Neo-Melanesian/Neo-Melanesian English Ad

My first experience of a creole en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Creole was with the New Guinea lingua franca known as either Neo-Melanesian or pidgin English. …… Papua New Guinea boasts about seven hundred native languages within an area similar to Sweden’s, but no single one of those languages is spoken by more than 3 percent of the population. Not surprisingly, a lingua franca was needed and arose after the arrival of English speaking traders and sailors in the early 1800s. Today, Neo-Melanesian serves in Papua New Guinea as the language not only of much conservation, but also of man y schools, newspapers, radios, and parliamentary discussions. The advertisement on page 166 will give a sense of this newly evolved language.

When I arrived in Papua New Guinea and first heard Neo-Melanesian, I was scornful of it. It sounded like long winded, grammarless baby talk, I was jolted to discover that New Guineans weren’t understanding me. My assumption that Neo-Melanesian words meant the same as their English cognates led to spectacular disaster…….

Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It is supple language that lets one express anything sayable in English. It even lets one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun “we” actually lu8mps two quite different concepts: “I plus you to whom I am speaking,” and “I plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking. In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words “yumi” and “mipela,” respectively. ….

Neo-Melanesian’s deceptive simplicity and actual suppleness stem partly from its vocabulary, partly from its grammar. Its vocabulary is based on a modest number of core words whose meaning varies with context and becomes extended metaphorically. For instance, while Neo-Melanesian “gras” can mean English “grass (whence “gras bilong solwara [salt water] “ means “seaweed”), it also can mean “hair,” whence “man I no gat grass long head bilong em” becomes “bald man.”

…… It is a normal complex language in its hierarchical organization of phonemes, syllables, and words. It lends itself so well to hierarchical organization of phases, and sentence that election speeches by New Guinea politicians rival the German prose of Thomas Mann in their convoluted structure.

Out of the temporary linguistic chaos that followed the ‘plantations or forts’ founding, simplified but stabilized new languages emerged. Consider the evolution of Neo-Melanesian as an example. After English ships began to visit Melanesian islands just east of New Guinea around 1820, the English also took islanders to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland and Samoa, where workers of many language groups were thrown together. From this Babel sprang somehow the Neo-Melanesian language, whose vocabulary is 80 percent English, 15 percent Tolai (the Melanesian group that furnished many of the workers) and the rest Malay and other languages. ~ Excerpt from Pages 157 to 159