Lexicon
See also: Haitian Creole Lexicon and Wiktionary:Appendix:Haïtian Creole Swadesh listMost of the lexicon of Creole is derived from French, with significant changes in pronunciation and morphology; often, the French definite article was retained as part of the noun. For example, the French definite article la in la lune ("the moon") was incorporated into the Creole noun for moon: lalin. However, the language also inherited many words of different origins, among them Wolof, Fon, Kongo, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Taino and Arabic, a testament to the numerous contacts with different cultures that led to the formation of the language.
Being a living language, Haitian Creole creates and borrows new words to describe new or old concepts and realities. Examples of this are "fè bak" which was borrowed from English and means 'to move backwards' (the original word derived from French is "rekile" from reculer), and also from English, "napkin", which is being used as well as the original Creole word "tòchon".
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Famous quotes containing the word lexicon:
“According to Father’s lexicon people who started on a job and didn’t stay at it for 50 years were “quitters.” If you stayed 20 years and then shifted to more congenial work you were a “drifter.””
—Richard Bissell (1913–1977)
“Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)