the formation of compounds that are loan-translations of African metaphors:
door-mouth
(a doorway, or the place just outside the doorway of a small house or hut) can be
compared with Yoruba
iloro enu
(threshold; literally porch mouth) and Hausa
baki
(a
mouth,
an opening, an entrance); and
strong-eye
(firm, determined) is possibly a loan-
translation from Twi
n’ani y
ε
de
ŋ
(strong-eye, insolent, self-willed). It is often difficult to
be certain about etymologies in Caribbean creoles. Cassidy points out that
kakanabu
(foolishness, nonsense) at first appears African, with the initial reduplication and the final
vowel [u], but it turns out to be quite regularly derived from
cock-and-a-bull,
as in “a
cock-and-bull story.” Conversely,
dutty
(earth, soil; excrement)
at first appears to be a
regular Jamaican development of Standard English
dirt, dirty;
however, the main source
turns out to be Twi
(soil, earth), with some influence from the English words.
More recent developments are recorded fully in print and especially as regards music in
the electronic media. The speech of the Rastafari (a religious and social movement that
arose during the 1940s among the Jamaican poor and was energized by a sense of
identification with Africa, and specifically Ethiopia) has given new forms to pronouns:
you
is eliminated for being divisive and
I and I
is used instead, as well as for
I
and for
me
.
From popular culture Jamaican English and the world at large
have received the words
reggae
and
ska
.
The variety of creoles in the Caribbean can be illustrated by versions of sentences in as
many as thirty-three different languages.
36
The Standard English sentence “The dog of
the man who lives in that house is named King” becomes in Jamaican Creole [di ma:n wa
lIb i:na da
da:g nj
ε
m kI
ŋ
]; in Trinidad Creole [di
dat
tu di man dat
lIv
ε
n In dat
ne:m kI
ŋ
]; in Caymans Creole [da man hu lrv In da
i dag
ne:m kI
ŋ
]. Comparisons can be made with African creoles. In Nigerian Creole the
sentence takes the form [di
we na di man we lif
da ha
υ
s g
ε
t am, i nem ki
ŋ
] and
in Krio, the creole language of Sierra Leone, [di man we tap na da os
n
ε
m ki
ŋ
].
Phonetic transcription is useful for
those who have studied it, though not for the
general public, and the question of the written representation of creole languages is part
of the unresolved complex of political, social, and psychological issues surrounding the
linguistic question. A modified standard orthography with markings for tone is another
way of representing speech on paper, as in these examples of Jamaican English:
36
See Ian Hancock, “A Preliminary Classification of the Anglophone
Atlantic Creoles with
Syntactic Data from Thirty-three Representative Dialects,” in
Pidgin and Creole Languages:
Essays in Memory of John E.Reinecke,
ed. Glenn G.Gilbert (Honolulu, 1987), pp. 264–333.
The nineteenth century and after 311
mi granma chier
“my grandmother’s chair”
Him did go down Hope Ruod
“He/she went down Hope Road”
7.
Canada.
Canadian English, as would be expected, has much in common with that of the United
States while retaining a few features of British pronunciation and spelling. Where
alternative forms exist the likelihood for a particular choice to be British or American
varies with region, education, and age. British items such as
chips, serviette,
and
copse
tend to occur more frequently in the West, while the more common American choices
French fries, napkin,
and
grove
tend to occur in the East. British spellings such as
colour
and pronunciations such as
schedule
with an initial [š] occur most frequently throughout
Canada among more highly educated and older speakers.
37
In addition there are a number
of words with meanings that are neither British nor American but peculiarly Canadian.
Thus one finds
aboiteau
(dam),
Blue nose
(Nova Scotian),
Creditiste
(member of the
Social Credit party),
Digby chicken
(smoke-cured herring),
mukluk
(Inuit boot),
reeve
(chairman of a municipal council),
salt-chuck
(ocean), and
skookum
(powerful, brave).
The
Dictionary of Canadianisms,
published in Canada’s
Centennial Year, allows
historical linguists to establish in detail the sources of Canadian English.
38
Many of the
earlier settlers in Canada came from the United States, and the influence of the United
States has always been very strong. A writer in the
Canadian Journal
in 1857
complained of the new words “imported by travellers, daily circulated by American
newspapers, and eagerly incorporated into the language of our Provincial press.”
Needless to say, he considered the influence wholly bad, and his
words are still echoed
by Canadians who deplore the wide circulation of American books and magazines in
Canada and in recent years the further influence of movies and television. Nevertheless a
linguistically informed opinion would have to concede that in language as in other
activities “it is difftcult to differentiate what belongs to Canada from what belongs to the
United States, let alone either from what might be called General North American.”
39
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