El pidgin chino-español de Manila a principios del siglo XVIII

Abstract

Despite the relative abundance of written records from the late 19th century of interactions in Chinese pidgin Spanish (a modified form of Spanish used in business transactions between Chinese merchants in Manila and their customers), few of these texts have made it into the hands ―or research― of Creole experts. Up to now, Chinese pidgin Spanish has been largely dismissed by creolists as an unstable jargon unworthy of their attention. However, the presence and use of stereotypes among the local population, as evidenced by the substantial corpus of surviving documents from this period, demonstrates a certain degree of stability in at least some aspects of the pidgin. The recent discovery of a short dialogue in Chinese pidgin Spanish dating from the early 18th century has pushed the timeline for the language back much further. This article examines the main linguistic features of the dialogue and compares them with those from a century and a half later. The results indicate the prolonged stability of the stereotypes over a period of at least 150 years. The analysis also explores the possible origins of these linguistic forms and how they spread.

The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future

“…29-30). The status of a Chinese-Spanish pidgin reported to have been spoken in Manila in the early eighteenth century remains a matter of some controversy, centred around whether it did exist as an established or 'stabilised' means of communication, or was a mere 'unstable jargon' (Fernández, 2018). A pidgin Hawaiian developed because of early contact between Hawaiians and outsiders in the 1790s, based on the Hawaiian language.…”

The lexicon and creole formation

“…It is as difficult to prove that ansina occurs in later centuries as to show evidence for its presence in the first years of the colony and its subsequent disappearance from the lexical repertoire. But there is at least one proof in the 18th century: the use of anchina, a variant of ansina, in a 1718 Chinese-Spanish Pidgin text (Fernández 2018). This means that it had to be part of the oral repertoire at some point, but that moment did not have to be brief or at the beginning of the colonial era.…”