrated within itself but they are only loosely integrated with each other, then S1 is parasystemic novelty (new stuff) from S2′s perspective, and vice versa. The term sort of takes a single standpoint because I’m thinking of situations where you have a big mind that’s been growing, and then you have a little bit of new stuff, and you want to describe the little bit of new stuff from the mind’s perspective, so you say it’s parasystemic novelty or whatever.
The way I think about it: ectosystemic novelty in the form of approximately unintelligible language-(community-)systems living by each other necessitates the development of an interface (pidgin), which constitutes parasystemic novelty. Initially, it has much less structure, is much less self-standing than any of the prior fully structured languages but children growing up with it imbue it with structure, developing into a creole, which becomes a new system, independent of its “parent languages”.
Is this different than what you wrote or is it basically the same thing and I’m missing something?
Hm, I’m not sure. I would say that pidgins are weird. (TBC I know very little about pidgins; I’m basically just believing the general descriptions given by Bickerton, which are controversial.) I would say that a pidgin doesn’t constitute much of any stable novelty. There’s lots of little sparks of novelty: whenever a speaker creates a new phrase in the shared-enough basic vocabulary to communicate a subtler thing, that’s a bit of novelty. But by the nature of pidgins, that novelty then often mostly disappears. A pidgin on this view is a froth of little connections forming and breaking between speakers of different languages. The pidgin-activity gives the connection that makes the more established languages / communities be parasystemic w.r.t. to each other rather than ectosystemic. But the pidgin-activity is unstable and so is harder to speak of as system or system-part on its own? I guess I’d call [the speakers’s capacity to generate nonce forms on the fly] a stable part of the multi-language system?
Like, by “parasystemic novelty” I mean that if you have two systems S1 and S2, and each of them is fairly integrated within itself but they are only loosely integrated with each other, then S1 is parasystemic novelty (new stuff) from S2′s perspective, and vice versa. The term sort of takes a single standpoint because I’m thinking of situations where you have a big mind that’s been growing, and then you have a little bit of new stuff, and you want to describe the little bit of new stuff from the mind’s perspective, so you say it’s parasystemic novelty or whatever.