3. Linguistic Notes

As indicated, the language spoken in Paramaribo is taki-taki, or Negro-English, that of the Saramacca people is the Saramaka tɔ̨ŋgo, or Negro-Portuguese and English. In rendering the translations of the texts we collected we have retained as much of the idiom and sentence structure as would not do too much violence to simple English constructions. A literal translation was impossible, since it would have rendered the tales unintelligible.1 An analysis of some of the texts raised the question as to what cultural mechanisms operated to produce the linguistic elements that recur with such regularity, for even a first reading of the material made evident that we were dealing with an inner structure that was the result of something other than the blind groping of

minds too primitive for expression in modes of speech beyond their capabilities.1

We may name some of the characteristics that stand out as forms foreign to the idiom of European languages, but which occur with a consistency that characterises grammatical forms.2 Among these may be noted the absence of sex-gender in pronouns, and the failure to utilise any methods of indicating sex except by employing as prefix the word for ‘man’ or ‘woman’, or the use of relationship terms, like ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’3; the manner of indicating the possessive;4 of expressing comparison;5 of employing nouns for prepositions of place.6 The use of a series of verbs to express a single action,7 or the use of verbs to indicate habitual8 and completed9 action also characterises this speech, as does the employment of the verb ‘to give’ as a preposition,10 the use of ‘to say’ to introduce objective clauses, making the only English translation possible the word ‘that’,11 the use of ‘make’ in the sense of ‘let’,12 of ‘back’ to mean ‘again’, ‘behind’, ‘in

back’, and ‘after’.1 Repetition of words for emphasis is a regularly employed mechanism,2 and this form is also used to indicate a more intense degree of the action,3 or to change a verb into a noun,4 while the verb ‘to go’ often carries the significance of ‘will’.5 Stylistic traits that appear regularly are the opening of many sentences with the word ‘then’,6 the change to the future tense to mark an explanatory interval between two actions which are separated from each other in time,7 and the use of the adverb tɛ to express emphatic distance, or effort, or emotion, or degree. Phonetically, also, deviations from the pronunciation of European words are quite regular, as, for example, the interchange of ‘r’ and ‘l’; the degree of nasalisation, about which we have already commented; or the insertion of a ‘y’ after ‘c’ in such words as ‘car’ and ‘carry’ and ‘can't’; or the tendency to end all words with a vowel,8 so that ‘call’ becomes kari or kali, ‘look’ becomes luku, ‘must’ changes to musu; the use of elision and the dropping of final syllables.

It soon became apparent that the characteristics which could be singled out in the Negro-English of Paramaribo were also manifested in other regions of the New World where Negroes speak English. Our first comparison was made with the speech of Jamaica, and in the following list we give some of the correspondences to Suriname speech we found:9

In addition, we found correspondences in such pronunciations as ‘bwoy’ (p. 2), for ‘boy’, of ‘kyan't’ (p. 2), for ‘can't’, ‘kyan-crow’ for ‘carrion-crow’ (p. 80, Suriname yankoro), of ‘busha’ for ‘overseer’ (p. 80, Suriname basha or bassia), while the words ‘nyam’ for ‘eat’, ‘Buckra’ for Bakra, ‘white person’ (p. 22), ‘oonoo’ for ‘you’ (p. 40, Suriname ųn, or unu), as well as the exclamation ‘Cho!’ which is often heard in Suriname, were further indications of linguistic similarity between the two regions.

However, these correspondences in speech were true not alone of the idiom and pronunciation of Jamaica where resemblances could be explained on definite historical grounds,1 for in our next com-

parison with the speech recorded by Parsons of the Andros Islanders in the Bahamas,1 we found the following correspondences:

As in Jamaica, there were also correspondences to Suriname pronunciation. Many of these have been given above, but others are ‘kyarry’ (p. 3, Suriname tyari) for ‘carry’, ‘kyarridge’ for ‘carriage’ (p. 28), ‘ooman’ (p. 115) for ‘woman’, or ‘kyamp’ for ‘camp’ (p. 148).

Yet another comparison was had when we analysed the language of the tales recorded by Parsons1 in the Sea Islands. Some of the correspondences to Suriname Negro speech we found in this collection are as follows:

Some of the phonetic correspondences are ‘yeddy’ (p. 1, Suriname yere) for ‘hear’, ‘kyart’ for ‘cart’, ‘kyarry’ for ‘carry’, ‘kyan't’ for ‘can't’ (p. 1), and ‘shum’ for ‘see him (or them)’ (p. 18). Similar phrases and phonetic shifts6 are to be found in the speech of the islands as reported by Peterkin, Gonzales, Stoney and Shelby, and Johnson.7

Correspondences of this character made it clear that, whatever the provenience of these phrases and phonetic parallels, they were

common to Negro-English in the New World. This suggested that it would be profitable to investigate pidgin English as spoken in the region of Africa from whence came the Negroes who laid down the fundamentals of New World Negro culture.1 As only few data on pidgin are available,2 it was necessary to go into the field to obtain the requisite material for such an investigation, and a field-trip to West Africa made this possible. During a short stay in Nigeria a small collection of tales in pidgin was made,3 and though these numbered but seven, the following significant phrases occurred in them:

In Africa, as in the New World, we found the phonetics of Negro speech producing such changes in English pronunciation as ‘cyap’ for ‘cap’, ‘dyah’ for ‘jar’, ‘hyar’ for ‘hear’.

The tales told us in Nigeria, however, were given by informants who had had some degree of schooling, and whose pidgin English was therefore modified by what teaching they had received. The extracts from historical tales of Dahomey which follow were told us, however, by an informant who had learned his English entirely ‘by ear’. This man, a son of former King Behanzin,4 had left Dahomey and had lived in the coastal and interior regions of Nigeria for more than ten years, where, in the course of his everyday life, he had learned what English he knew.

Dis princess, she palaver too much. If he marry dis man today, tomorrow he go way leave 'um. He suffer everybody. He vex he fadder too much, so he sell 'um go 'way. He no can kill he own daughter, so he sell go 'way. When he never see he daughter no mo', he sorry now. He say, ‘Who find daughter, I give dash plenty,’ say, ‘I give everyt'ing.’ Now dey bring him come. Now he start make lau again. He fadder say, ‘You be my proper blood,’ say, ‘I like you too much when you be quiet.’ But he make too much trouble. Sell 'em again to Portuguese. White man take him go. Dey de' fo' Whydah. Dey no go fo' sea yet... Dis princess he was ploud. He was fine too much. He fine pass all woman. Dere was hole in Allada, nobody mus' go. Princess he steal he fadder sandal at night. Nex' day ol' woman see someone was in hole, come tell king. Everybody go for look, see king foot. King vex, say, he no go. Princess he laugh, say, ‘Who go? Look, you foot.’... He (Hwegbadja) give dem order again say, if be somebody go put faiah to anode' man house fo' burn anode' man house, if sometime he no like 'em, he burn house, if he see, kill 'um, bring him head come, show, say, ‘Dat man burn house.’ I see, I kill 'um. Den if he tell dem so, den man have enemy, take man who do not'ing, cut head and bring, den if he fin' man lie, he go kill 'um de same. Den he say, if take small small gyal (girl) no be big 'nough, if somebody spoil 'um dey go kill 'um. Make nobody see people dey pass wit' load, go sell 'um. If somebody do so, he go find out, he kill 'um... Den de people who de' fo' odde' king country de' lon com' fo' Hwegbadja, say, ‘If my fadde' die, you go bury fo' me. To put fo' stick no good.’... So people like it too much.

Many of the idioms and phonetic shifts of Suriname speech, the West Indies, and the United States appear in these excerpts: ‘too much’ for ‘very much’, ‘sell go 'way’ for ‘sell and send away’, ‘bring him come’ for ‘bring him (her)’, ‘take him go’ for ‘take away’, ‘dey de' fo' Whydah’ for ‘they are at Whydah’, ‘dey no go fo' sea yet’, literal translation of the Suriname den no go fō si yɛte, ‘ploud’ for ‘proud’, ‘he fine pass all women’, the African comparative that finds its Suriname equivalentin a moi̯ mɔro ala umą, ‘gyal’ for ‘girl’, ‘if somebody spoil 'em’, the Suriname equivalent of pɔri in the significance of ‘deflower’, ‘make nobody see people dey pass...’, mek' nową si suma den pasa, ‘lon com’ for lɔ̨ kɔm, and, finally, the use of the term ‘stick’ to mean ‘tree’, a usage which has its equivalent in the Saramacca use of the term pau̯, also ‘stick’, for ‘tree’.

In Dahomey, a possession of France, this was the only English we heard. French has little pidgin, yet occasionally, in contact with a native who had not been educated in the schools, we would hear

une fois, the French equivalent of the Suriname wą trɔ̨, used exactly as the people of the Sea Islands employ ‘one time’. We would hear a native telling another to go doucement, doucement, - safri, safri, as the Suriname Negro has it, - while phonetic shifts which cause the White man to eat ‘flied potatoes’ in Nigeria and in Suriname, make him eat pommes flites in the French territory of Dahomey, or cause a native to point out a young woman walking along the road with the remark ‘C'est mon flere, là. C'est femme, eh?’1

Still pursuing the subject of correspondences between New World and West African Negro English, we collected more tales in pidgin among the Ashanti of the British territory of the Gold Coast, - among some of these very people to whom the Suriname Negroes, in their folk-lore, owe their trickster-hero, Anansi. We give here some of the correspondences in phraseology which are to be found in these stories:2

While with the Ashanti, we were also able to obtain some characteristic expressions from a member of the Mossi people from the northern territories of the Gold Coast, whose pidgin was as untutored and as rich in flow as any we heard in West Africa.

Still other examples are to be found in Cronise and Ward's Temne tales. These are rendered in pidgin, and beside the idiomatic

expressions and constructions cited by the authors in their ‘Introduction’1, the following may be also found; under each of the expressions we place the taki-taki equivalent:

The correspondences between the speech of New World Negroes in idiomatic expression and the pidgin English of West Africa suggested a further inquiry. It seemed logical to investigate whether there might not be some underlying similarity in aboriginal speech that could account for the large number of parallels between New World and African Negro English. To this end we drew up a list of taki-taki idioms, and asked our interpreter1 to give us the corresponding Twi phrases for these, being careful, however, to state them to him in the English, rather than taki-taki manner of expressing the ideas contained in them. The following list gives some of the resultant Twi idioms, with their literal meaning expressed in English words:

The above list shows that many of the idioms peculiar to Paramaribo, Jamaica, Andros Islands, and the Sea Islands are literal translations of Twi. The presence of similar idiomatic expressions in Yoruba, Fɔ̨, Ewe and Hausa speech, and as reported by Cronise and Ward and others, leads to the further hypothesis that these idioms are basic to many, if not all, of the West African tongues.

Though this establishes the provenience of a large proportion of the idioms, explanation of the non-European constructions remained to be made. In earlier studies of taki-taki and other New World Negro speech, there had been several attempts to trace the provenience of vocabulary,2 but not of morphology. Parsons3 makes some cogent observations on prevalent grammatical forms, and offers as a possibility that these may derive from African usage. Available grammars of West African languages throw considerable

light on these perplexing constructions, and, though it is not possible here to give a complete discussion, a few examples will make the point that in this, as in the instance of many of the idioms whose literal translation we have given, the peculiarities of Negro speech are primarily due to the fact that the Negroes have been using words from European languages to render literally the underlying morphological patterns of West African tongues.

Let us consider first the tendency of New World Negroes to use the verb ‘to give’ for the English preposition ‘for’. In Ewe1 na, ‘to give’ is used in just this manner, and we read that

‘...what one does to another is done for him and is, as it were, given to him, e.g.,... he said a word (and) gave (it) to the person, i.e., he said a word to the person; he bought a horse (and) gave (it) to me, i.e., he bought me a horse.’

In rendering Ashanti tales, it is explained that ma, which is translated by the preposition ‘for’ is really the verb ‘to give’.2 In Gą, ha, ‘to give’, is used as we would use ‘for’ in English, when employed with persons.3 The Fante-Akan language utilises the verb ma, ‘to give’ as an equivalent of the English preposition ‘for’;4 while, turning to a Yoruba text we find a phrase which, literally translated, reads

‘Ils prennent vont donnent au roi’, and has the meaning of ‘They bring to the king.’5

In the matter of gender, we find in grammars of West African languages the explanation of the seeming lack of differentiation of sex in the use of pronouns. We have noted how ‘he’ and ‘she’ are interchanged in West Africa and Suriname; how, in the West Indies and the Gulla Islands, ‘he’ is employed to indicate both a man and a woman. Ewe, we find, ‘has no grammatical gender’.6 Do the Ewe, then, fail to distinguish persons who differ in sex? Not at all; they must, however, employ nouns, such as ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘youth’, ‘maiden’, ‘father’, ‘mother’, or they must add either -su, ‘male’, or -nɔ, ‘female’ to a given word as a suffix. Yet this latter method is that of New World Negro English, as, for example, when the Suriname Negro speaks of a man-pikin, - a boy, - as against an umą-pikin, a girl. In Gą,7 as in Ewe, gender is designated by a prefixing or a suffixing of an element, in this case, yo for woman and nu for man, though there are a few differ-

entiating words such as ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘father’, ‘mother’, and the like. Similarly, in the related Fante-Akan speech,1 it is by affixing particles or utilising different words, that the difference of sex is indicated. Of Yoruba we read that

‘The Yoruba language being non-inflective, genders cannot be distinguished by their terminal syllables, but by prefixing the words ako, male, and abo, female, to the common term;...’2

Perhaps no other element in taki-taki proved more difficult to translate than those expressions containing what Westermann terms ‘substantives of place.’ While taki-taki does not have all the connotations given for each of the words listed in his Ewe grammar,3 all the words he cites in this connection have their taki-taki equivalents, and many of these equivalents have retained several of their meanings in Ewe. Thus, in taki-taki as in Ewe, na mɩ̨ndri, (the Ewe dome) not only means ‘a place between’, but is also used with the meaning of ‘between’, ‘among’, ‘in the midst of’. Tapu, (Ewe dzi), means not only ‘top’ but also ‘the sky’, and ‘over’, ‘on’, and ‘above’. Inisei̯ in Suriname (Ewe me), as in Africa, carries the significance not only of ‘inside’ but also of ‘the context of a word of speech’. Na baka is difficult to translate into English until its equivalence to the Ewe megbe is perceived, when it becomes clear that it not only signifies ‘the back’ but also ‘behind’ and ‘after’ and ‘again’. A last example (though this does not exhaust the list) shows the derivation of the numerous curious uses of the taki-taki word hɛdɛ, ‘head’. The Ewe equivalent, ta, besides its initial significance, means ‘point’ or ‘peak’, ‘on account of’, ‘because’, ‘therefore’, and ‘for that reason’, the last being the exact translation of the Suriname word in such a phrase as fō dɑti ɛdɛ. For Gą we find similar constructions reported.4 Thus, the Gą people say, ‘he looked at his face’ for ‘he looked in front of him’; ‘my garden is at the house's back’ for ‘my garden is behind the house’; ‘he went to their middle’ for ‘he went among them’; ‘walk my back’ for ‘walk behind me’. In Fante the same construction is found.5

If one wishes to know the grammatical bases of such usage as the reflexive pronoun, den fɔm den s'rɛfi; the order in which those in a compound subject involving the speaker are named, mi nąŋga yu; the cohortive form, which expresses an invitation, as mɛk' wi go for ‘let us go’; forms like mi dɛ go, mi bɛn go; the use of a separate term (like the taki-taki kaba) to denote completed action; the use of the word ‘to say’, a taki, to introduce objective phrases; the use

of the term ‘more’ (‘surpass’)1 to make the comparative form of the adjective, he will find all these discussed in grammars of West African languages. Let us here only indicate, from Westermann, some other rules of Ewe that, as for other West African tongues, still are operative for taki-taki. When one says ‘he is four years old’,2 he says ‘he has received four years’ - the Suriname a kɩsi fo yari kaba; if one wishes to say ‘I know something’, he says ‘I have come to know something’,3 - taki-taki mi dɛ kɔm sabi wą sani. In Ewe, for ‘tell the Governor’, one says, ‘say it give Governor say’, our taki gi Gramą taki;4 the Ewe use of the double verb occurs also in taki-taki as krɔi̯pi a krɔi̯pi.5

In our examples, we have cited the language of the Negroes of Paramaribo. Except, however, for the greater presence of both African and Portuguese words in the Saramaka tɔ̨ŋgo,6 a greater use of elision, and the omission of the r, this language follows in idiom and structure that of the town, as the several Saramacca proverbs with the equivalents in taki-taki, and the interlinear English translation serve to illustrate.7

It may be well to restate the conclusions arrived at on the basis of comparing taki-taki with Negro English in the New World, pidgin English in Africa, Ashanti idioms, and West African grammatical forms as illustrated in Yoruba, Ewe, Fɔ̨, Gą, Twi, Mende, Hausa and other West African languages.8

1. Parallels to taki-taki were found in Jamaican speech, in the Bahamas, and in the Sea Islands of the United States.

2. Similar parallels were also found in pidgin English as spoken in Nigeria and on the Gold Coast, as well as in such specimens of Negro-French spoken by natives with no schooling as were available.

3. Phonetic peculiarities which Negro speech exhibits in the New

World were met with in African pidgin, and it was possible to trace them to African speech.1

Therefore, it must be concluded that not only taki-taki, but the speech of the other regions of the New World we have cited, and the West African pidgin dialects, are all languages exhibiting, in varying degrees of intensity, similar African constructions and idioms, though employing vocabulary that is predominantly European.

We have thus far made no mention of the element of tone in taki-taki. Tone is to be found in Paramaribo Negro speech, as it is in Africa, but whereas in Africa tone is ‘significant’, in Paramaribo we have come across no example where tone entered into the determination of grammatical form. An extended study is necessary to determine definitely whether all significant tone has been lost in the New World. It can be assumed, however, that relatively little tone of grammatical importance has held over in taki-taki, though in Saramaka tɔ̨ŋgo it has been possible to isolate tonal configurations of significance.

One point has yet to be touched upon, and concerns the European elements, other than vocabulary, that have entered into the organisation of taki-taki. It must be evident that with the loss of tone certain Europeanisms had to be introduced to meet the linguistic needs of the Negroes in their new environment. It need not be stressed here that this involves no implication that the recognition of such a need is a conscious one. That acculturation was not limited to vocabulary, but made for the introduction of morphological characteristics of European origin as well, is to be seen in the position of the adjective in the sentence, for example, where the modifier most frequently appears before the word it modifies, instead of after the word, as in African usage.

Finally we must call attention to the fact that just as English words had in earlier times replaced Portuguese, as is evidenced by the difference in the speech of the bush and town Negroes, and as African words for non-ritual phenomena are tending to disappear, to be replaced by English, or Dutch ones, so Dutch is today replacing many of the English words. Instead of boi̯ we often hear yųŋgu, instead of umą-pikin we hear mei̯shɛ, instead of umą we hear fro, and we hear the words drei̯ for ‘turn’, and wardɛ for ‘worthy’, dax for ‘howdo’ (odi), and hemɛl for ‘sky’. One encounters nōtu for ‘need’, rɛkfardig for ‘just’, ferstąn for ‘understand’, fertro for ‘trust’, xolōku for ‘luck’, sipotu for ‘ridicule’, frandra for ‘change’, mɛshandɛl for ‘abuse’, beina for ‘almost’, ɔndrosuku for ‘examine’, gɛbɔro for ‘born’, regɛl for ‘rule’, stɔfu for ‘stewed’, strafu for ‘punishment’, skotu for ‘fence’, sontu for ‘healthy’. Still other words are sufficiently similar, both in English and Dutch,

to make difficult the determination from which of the two languages they stem. What is significant is that, whether English or Dutch, these words are spoken in sentences which adhere to the rules of grammar we have described.