Word: pidgin
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...States is a land of many languages, dialects, accents and vocabularies. English is not necessarily the first language of the American Indian or the Chinese American, the Spanish American or the American Jew, all of whom inherited ancient tongues. But apart from children's pig Latin and the pidgin English still employed occasionally in Hawaii, one of the oldest invented languages in the U.S. was devised and survives in the California hamlet of Boonville. TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler visited there recently and tried to speak with the people. Here is his report...
...Menotti's Help, Help, The Globolinks is as different from his 1951 Christmas pageant Amahl and the Night Visitors as a shepherd is from an astronaut. The plot centers on the invasion of Earth by a race from outer space known as Globolinks. They speak a kind of pidgin-electronese, and their touch can turn a human into a Globolink within 24 hours. Though the Globolinks are immune to man's weapons, it turns out that they are allergic to the sound of music. After a number of close encounters, they are defeated by a band of schoolchildren...
Hardest of all was the use of color. Sporadically, through the years, Kline tried and failed. Black and white, the nouns and verbs of his paintings, could talk to each other in a stately pidgin English, but colors, the adjectives and adverbs, often garbled the conversation to an incoherent babble. Only in his last years did Kline make color do his bidding. Orange and Black Wall, one of his later paintings, lunges upward and off the canvas like a giant rocket, rising up on the strength of its flaming boosters. Red Painting mounts an enigmatic black rectangle in a morning...
...people Fisk attracts into his whirlwind way of life, Joan Tolentino as a madam and Andy Weil as a barber and several drunks are funny and invariably interesting to watch. Arthur Friedman is top-notch as Drew, also as a lunatic Indian fighter speaking half in words, half in pidgin sign-language. Stephen Kaplan doing two numbers in blackface is revolting, and when revolting, Stephen Kaplan is invariably magnificent. Dominic Meiman as Fisk's secretary, among other parts, is consistently excellent, as are can-can dancer Lindsay Crouse's legs...
...Silk Manuscript will reveal the meanings of 300 hitherto-undefined characters. Working with infra-red photographs, which help make the characters legible, Jao has begun translating the manuscript into modern Chinese. Dr. Noel Barnard, a senior fellow in Far Eastern history at Australian National University, is converting it into "pidgin English...