夜雷星蜂, I think I'm coming at all this from a different angle than U. That's why I partly disagree. For me, this is personal, so, "Don't mind me." As I mentioned, or speculated, it's like mankind has a gene that makes well-fed specimens look down on creoles and creole-like tongues. Lower-class folk speak them, middle-class folk despise them, and working-class people work their butts off so their kids can stop swearing in them. Let's take the lingua franca of this forum: English. American Black English -- one of my "childhood dialects" -- just has this groove, this "hustle and flow". It's raw and direct even when it ain't crude, like a fine-tuned yen for sex. It's got so much rhythm U can touch it. It's so "there" that U can move it to your kitchen and eat on it. U can pull it down out of the air and chop wood with it. No mistake it's the language of hip-hop and the blues and the rhythm-and-blues. Even rock and pop speaks a sister dialect. Yet Black English is ostracized from print media and much of the economic life of the English-speaking world ... in favor of Suburban Cubicle English with its big words, set phrases, and set sentences.
If all this is true for Black English, it's ten times truer for the "somehow related" "real" creoles like Jamaican Patois, Gullah, Trinidadian Creole...
Let's take almost any paragraph here on this forum. Then imagine having to get the same points across, but w/o words like "historically" or "deficient". For better or worse, it would make us have to think harder and think clearer, in order to get our points across. Words like "historically" may be "precise", but they tempt us to use them in imprecise ways. Creoles may lack such precise, intellectual words, but in turn they take a dialog and tie it back to sun and stars and wine and dine. The way we were. And in the end we still get there if we try to "say it in creole". It's the stereotypical social sciences academics -- stereotypical! -- that spend decades of their life using big, used-to-be-precise words to say and prove a whole lot of nothing. Say it like U mean it! Social science degree candidates should all have to learn a creole...
Links between the words in a language... That is key, from a writer's POV. Take the word phoekoán. Great links to phoe and koán. Lu̍t'sukoán? Again, good links. So why iûkio̍k and lu̍t'su sūbūsó͘? Bô hoeh bô ba̍ksái. What if they all co-existed? That's the state that bahasa Indonesia is in, I think... It does allow for many styles.
Back to Black English, or maybe not. What I've found in my time in the Caribbean is that there's a Black Spanish too. Just like Black English in North America, it's an "Africated" form of a European language... It tends toward short words, heavy rhythms, common words in fresh combinations, and lots of visuals... And it's spoken by all working-class Spanish-speaking Caribbeans, be they blue-black or snow-white. And in every port city and country town U've got the wannabe Europeans wringing their hands and going on about how 80% of the people around them don't know how to talk, and how they hate reggaeton, and how people should name their babies Josefina or Anamaría instead of Yudisleidis or Yesenia. Whatever! Give me that saltwater santero Spanish any day of the week.
Back to our regular programming. Have U guys watched a made-in-Taiwan Hoklo soap opera lately? Is there a single actor under 40 that sounds like they speak Hoklo in real life? In fact one time last yr at the end of an episode, there was a flash-forward to a future episode -- it could've been an out-take, actually -- where a chick in a wedding dress slips and falls in a basement parking lot and says something in Mandarin like, Aiyo, hao tong! Possibly the most convincing Hoklo soap moment of the year!
To sum up, and get back on-topic... I mean, yeah, I think it's great to have lots of vocabulary in a language, unless U're an adult learner.
Imagine -- I mean, imagine -- if somehow there was a mass Speak Hoklo and Write Hoklo movement, starting with pissed-off Singaporeans and TWese who feel that their gahmens robbed them of their language, and somehow this movement stuck, and spread, leading to Hoklo education, Hoklo mass media, and a Hoklo netscape. Now imagine if the new Hoklo idiom were to take in words and expressions from every kind of Hoklo we discuss on this forum, and others. Imagine if TWese could understand PgHK the same way an Australian understands a Black North American, and if Kuching Hoklophones borrowed words from Medan, and if all Hokkien speakers had hundreds of Teochew words in their vocab for dealing with fine emotional or logical nuances...
Let it be organic. Let it be from the bottom up. Most of all, let it be expressive. Let it be like the aLians on their aLian blogs instead of the wish-I-wasn't-here 32-year-olds on 21st century white-collar Hoklo telenovelas.
Anyway, to put things in proper context, I dug out the citation online, it reads: