An Introduction to Copulas

An introduction to copulas system of Nigerian Pidgin English, a pidgin/creole language spoken in Nigeria.

The oraigin of the word copula i sthe latin word copulae, which means "to join together"

Normally, it is assumed that creole languages do not have copulas as the choice of the copula is mainly grounded on the syntactic nature of the complement.

Many other factors also contribute to the choice or to the presence of the copulas.

Nigeria is a highly multilingual country, with over 500 spoken languages and thus is one of the world's territories with the highest linguistic diversification.

The total population is estimated to be over 170+ miilion people. Nigerian languages belong to the three families of Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan.

Three main languages spoken in Nigeria have a distinctive official recognition as major national lanuages - Igbo (main language of the South-East), Hausa (main language in the North) and Yoruba (main language of the South-West).

The choice of these three African Nigerian languages to be represented at the Federal level is certainly grounded on demographic but also political reasons.

There are some major "minor language" among others Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio and Tiv , which have as many speakers as, say, the Igbo language, but for some reasons they were disfavoured.

Each of the three main Nigerian languages has millions of native speakers but Hausa is distinct from the other ywo because it is also commonly spoken as a second language in the northern part of th eountry.

About 25% of Nigerians speak Nigerian English among their first their first languages but for most of the population English remains a second language which is still not easily accessible.

However, English is de facto the only official language in Nigeria.

It is true that Nigerian Pidgin does not have any official recognition, which strikingly contracticts the range of its uses and it is potential as a language of aggregation and general communication among Nigerians.

On the contrary, Nigerian Pidgin, a language that has no kind of official recognition whatsoever, is probably the most widely spoken language of Nigeria.

Nigerian Pidgin has over two million of native speakers in the Southern regions of Niger Delta and over 50 million of native speakers who speak it as one among their first languages.

It is reasonable to assume thatboth of these estimates are rapidly rising.

It is easy to say that Nigerian Pidgin represents one of the main threats to minor Nigerian languages, especially in the Southern regions of Nigeria.

Nigerian Pidgin is an English-based expanded pidgin. Its denomination as "pidgin" may be misleading.

Firstly, linguistic evidence demonstrates a rather advanced level of internal development (archimedean copulas).

Secondly, although its level of sociolinguistic nativization varies from region to region, the language has steadily entered into the domain of informational communications among young speakers, especially in the urban areas.

As a result, Nigerian Pidgin should henceforth included as creole varieties.

By definition, a copula is a function that joins or couples multiple distribution fuctions to their one-dimensional distribution function. Copulas are distribution function whose one-dimensional margins are uniform.

The term copula is commonly used in grammatical description to refer to a link ver or particle which has little independent meaning and whose main function is to relate other elements of the clause structure, normally a subject and a predicate.

For example, how does the standand English, Nigerian English or Nigerian Pidgin English related?

You see, the copular verb in English is to be, as in he is a doctor. Even though may other verbs can be said to have similar functions, e.g. feel, as in he feels angry, they do not qualify as copulas since they bear too much sematic content.

As this applies also to Nigerian Pidgin, for instance, which has many copulative verb such as feel {to feel}, be like {to seem}, turn {to turn}, kom {to become}, etc...

However, in this an introduction to copulas, the scope focus will be limited to work of three items be, na and de, which can be defined as real copulas, even though they may also have non-copular uses.

As you know, many linguists and philosophers regarded the copula as a key item in terms of logical and linguistic properties.

Gaussian copulas is a solution to problem on how to handle default correlation in complex instruments. It was used prior to the credit crisis of 2008 (copulas in finance), and it has pretty much been shamed to be useless formulae.

Mathematically, it's an elegant way to join marginal distributions and handle default correlation. But it requires too many simplifying assumptions.

In many cases of statistical modelling, it is essential to obtain the joint copula pdf between multiple random variables.

Even though the marginal distributions each of the RVs are known, their joint distributions may not be easy to obtain from these marginal distribution.

Knowing the scale-free measures of dependence between random variables, copula can be used to obtain their joint distribution.

How would gaussian copulas help with nigerian pidgin and broken english or pidgin english dictionary and pidgin english nigerian?