Thursday, February 29, 2024

U Are Not Alone ...

 Haitian Creole is French as she is (was) spoke, which is a great relief to those who had to suffer through French conjugations. Even if one kept the distinction between singular and plural, the subtractive morphology, in which the plural contains a consonant absent in the singular, is unpredictable and complicated from the default direction of pluralization. The simplification of spelling is welcome, but it has one unanticipated side effect: the elimination of as a singular vowel. In Creole, the solitary vowel u becomes i, as is the fate of most high rounded vowels. A learner who failed to distinguish between orthography and speech might miss this feature altogether.

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