Talk:dofu

@Lingo Bingo Dingo Is this a noun or an adjective? — Mnemosientje (t · c) 12:11, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mnemosientje It's both. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 07:45, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo Thanks. I was wondering if you had an opinion on this - shouldn't there be an ancestor language for Sranan from which words could be considered inherited? Currently in our modules, Sranan is not listed as having an ancestor, thus all words must be borrowed (because none can be inherited), which seems odd to me - though admittedly I don't know the first thing about how creoles work in terms of how they come into existence. Shouldn't English at least be listed as an ancestor, per the claim over at Wikipedia that Sranan is an English-based creole? Then we could add English as an ancestor, and possibly list a significant portion of Sranan words that derive from English as inherited, or at least not necessarily explicitly as "borrowed". — Mnemosientje (t · c) 10:23, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mnemosientje I would prefer that Sranan Tongo has an ancestor, yes, but I am not entirely sure whether that language should be English or an earlier English-based creole (compare the correspondences with Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, some scholars would posit far deeper relations down to early seventeenth century West Africa). A complication is that few of the early Sranan speaking community (consisting of active, daily speakers) would have been native speakers of English; in fact until far into the eighteenth century most weren't native speakers of Sranan. Also, if this is realised it would also be a good idea to let the software permit that Aukan and Saramaccan have inherited terms from Sranan Tongo. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 10:40, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mnemosientje My opinion is that if the description of the language says: "English"-based language, you cannot use bor=1 when a word clearly comes from the English, like "spun" or "buku" or "forku". In this case the same with the term "borrowed from". I would say "derived". For the considerable number of words coming from the Dutch language, like "dofu" or "winti" or "sweri", I'm not certain. If the word exists in the language before 1900, I wonder if you can call it "borrowed", because these languages originated as a kind of lingua franca, with the characteristic of taking words from adjacent languages. HansRompel (talk) 13:14, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

(Also pinging @HansRompel, who has expressed an interest in related creole languages.)

Well, for what it's worth, there's Category:Jamaican Creole terms inherited from English; even if there is an intermediary that's also English based, the ultimate ancestor would then still be English surely (just as Old Dutch is still the ancestor of Dutch, even though Middle Dutch is the more recent link in the chain). Isn't there a comparable situation with Afrikaans/Dutch, considering that Afrikaans as a language existed alongside "standard" Dutch for a very long time? — Mnemosientje (t · c) 10:49, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

(P.S. re: diff, I moved it in anticipation of this discussion: if we decide on considering English an ancestor, it would not be borrowed and thus be above all borrowed terms in the list of descendants. If we decide not to make English an ancestor, I'll make sure all of them are in the right place with the bor=1 parameter.) — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:54, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mnemosientje There is a convention to place direct descendants above borrowings? Anyway, should there be a Beer Parlour discussion? ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 12:44, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Lingo Bingo Dingo Well, that seems to be a common practice on the pages for early Germanic languages, though I've not seen it uniformly followed on Wiktionary. I don't think it's codified anywhere. I can create a discussion in the Beer Parlour later (currently busy irl), if you don't beat me to it. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 12:52, 11 February 2019 (UTC)