Prince Phillip as Pela Bilong Missus Kwin

From: On Frobnication, Universal Grammers, and the Pela Bilong Missus Kwin - A review of The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

...Lewis Caroll makes up all sorts of new verbs, nouns and adjectives. There's even an irregular verb in there---as you know the past tense for outgribe is not outgribed but outgrabe. But he doesn't touch the function words---prepositions, articles and so on. In fact, function words in a language are really resistant to change. That's why new gender-neutral pronouns just haven't worked in English. When we want a gender-neutral pronoun, we tend to commandeer an existing one and overload it. Like using they as a singular pronoun, which is quite standard now.

If it's that easy for new words to appear, what about new languages? New languages appear all the time too, and Pinker gives us several examples.

When a group of adults without a common language gets together they tend to pool words from different sources and make up a pidgin. That can happen among immigrants, as in Hawaii in the last century, or when long isolated communities meet, as in Papua New Guinea. Pidgins don't have much grammatical structure, and that leaves ambiguities in speech which have to be resolved from context or other cues. Children obviously don't like pidgins, because the moment they hear one they put a grammar on it and turn it into a creole. And here's the one blooper I spotted in the book. Pinker gives Papua New Guinean Pidgin as an example of a pidgin, where Prince Philip is known as `Pela bilong missus Kwin'. In fact, by his definition it's not a pidgin at all, but a creole. `Pela bilong missus Kwin' is no random collection of English words; it's a perfectly grammatical phrase which just happens to have English word roots. From other quotes I've seen, I'm pretty sure bilong is not a verb but a preposition. That's a giveaway that this really is a new language---remember we said prepositions are a closed club. And bilong's position tells us this is another subject-verb-object language. And I suspect missus is not a title but a noun classifier. English has only a few of those, like `a gaggle of geese', but some languages use many..

See also:

3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin

I love it wen you Tok Pisin tu mi.


"Missus Kwin, and Pela Bilong Missus Kwin."