In Singapore Colloquial English (aka “Singlish”) there is a linguistic construction I like to call the “is one” construction. Basically this is an “is”, followed by a statement, followed by “one”, typically used to assert the agency of the subject of the statement. E.g., one might say,
“Is he say one, (not me)!”
To mean, “It is he who said it, (not me)!”
Or “Is the cat eat one, (not the dog)!”
To mean, “It is the cat that ate it, (not the dog)!”
The “is” can be left out entirely, in which case what is being asserted is the statement in its entirety. For example,
“Discuss before one! (Don’t remember meh?)”
Meaning, “This has been discussed before! (Don’t you remember?)”
The operative word is “one”, which is what signifies this asserting or emphasising modality.
The origins of this construction is not a mystery. One can observe an almost identical construction in Mandarin Chinese:
“是他说的，（不是我！)”
[be] [3rd person singular] [say] [的], [negation][be][1st person singular]
Meaning, “It is he who said it, (not me)!”
What I want to know is, how did “one” in English come to take on the function of 的 in Mandarin Chinese?
的 is used in other constructions, such as those signifying belonging,
“她的猫。”
[3rd person singular][的][cat]
”Her cat”
As well as relative clauses, where it functions similar to the relative pronouns “that” or “which” in English:
“他煮的汤很好喝。”
[3rd person singular][cook][的][soup][very][good][eat]
“The soups that he cooks are very good to eat.”
I want to state the question this way: What semantic (or pragmatic?) properties do “one” and “的” share that prompted early Chinese speakers of English in Singapore to extend the assertive meaning of the latter to the former?
I might be misapplying some terminology. I haven’t been a linguistics major in almost a decade.
(There is an argument that the “one” in the Singlish construction is not actually “one” but the sound “wan”. I don’t like this argument because it takes us nowhere. Of all the possible sounds English-Mandarin bilingual speakers can produce, why “wan” specifically? It bears no phonetic resemblance to 的, nor to any other pragmatic particle in Mandarin I can think of…
Anecdotally, I have also observed “one” indeed spelt “one” while employed in this construction, suggesting that this equivalence is real in the minds of at least some speakers.)
@wzhkevin
Is it functioning approximately like の in Japanese (or "n[o] desu"?)
Borrowing "one" from English, I think maybe it might be borrowing from the usage like "it's not this one, it's that one", "It's the one that..."?
@manvanaarde @wzhkevin
I didn't know hiragana の was being borrowed in Mandarin, but yeah it is one of the more aesthetically pleasing ones so why not. English should borrow it too.
I had read it was being used in a Taiwanese language because Chinese characters don't have a good alternative for a particle with similar use.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8922
@wzhkevin This is similar to how people use “only" in Indian colloquial English. Your examples would translate to:
He only said it.
The cat only ate it.
I suspect this come from the influence of Indic languages that have similar sentence structures.
wzhkevin
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