Creole peoples were a mixture of people of European ancestry and slave populations (or free men and women of color). They were also referred to as "criollos", a word from the Spanish language meaning "created" and used in the post-French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history. Actually, the French word Creole is derived from the Portuguese word "Crioulo", which described Spaniards born in the Americas as opposed to Spain.
Folk etymology removing elements thought to be affixes. For example, Italian "pronuncia" ("pronunciation; accent") is derived from the verb "pronunciare" ("to pronounce; to utter") and English "edit" derives from "editor". Some cases of back-formation are based on folk etymology. In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. Typically this happens either to unanalyzable foreign words or to compounds where the word underlying one part of the compound becomes obsolete. There are many examples of words borrowed from foreign languages, and subsequently changed by folk etymology. The spelling of many