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Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole) | ||
Tags: Haitian Creole | Creole | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| lynxrunner Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States crittercryptics.com Joined 6007 days ago 361 posts - 461 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish, Haitian Creole | Message 9 of 13 02 June 2010 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Volte: I say this because I once tried to track down a certain book written in Haitian
Creole. I searched absolutely everywhere online to find this book and found nothing. Not even a ridiculously priced item, not even on eBay or Amazon, not on the most obscure sites I found, nothing. It was one of the first books printed in Haitian Creole (I think it may have been a play?) and so I expected it to be easier to find. When I say lack of literature, however, I don't mean that Haitian Creole has no literature. I meant to say that it has less compared to the languages I'm used to studying. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5437 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 10 of 13 03 June 2010 at 12:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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I also think that Haitian Creole would be interesting to study, although it is not a language that I would actively study unless it was for a study at a university or something, simply because there are other smaller languages which I would prefer to study first, and there is only so much time to go around.
I used to tutor a middle-aged man from Haiti in English who spoke Haitian Creole. I've thought about the language before because of him, and had always wondered about if there was any mutual intelligibility between it and French. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6524 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 13 03 June 2010 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, yes, having trouble finding particular books can be a real bother. I've tried and failed to track down ones in various languages, including Italian and English.
Makes sense, though there's always the question of how much one can actually read, in practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6314 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 13 04 June 2010 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I spent several weeks in Haiti after the quake.
(see my blog here) http://brewdocinhaiti.blogspot.com/ Kreyol is a wonderful and fascinating language. If you speak any romance language it is pretty easy to master the basics. As my friend said " Ah, it's like French without all the picky grammar rules!!". The Haitian people are absolutely wonderful. It is such a shame that such a horrible tragedy has befallen their people. If you do go to Haiti (which I would strongly encourage anyone to do) talk to the folks at the Creole Institute at Indiana University. They set me up with Ann Pale Kreyol and some dictionaries which I found immensely helpful. The DLI course is incredible if you need more than a basic level of Kreyol. Unfortunately, the sound quality is sooooo poor on the files it is painful to listen to some of them. Then, of course, if you search another site...ahem... lets just say there is a "uz" and a "translations" in the site title, there are a multitude of Kreyol materials that I couldn't find anywhere else. Bon Chans! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sungchul Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5513 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Korean Studies: German, English*, French, Spanish Studies: Haitian Creole | Message 13 of 13 07 June 2010 at 6:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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I studied Kreyol at school for 2 semesters, and I plan on finishing out the track offered with another year's study! It really is a beautiful language. The issue of Haitian Creole and the degree of its relatedness to French was something we discussed a lot in class. Our prof. (Patrick Sylvain, for those of you might be interested) stated that many Haitians can understand French because they're just so exposed to it (at present, bother Kreyol and French are official languages, and instruction in school has only recently incorporated instruction in Kreyol). Francophones, however, can only get a gist of Kreyol at best without knowing the many words that are of west African extraction and the tense marking particles.
A sociolinguistic tidbit I found far more interesting was the continued mental colonization of the Haitian people. When I was volunteering, a joined a conversation between Haitians speaking in Kreyol. When another Kreyol speaker joined, the other members of the discussion informed him in Kreyol that I spoke the language. The newcomer then turns to me and says in English, "Oh, you know French?" Knowing French aside from Kreyol, I answered yes. Our professor went on to tell us that roughly 5-10% have a proficient/fluent grasp on French, whereas a majority of the Haitian people would claim that they speak the language. Also, the national religion of Haiti is voudoun (Voodoo, as represented by Hollywood); even my professor, who reported growing up well-off, said his life was filled with many voudoun aspects, as are the lives of many Haitians. However, nearly nobody would admit to practicing voudoun. (Instead, they would say they ascribe to the more seemingly prestigious Catholicism that the French introduced.) 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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