Abbreviations

English glosses1

Diplomatic symbols

The Negerhollands material, whether printed or manuscript, is presented unaltered. We have stayed as close to the original as possible and have not corrected spelling mistakes, etc. In fact, we have attempted to make a diplomatic edition of the Negerhollands material. This implies that we did not omit any information which can be rendered in a printed form, e.g. corrections by the author, original footnotes, etc. We kept various types of information by way of a consistently applied system of diplomatic symbols. Below, we list the symbols used2:

1. Additions

2. Omissions

3. Replacement

4. Uncertain readings

Because of the automatic glossing, if it was uncertain whether two words were written as one they were split apart. The diplomatic symbol is in those cases mostly added to the second part.

5. Other metagraphic notations and remarks

In case of uncertain readings, we used one dot per illegible character, and in case of doubt about the number of characters, a question mark is added.

Two horizontal bars with one space between symbolizes blank space on the line: ||.

If synonyms or alternative expressions are given in the manuscript by placing them over or under one another, we represented this as follows: na|in ‘NA|in’ (where na is the upper form and the alternative form in is the lower).

Remarks about torn paper, note reference symbols lacking a note, etc. are placed between dollar signs: $..$.

The symbol for ‘addition on a following page’ only occurs with footnotes which continue on the next page, so this symbol only occurs as embedded in another note sign: <bm•b <np•a>>. Usually, such a note is continued in the bottom margin of the next page: <bm•b <np•bm•a>>, thus outside the normal type page.

Moravian missionary Böhner, who produced several large manuscript translations, sometimes makes use of asterisks and brackets. Also, he uses slashes in some cases. Our diplomatic use of slashes occurs only in between asterisks, and it can therefore be distinguished from Böhner's use.

Abbreviations in the manuscript: double characters are sometimes represented in the manuscript by a single character with a horizontal bar over it. Here, we wrote all abbreviated forms out in full, but we have kept the paleographic information by underlining the omitted parts, e.g. mamma ‘mother’.

We made use of underlinings in three different cases in the manuscripts:

General conventions

We have chosen to leave intact the original size of the lines in the manuscripts. Also, we chose not to repair ‘broken off’ words, but we left hyphens or spaces in their original place as they may be useful in e.g. research of Negerhollands prosody. These decisions necessitated the use of the minus sign (-) in the glosses by which we want to indicate that the pertinent form belongs to the last ‘word’ of the previous one, under which the gloss can be found. In some cases, the gloss is put under the second part when it contains the stem of a form.

The translation of morphology

Especially in the early texts written by Europeans, bound morphemes (affixes) can be encountered that seem to be used productively. Here, we often find derivational affixes such as diminutive -je/-ki ‘little -’, superlative -st ‘most -’, nominalizing -heid/-skap ‘-ness, -hood’ etc. instead of the analytic creole forms. They are often identical to their Dutch equivalents, both in form and use. It is usually unclear whether they were productive in the variety of Negerhollands known to the authors, or that they came directly from the Dutch superstate model.

In the same texts we often also encounter zero-derived (or, conveying the same sense: multifunctional) forms such as dood for ‘dead’ (adjective, Du. dood, dode, dooie), ‘death’ (noun, Du. dood) or ‘die’ (verb, Du. doodgaan, sterven). If Dutch affixes were really productive in Negerhollands, we would also have expected them in such cases.

In this anthology, Dutch morphology is in principle regarded as fossilized, usually translated unanalyzed, and as such not treated as Negerhollands morphology; e.g. hoogste ‘highest’ and not: ‘high.SUP’. With this we did not necessarily mean to imply that Negerhollands should be a language without morphology, or that nothing of the grammar of Dutch could have been transferred to Negerhollands. We did analyze some morphology originating from Dutch, as if it were part of Negerhollands grammar. Especially in the plural formation of the nouns there is much variability. The Dutch inflectional plural markers -s/-en are as often present as they are lacking, and they are even used regularly in combination with the equally frequent Negerhollands analytical plural morpheme sender/sen ‘they’, e.g. die jüngers sender ‘DET apostle.PL 3PL’ (meaning ‘the apostles’). We have left it an open question whether plural inflection is productive in Negerhollands or not. Where English plural glosses are encountered, the Negerhollands word is not marked for plural itself, e.g. gebeente ‘bones’, or an equivalent expression, e.g. danki ‘thanks’.

Of Negerhollands compositions which do not exist in English, the morphemes or words are bound by a point, e.g. voetbank is glossed as foot.stool. Negerhollands compositions of which the morphemes or words are bound by a hyphen, are glossed alike, e.g. quaat-doenders is glossed as evil-doer.PL.

The translation of prepositions

In particular, prepositions are often not easily glossed. Generally, Negerhollands prepositions have the same semantic properties as their formal equivalents in Dutch, e.g. op means both ‘up’ and ‘on’ in Negerhollands and Dutch. And both prepositions op and aan are represented in English by ‘on’, both for Negerhollands and Dutch. The situation is symbolized by the following figure:

Consequently, we provided these and other prepositions with only one translation, leaving the correct interpretations for future researchers to establish. The inventory of (ambiguous) prepositions encountered and the glosses we used is listed below:

The preposition na is dealt with below.

The translation of homonyms

Negerhollands words of a bicategorical status, which is the usual case with lexical words, e.g. leev ‘live (verb), life (noun)’, are glossed only in one way, here ‘live’ (viz. our remark on dood under morphology). Another example is fraj ‘good, nice (ADJ), well (ADV)’, which we chose to gloss as ‘good’.

True homonyms, such as lief ‘body, dear, love’, are translated in the sense corresponding with the context of their use. (As it was sometimes difficult to be strictly consistent in giving a single translation, we did the same with words like enigste ‘only, any’, leer ‘learn, teach, doctrine’, raad ‘advice, council’.) One exception is kom which means both ‘come’ and ‘become’: because word is also used for ‘become’, although often also as a passive auxiliary, we translated kom only as ‘come’. Since the productivity of word as a grammatical marker of the passive remains questionable, it is just translated as ‘become’ and not with an abstract grammatical symbol like ‘PASS’.

Expressions

The texts also contain many calques on Dutch expressions, e.g. woon onder, which apparently in both languages means ‘live among’. We opted for a literal translation, here ‘live under’, and made a comment on the expression in a footnote.

Comments on specific glosses

Orthography of the texts of de Josselin de Jong

Since the more or less phonetic orthography of de Josselin de Jong was hard to reproduce in this work, especially the combinations of different accents above one vowel, we have used some simplifications in the spelling as used in Ponelis (1988).

List of illustrations