PIDGIN AND CONGENERS
§ 1. Beach-la-Mar. § 2. Grammar. § 3. Sounds. § 4. Pidgin. § 5.
Grammar, etc. § 6. General Theory. § 7. Mauritius Creole. § 8.
Chinook Jargon. § 9. Chinook continued. § 10. Makeshift Languages. §
11. Romanic Languages.
XII.--§ 1. Beach-la-Mar.
As a first typical example of a whole class of languages now found in
many parts of the world where people of European civilization have
come into contact with men of other races, we may take the so-called
_Beach-la-mar_ (or Beche-le-mar, or Beche de mer English);[48] it is
also sometimes called Sandalwood English. It is spoken and understood
all over the Western Pacific, its spread being largely due to the
fact that the practice of ‘blackbirding’ often brought together on
the same plantation many natives from different islands with mutually
incomprehensible languages, whose only means of communication was
the broken English they had picked up from the whites. And now the
natives learn this language from each other, while in many places the
few Europeans have to learn it from the islanders. “Thus the native
use of Pidgin-English lays down the rules by which the Europeans let
themselves be guided when learning it. Even Englishmen do not find it
quite easy at the beginning to understand Pidgin-English, and have to
learn it before they are able to speak it properly” (Landtman).
I shall now try to give some idea of the structure of this lingo.
The vocabulary is nearly all English. Even most of the words which
ultimately go back to other languages have been admitted only because
the English with whom the islanders were thrown into contact had
previously adopted them into their own speech, so that the islanders
were justified in believing that they were really English. This is true
of the Spanish or Portuguese _savvy_, ‘to know,’ and _pickaninny_,
‘child’ or ‘little one’ (a favourite in many languages on account
of its symbolic sound; see Ch. XX § 8), as well as the Amerindian
_tomahawk_, which in the whole of Australia is the usual word for a
small axe. And if we find in Beach-la-mar the two Maori words _tapu_
or _taboo_ and _kai_, or more often _kaikai_, ‘to eat’ or ‘food,’
they have probably got into the language through English--we know
that both are very extensively used in Australia, while the former is
known all over the civilized world. _Likkilik_ or _liklik_, ‘small,
almost,’ is said to be from a Polynesian word _liki_, but may be
really a perversion of Engl. _little_. Landtman gives a few words from
unknown languages used by the Kiwais, though not derived from their own
language. The rest of the words found in my sources are English, though
not always pure English, in so far as their signification is often
curiously distorted.
_Nusipepa_ means ‘a letter, any written or printed document,’ _mary_ is
the general term for ‘woman’ (cf. above, p. 118), _pisupo_ (peasoup)
for all foreign foods which are preserved in tins; _squareface_, the
sailor’s name for a square gin-bottle, is extended to all forms of
glassware, no matter what the shape. One of the earliest seafarers is
said to have left a bull and a cow on one of the islands and to have
mentioned these two words together; the natives took them as one word,
and now _bullamacow_ or _pulumakau_ means ‘cattle, beef, also tinned
beef’; _pulomokau_ is now given as a native word in a dictionary of
the Fijian language.[49] _Bulopenn_, which means ‘ornament,’ is said
to be nothing but the English _blue paint_. All this shows the purely
accidental character of many of the linguistic acquisitions of the
Polynesians.
As the vocabulary is extremely limited, composite expressions are
sometimes resorted to in order to express ideas for which we have
simple words, and not unfrequently the devices used appear to us very
clumsy or even comical. A piano is called ‘big fellow bokus (box) you
fight him he cry,’ and a concertina ‘little fellow bokus you shove
him he cry, you pull him he cry.’ _Woman he got faminil_ (‘family’)
_inside_ means ‘she is with child.’ _Inside_ is also used extensively
about mental states: _jump inside_ ‘be startled,’ _inside tell himself_
‘to consider,’ _inside bad_ ‘grieved or sorry,’ _feel inside_ ‘to
know,’ _feel another kind inside_ ‘to change one’s mind.’ _My throat he
fast_ ‘I was dumb.’ _He took daylight a long time_ ‘lay awake.’ _Bring
fellow belong make open bottle_ ‘bring me a corkscrew.’ _Water belong
stink_ ‘perfumery.’ The idea of being bald is thus expressed: _grass
belong head belong him all he die finish_, or with another variant,
_coconut belong him grass no stop_, for _coconut_ is taken from English
slang in the sense ‘head’ (Schuchardt has the sentence: _You no savvy
that fellow white man coconut belong him no grass?_). For ‘feather’ the
combination _grass belong pigeon_ is used, _pigeon_ being a general
term for any bird.
A man who wanted to borrow a saw, the word for which he had forgotten,
said: ‘You give me brother belong tomahawk, he come he go.’ A servant
who had been to Queensland, where he saw a train, on his return called
it ‘steamer he walk about along bush.’ Natives who watched Landtman
when he enclosed letters in envelopes named the latter ‘house belong
letter.’ Many of these expressions are thus picturesque descriptions
made on the spur of the moment if the proper word is not known.
XII.--§ 2. Grammar.
These phrases have already illustrated some points of the very simple
grammar of this lingo. Words have only one form, and what is in our
language expressed by flexional forms is either left unexpressed or
else indicated by auxiliary words. The plural of nouns is like the
singular (though the form _men_ is found in my texts alongside of
_man_); when necessary, the plural is indicated by means of a prefixed
_all_: _all he talk_ ‘they say’ (also _him fellow all_ ‘they’); _all
man_ ‘everybody’; a more indefinite plural is _plenty man_ or _full up
man_. For ‘we’ is said _me two fella_ or _me three fellow_, as the case
may be; _me two fellow Lagia_ means ‘I and Lagia.’ If there are more,
_me altogether man_ or _me plenty man_ may be said, though _we_ is also
in use. _Fellow_ (_fella_) is a much-vexed word; it is required, or
at any rate often used, after most pronouns, thus, _that fellow hat_,
_this fellow knife_, _me fellow_, _you fellow_, _him fellow_ (not _he
fellow_); it is found very often after an adjective and seems to be
required to prop up the adjective before the substantive: _big fellow
name_, _big fellow tobacco_, _another fellow man_. In other cases no
_fellow_ is used, and it seems difficult to give definite rules; after
a numeral it is frequent: _two fellow men_ (_man_?), _three fellow
bottle_. There is a curious employment in _ten fellow ten one fellow_,
which means 101. It is used adverbially in _that man he cry big fellow_
‘he cries loudly.’
The genitive is expressed by means of _belong_ (or _belong-a_, _long_,
_along_), which also serves for other prepositional relations.
Examples: _tail belong him_, _pappa belong me_, _wife belong you_,
_belly belong me walk about too much_ (I was seasick), _me savvee talk
along white man_; _rope along bush_ means liana. _Missis! man belong
bullamacow him stop_ (the butcher has come). _What for you wipe hands
belong-a you on clothes belong esseppoon?_ (spoon, i.e. napkin). Cf.
above the expressions for ‘bald.’ _Piccaninny belong banana_ ‘a young
b. plant.’ _Belong_ also naturally means ‘to live in, be a native
of’; _boy belong island_, _he belong Burri-burrigan_. The preposition
_along_ is used about many local relations (in, at, on, into, on
board). From such combinations as _laugh along_ (l. at) and _he speak
along this fella_ the transition is easy to cases in which _along_
serves to indicate the indirect object: _he give’m this fella Eve along
Adam_, and also a kind of direct object, as in _fight alonga him_, _you
gammon along me_ (deceive, lie to me), and with the form _belong_: _he
puss-puss belong this fellow_ (_puss-puss_ orig. a cat, then as a verb
to caress, make love to).
There is no distinction of gender: _that woman he brother belong me_
= ‘she is my sister’; _he_ (before the verb) and _him_ (in all other
positions) serve both for he, she and it. There is a curious use of
_’m_, _um_ or _em_, in our texts often written _him_, after a verb as
a ‘vocal sign of warning that an object of the verb is to follow,’ no
matter what that object is.
Churchill says that “in the adjective comparison is unknown; the
islanders do not know how to think comparatively--at least, they lack
the form of words by which comparison may be indicated; _this big_,
_that small_ is the nearest they can come to the expression of the
idea that one thing is greater than another.” But Landtman recognizes
_more big_ and also _more better_: ‘no good make him that fashion,
more better make him all same.’ The same double comparative I find in
another place, used as a kind of verb meaning ‘ought to, had better’:
_more better you come out_. _Too_ simply means ‘much’: _he savvy too
much_ ‘he knows much’ (praise, no blame), _he too much talk_. A synonym
is _plenty too much_. Schuchardt gives the explanation of this trait:
“The white man was the teacher of the black man, who imitated his
manner of speaking. But the former would constantly use the strongest
expressions and exaggerate in a manner that he would only occasionally
resort to in speaking to his own countrymen. He did not say, ‘You are
very lazy,’ but ‘You are too lazy,’ and this will account for the fact
that ‘very’ is called _too much_ in Beach-la-mar as well as _tumussi_
in the Negro-English of Surinam” (_Spr. der Saramakkaneger_, p. iv).
Verbs have no tense-forms; when required, a future may be indicated
by means of _by and by_: _brother belong-a-me by and by he dead_ (my
br. is dying), _bymby all men laugh along that boy_; _he small now,
bymbye he big_. It may be qualified by additions like _bymby one
time_, _bymby little bit_, _bymby big bit_, and may be used also of
the ‘postpreterit’ (of futurity relative to a past time): _by and by
boy belong island he speak_. Another way of expressing the future is
seen in _that woman he close up born (!) him piccaninny_ ‘that woman
will shortly give birth to a child.’ The usual sign of the perfect is
_been_, the only idiomatic form of the verb to be: _you been take me
along three year_; _I been look round before_. But _finish_ may also be
used: _me look him finish_ (I have seen him), _he kaikai all finish_
(he has eaten it all up).
Where we should expect forms of the verb ‘to be,’ there is either no
verb or else _stop_ is used: _no water stop_ (there is no water), _rain
he stop_ (it rains), _two white men stop Matupi_ (live in), _other day
plenty money he stop_ (... I had ...). For ‘have’ they say _got_. _My
belly no got kaikai_ (I am hungry), _he got good hand_ (is skilful).
XII.--§ 3. Sounds.
About the phonetic structure of Beach-la-mar I have very little
information; as a rule the words in my sources are spelt in the usual
English way. Churchill speaks in rather vague terms about difficulties
which the islanders experience in imitating the English sounds, and
especially groups of consonants: “Any English word which on experiment
proved impracticable to the islanders has undergone alteration to
bring it within the scope of their familiar range of sounds or has
been rejected for some facile synonym.” Thus, according to him, the
conjunction _if_ could not be used on account of the _f_, and that is
the reason for the constant use of _suppose_ (_s’pose_, _pose_, _posum_
= s’pose him)--but it may be allowable to doubt this, for as a matter
of fact _f_ occurs very frequently in the language--for instance,
in the well-worn words _fellow_ and _finish_. _Suppose_ probably is
preferred to _if_ because it is fuller in form and less abstract, and
therefore easier to handle, while the islanders have many occasions to
hear it in other combinations than those in which it is an equivalent
of the conjunction.
Landtman says that with the exception of a few sounds (_j_, _ch_, and
_th_ as in _nothing_) the Kiwai Papuans have little difficulty in
pronouncing English words.
Schuchardt gives a little more information about pronunciation, and
instances _esterrong_ = _strong_, _esseppoon_ = _spoon_, _essaucepen_
= _saucepan_, _pellate_ = _plate_, _coverra_ = _cover_, _millit_
= _milk_, _bock-kiss_ = _box_ (in Churchill _bokus_, _bokkis_) as
mutilations due to the native speech habits. He also gives the
following letter from a native of the New Hebrides, communicated to him
by R. H. Codrington; it shows many sound substitutions:
_Misi Kamesi Arelu Jou no kamu ruki mi Mi no ruki iou Jou ruku Mai
Poti i ko Mae tete Vakaromala mi raiki i tiripi Ausi parogi iou i
rukauti Mai Poti mi nomoa kaikai mi angikele nau Poti mani Mae i kivi
iou Jamu Vari koti iou kivi tamu te pako paraogi mi i penesi nomoa te
Pako._
_Oloraiti Ta_, MATASO.
This means as much as:
Mr. Comins, (How) are you? You no come look me; me no look you; you
look my boat he go Mae to-day. Vakaromala me like he sleep house
belong you, he look out my boat, me no more kaikai, me hungry now,
boat man Mae he give you yam very good, you give some tobacco belong
(here = to) me, he finish, no more tobacco.
All right Ta, MATASO.
There are evidently many degrees of approximation to the true English
sounds.
This letter also shows the characteristic tendency to add a vowel,
generally a short _i_, to words ending in consonants. This is old,
for I find in Defoe’s _Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe_ (1719,
p. 211): “All those natives, as also those of Africa, when they learn
English, they always add two E’s at the end of the words where we use
one, and make the accent upon them, as _makee_, _takee_ and the like.”
(Note the un-phonetic expressions!) Landtman, besides this addition,
as in _belongey_, also mentions a more enigmatic one of _lo_ to words
ending in vowels, as _clylo_ for ‘cry’ (cf. below on Pidgin).
XII.--§ 4. Pidgin.
I now turn to Pidgin-English. As is well known, this is the name
of the jargon which is very extensively used in China, and to some
extent also in Japan and California, as a means of communication
between English-speaking people and the yellow population. The name
is derived from the Chinese distortion of the Engl. word _business_.
Unfortunately, the sources available for Pidgin-English as actually
spoken in the East nowadays are neither so full nor so exact as those
for Beach-la-mar, and the following sketch, therefore, is not quite
satisfactory.[50]
Pidgin-English must have developed pretty soon after the first
beginning of commercial relations between the English and Chinese. In
_Engl. Studien_, 44. 298, Prick van Wely has printed some passages of
C. F. Noble’s _Voyage to the East Indies in 1747 and 1748_, in which
the Chinese are represented as talking to the writer in a “broken
and mixed dialect of English and Portuguese,” the specimens given
corresponding pretty closely to the Pidgin of our own days. Thus, _he
no cari Chinaman’s Joss, hap oter Joss_, which is rendered, ‘that man
does not worship our god, but has another god’; the Chinese are said
to be unable to pronounce _r_ and to use the word _chin-chin_ for
compliments and _pickenini_ for ‘small.’
The latter word seems now extinct in Pidgin proper, though we have
met it in Beach-la-mar, but _Joss_ is still very frequent in Pidgin:
it is from Portuguese _Deus_, _Deos_ (or Span. _Dios_): _Joss-house_
is a temple or church, _Joss-pidgin_ religion, _Joss-pidgin man_ a
clergyman, _topside Joss-pidgin man_ a bishop. _Chin-chin_, according
to the same source, is from Chinese _ts’ing-ts’ing_, Pekingese
_ch’ing-ch’ing_, a term of salutation answering to ‘thank you,
adieu,’ but the English have extended its sphere of application very
considerably, using it as a noun meaning ‘salutation, compliment,’ and
as a verb meaning “to worship (by bowing and striking the chin), to
reverence, adore, implore, to deprecate anger, to wish one something,
invite, ask” (Leland). The explanation given here within parentheses
shows how the Chinese word has been interpreted by popular etymology,
and no doubt it owes its extensive use partly to its sound, which has
taken the popular fancy. _Chin-chin joss_ means religious worship of
any kind.
Simpson says: “Many of the words in use are of unknown origin. In a
number of cases the English suppose them to be Chinese, while the
Chinese, on the other hand, take them to be English.” Some of these,
however, admit now of explanation, and not a few of them point to
India, where the English have learnt them and brought them further
East. Thus _chit_, _chitty_, ‘a letter, an account,’ is Hindustani
_chiṭṭhī_; _godown_ ‘warehouse’ is an English popular interpretation
of Malay _gadong_, from Tamil _giḍangi_. _Chowchow_ seems to be real
Chinese and to mean ‘mixed preserves,’ but in Pidgin it has acquired
the wider signification of ‘food, meal, to eat,’ besides having
various other applications: a chowchow cargo is an assorted cargo, a
‘general shop’ is a chowchow shop. _Cumshaw_ ‘a present’ is Chinese.
But _tiffin_, which is used all over the East for ‘lunch,’ is really
an English word, properly _tiffing_, from the slang verb _to tiff_, to
drink, esp. to drink out of meal-times. In India it was applied to the
meal, and then reintroduced into England and believed to be a native
Indian word.
XII.--§ 5. Grammar, etc.
Among points not found in Beach-la-mar I shall mention the extensive
use of _piecee_, which in accordance with Chinese grammar is required
between a numeral and the noun indicating what is counted; thus in
a Chinaman’s description of a three-masted screw steamer with two
funnels: “Thlee piecee bamboo, two piecee puff-puff, walk-along inside,
no can see” (walk-along = the engine). _Side_ means any locality: _he
belongey China-side now_ (he is in China), _topside_ above, or high,
_bottom-side_ below, _farside_ beyond, _this-side_ here, _allo-side_
around. In a similar way _time_ (pronounced _tim_ or _teem_) is used in
_that-tim_ then, when, _what-tim_ when? _one-tim_ once, only, _two-tim_
twice, again, _nother-tim_ again.
In one respect the Chinese sound system is accountable for a deviation
from Beach-la-mar, namely in the substitution of _l_ for _r_: _loom_,
_all light_ for ‘room, all right,’ etc., while the islanders often
made the inverse change. But the tendency to add a vowel after a final
consonant is the same: _makee_, _too muchee_, etc. The enigmatic
termination _lo_, which Landtman found in some words in New Guinea, is
also added to some words ending in vowel sounds in Pidgin, according to
Leland, who instances _die-lo_, die; in his texts I find the additional
examples _buy-lo_, _say-lo_, _pay-lo_, _hear-lo_, besides _wailo_, or
_wylo_, which is probably from _away_; it means ‘go away, away with
you! go, depart, gone.’ Can it be the Chinese sign of the past tense
_la_, _lao_, generalized?
Among usual expressions must be mentioned _number one_ (_numpa one_)
‘first-class, excellent,’ _catchee_ ‘get, possess, hold, bring,’ etc.,
_ploper_ (_plopa_) ‘proper, good, nice, correct’: _you belong ploper?_
‘are you well?’
Another word which was not in use among the South Sea islanders, namely
_have_, in the form _hab_ or _hap_ is often used in Pidgin, even to
form the perfect. _Belong_ (_belongy_) is nearly as frequent as in
Beach-la-mar, but is used in a different way: ‘My belongy Consoo boy,’
‘I am the Consul’s servant.’ ‘You belong clever inside,’ ‘you are
intelligent.’ The usual way of asking the price of something is ‘how
much belong?’
XII.--§ 6. General Theory.
Lingos of the same type as Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English are found
in other parts of the world where whites and natives meet and have
to find some medium of communication. Thus a Danish doctor living in
Belgian Congo sends me a few specimens of the ‘Pidgin’ spoken there: to
indicate that his master has received many letters from home, the ‘boy’
will say, “Massa catch plenty mammy-book” (_mammy_ meaning ‘woman,
wife’). _Breeze_ stands for air in general; if the boy wants to say
that he has pumped up the bicycle tyres, he will say, “Plenty breeze
live for inside,” _live_, being here the general term for ‘to be’
(Beach-l. _stop_); ‘is your master in?’ becomes ‘Massa live?’ and the
answer is ‘he no live’ or ‘he live for hup’ (i.e. he is upstairs). If
a man has a stomach-ache he will say ‘he hurt me for belly plenty too
much’--_too much_ is thus used exactly as in Beach-la-mar and Chinese
Pidgin. The similarity of all these jargons, in spite of unavoidable
smaller differences, is in fact very striking indeed.
It may be time now to draw the moral of all this. And first I want
to point out that these languages are not ‘mixed languages’ in the
proper sense of that term. Churchill is not right when he says that
Beach-la-mar “gathered material from every source, it fused them
all.” As a matter of fact, it is English, and nothing but English,
with very few admixtures, and all of these are such words as had
previously been adopted into the English speech of those classes of the
population, sailors, etc., with whom the natives came into contact:
they were therefore justified in their belief that these words formed
part of the English tongue and that what they learned themselves was
real English. The natives really adhere to Windisch’s rule about the
adoption of loan-words (above, XI § 10). If there are more Chinese
words in Pidgin than there are Polynesian ones in Beach-la-mar, this is
a natural consequence of the fact that the Chinese civilization ranked
incomparably much higher than the Polynesian, and that therefore the
English living in China would adopt these words into their own speech.
Still, their number is not very large. And we have seen that there are
some words which the Easterners must naturally suppose to be English,
while the English think that they belong to the vernacular, and in
using them each party is thus under the delusion that he is rendering
a service to the other.
This leads me to my second point: those deviations from correct
English, those corruptions of pronunciation and those simplifications
of grammar, which have formed the object of this short sketch, are due
just as much to the English as to the Easterners, and in many points
they began with the former rather than with the latter (cf. Schuchardt,
_Auf anlass des Volapüks_, 1888, 8; KS 4. 35, SlD 36; ESt 15. 292).
From Schuchardt I take the following quotation: “The usual question on
reaching the portico of an Indian bungalow is, _Can missus see?_--it
being a popular superstition amongst the Europeans that to enable
a native to understand English he must be addressed as if he were
deaf, and in the most infantile language.” This tendency to meet the
‘inferior races’ half-way in order to facilitate matters for them is
by Churchill called “the one supreme axiom of international philology:
the proper way to make a foreigner understand what you would say is to
use broken English. He speaks it himself, therefore give him what he
uses.” We recognize here the same mistaken notion that we have seen
above in the language of the nursery, where mothers and others will
talk a curious sort of mangled English which is believed to represent
real babytalk, though it has many traits which are purely conventional.
In both cases these more or less artificial perversions are thought
to be an aid to those who have not yet mastered the intricacies of
the language in question, though the ultimate result is at best a
retardation of the perfect acquisition of correct speech.
My view, then, is that Beach-la-mar as well as Pidgin is English, only
English learnt imperfectly, in consequence partly of the difficulties
always inherent in learning a totally different language, partly of the
obstacles put in the way of learning by the linguistic behaviour of the
English-speaking people themselves. The analogy of its imperfections
with those of a baby’s speech in the first period is striking, and
includes errors of pronunciation, extreme simplification of grammar,
scantiness of vocabulary, even to such peculiarities as that the word
_too_ is apprehended in the sense of ‘very much,’ and such phrases as
_you better go_, etc.
XII.--§ 7. Mauritius Creole.
The view here advanced on the character of these ‘Pidgin’ languages
is corroborated when we see that other languages under similar
circumstances have been treated in exactly the same way as English.
With regard to French in the island of Mauritius, formerly Ile de
France, we are fortunate in possessing an excellent treatment of the
subject by M. C. Baissac (_Étude sur le Patois Créole Mauricien_,
Nancy, 1880; cf. the same writer’s _Le Folk-lore de l’Ile-Maurice_,
Paris, 1888, Les littératures populaires, tome xxvii). The island was
uninhabited when the French occupied it in 1715; a great many slaves
were imported from Madagascar, and as a means of intercourse between
them and their French masters a French Creole language sprang up, which
has survived the English conquest (1810) and the subsequent wholesale
introduction of coolies from India and elsewhere. The paramount element
in the vocabulary is French; one may read many pages in Baissac’s texts
without coming across any foreign words, apart from the names of some
indigenous animals and plants. In the phonetic structure there are a
few all-pervading traits: the front-round vowels are replaced by the
corresponding unrounded vowels or in a few cases by [u], and instead
of [ʃ, ʒ] we find [s, z]; thus _éré_ heureux, _éne plime_ une plume,
_sakéne_ chacun(e), _zize_ juge, _zunu_ genou, _suval_ cheval: I
replace Baissac’s notation, which is modelled on the French spelling,
by a more phonetic one according to his own indications; but I keep his
final _e muet_.
The grammar of this language is as simple as possible. Substantives
have the same form for the two numbers: _dé suval_ deux chevaux. There
is no definite article. The adjective is invariable, thus also _sa_
for ce, cet, cette, ces, ceci, cela, celui, celle, ceux, celles. _Mo_
before a verb is ‘I,’ before a substantive it is possessive: _mo koné_
I know, _mo lakaze_ my house; in the same way _to_ is you and your, but
in the third person a distinction is made, for _li_ is he or she, but
his or her is _so_, and here we have even a plural, _zaute_ from ‘les
autres,’ which form is also used as a plural of the second person: _mo
va alle av zaut_, I shall go with you.
The genitive is expressed by word-order without any preposition:
_lakase so papa_ his father’s house; also with _so_ before the
nominative: _so piti ppa Azor_ old Azor’s child.
The form in which the French words have been taken over presents some
curious features, and in some cases illustrates the difficulty the
blacks felt in separating the words which they heard in the French
utterance as one continuous stream of sounds. There is evidently a
disinclination to begin a word with a vowel, and sometimes an initial
vowel is left out, as _bitation_ habitation, _tranzé_ étranger, but in
other cases _z_ is taken from the French plural article: _zozo_ oiseau,
_zistoire_, _zenfan_, _zimaze_ image, _zalfan_ éléphant, _zanimo_
animal, or _n_ from the French indefinite article: _name_ ghost, _nabi_
(or _zabi_) habit. In many cases the whole French article is taken as
an integral part of the word, as _lérat_ rat, _léroi_, _licien_ chien,
_latabe_ table, _lére_ heure (often as a conjunction ‘when’); thus
also with the plural article _lizié_ from _les yeux_, but without the
plural signification: _éne lizié_ an eye. Similarly _éne lazoie_ a
goose. Words that are often used in French with the so-called partitive
article keep this; thus _disel_ salt, _divin_ wine, _duri_ rice, _éne
dipin_ a loaf; here also we meet with one word from the French plural:
_éne dizéf_ an egg, from _des œufs_. The French mass-word with the
partitive article _du monde_ has become _dimunde_ or _dumune_, and
as it means ‘people’ and no distinction is made between plural and
singular, it is used also for ‘person’: _éne vié dimunde_ an old man.
Verbs have only one form, generally from the French infinitive or past
participle, which in most cases would fall together (_manzé_ = manger,
mangé; _kuri_ = courir, couru); this serves for all persons in both
numbers and all moods. But tenses are indicated by means of auxiliary
words: _va_ for the future, _té_ (from _été_) for the ordinary past,
and _fine_ for the perfect: _mo manzé_ I eat, _mo va manzé_ I shall
eat, _mo té manzé_ I ate, _mo fine manzé_ I have eaten, _mo fine
fini_ I have finished. Further, there is a curious use of _aprè_ to
express what in English are called the progressive or expanded tenses:
_mo aprè manzé_ I am eating, _mo té aprè manzé_ I was eating, and of
_pour_ to express the immediate future: _mo pour manzé_ I am going
to eat, and finally an immediate past may be expressed by _fék_: _mo
fék manzé_ I have just been eating (je ne fais que de manger). As
these may be combined in various ways (_mo va fine manzé_ I shall have
eaten, even _mo té va fék manzé_ I should have eaten a moment ago,
etc.), the language has really succeeded in building up a very fine and
rich verbal system with the simplest possible means and with perfect
regularity.
The French separate negatives have been combined into one word each:
_napa_ not (there is not), _narien_ nothing, and similarly _nék_ only.
In many cases the same form is used for a substantive or adjective and
for a verb: _mo soif_, _mo faim_ I am thirsty and hungry; _li content
so madame_ he is fond of his wife.
_Côte_ (or _à côte_) is a preposition ‘by the side of, near,’ but also
means ‘where’: _la case àcote li resté_ ‘the house in which he lives’;
cf. Pidgin _side_.
In all this, as will easily be seen, there is very little French
grammar; this will be especially evident when we compare the French
verbal system with its many intricacies: difference according to
person, number, tense and mood with their endings, changes of
root-vowels and stress-place, etc., with the unchanged verbal root
and the invariable auxiliary syllables of the Creole. But there is
really as little in the Creole dialect of Malagasy grammar, as I have
ascertained by looking through G. W. Parker’s _Grammar_ (London, 1883):
both nations in forming this means of communication have, as it were,
stripped themselves of all their previous grammatical habits and have
spoken as if their minds were just as innocent of grammar as those of
very small babies, whether French or Malagasy. Thus, and thus only, can
it be explained that the grammar of this variety of French is for all
practical purposes identical with the grammar of those two varieties of
English which we have previously examined in this chapter.
No one can read Baissac’s collection of folk-tales from Mauritius
without being often struck with the felicity and even force of this
language, in spite of its inevitable _naïveté_ and of the childlike
simplicity of its constructions. If it were left to itself it might
develop into a really fine idiom without abandoning any of its
characteristic traits. But as it is, it seems to be constantly changing
through the influence of real French, which is more and more taught
to and imitated by the islanders, and the day may come when most of
the features described in this rapid sketch will have given place to
something which is less original, but will be more readily understood
by Parisian globe-trotters who may happen to visit the distant island.
XII.--§ 8. Chinook Jargon.
The view here advanced may be further put to the test if we examine
a totally different language developed in another part of the world,
viz. in Oregon. I give its history in an abridged form from Hale.[51]
When the first British and American trading ships appeared on the
north-west coast of America, towards the end of the eighteenth century,
they found a great number of distinct languages, the Nootka, Nisqually,
Chinook, Chihailish and others, all of them harsh in pronunciation,
complex in structure, and each spoken over a very limited space. The
traders learnt a few Nootka words and the Indians a few English words.
Afterwards the traders began to frequent the Columbia River, and
naturally attempted to communicate with the natives there by means of
the words which they had found intelligible at Nootka. The Chinooks
soon acquired these words, both Nootka and English. When later the
white traders made permanent establishments in Oregon, a real language
was required; and it was formed by drawing upon the Chinook for such
words as were requisite, numerals, pronouns, and some adverbs and other
words. Thus enriched, ‘the Jargon,’ as it now began to be styled,
became of great service as a means of general intercourse. Now, French
Canadians in the service of the fur companies were brought more closely
into contact with the Indians, hunted with them, and lived with them
on terms of familiarity. The consequence was that several French words
were added to the slender stock of the Jargon, including the names of
various articles of food and clothing, implements, several names of
the parts of the body, and the verbs to run, sing and dance, also one
conjunction, _puis_, reduced to _pi_.
“The origin of some of the words is rather whimsical. The Americans,
British and French are distinguished by the terms _Boston_, _Kinchotsh_
(King George), and _pasaiuks_, which is presumed to be the word
_Français_ (as neither _f_, _r_ nor the nasal _n_ can be pronounced
by the Indians) with the Chinook plural termination _uks_ added....
‘Foolish’ is expressed by _pelton_ or _pilton_, derived from the name
of a deranged person, one Archibald Pelton, whom the Indians saw at
Astoria; his strange appearance and actions made such an impression
upon them, that thenceforward anyone behaving in an absurd or
irrational manner” was termed _pelton_.
The phonetic structure is very simple, and contains no sound or
combination that is not easy to Englishmen and Frenchmen as well as to
Indians of at least a dozen tribes. The numerous harsh Indian velars
either disappear entirely or are softened to _h_ and _k_. On the other
hand, the _d_, _f_, _r_, _v_, _z_ of the English and French become in
the mouth of a Chinook _t_, _p_, _l_, _w_, _s_. Examples:
Chinook: _thliakso_ _yakso_ hair
_etsghot_ _itshut_ black bear
_tkalaitanam_ _kalaitan_ arrow, shot, bullet
_ntshaika_ _nesaika_ we
_mshaika_ _mesaika_ we
_thlaitshka_ _klaska_ (_tlaska_) they
_tkhlon_ _klon_ (_tlun_) three
English: _handkerchief_ _hakatshum_ (_kenkeshim_) handkerchief
_cry_ _klai_, _kalai_ (_kai_) cry, mourn
_fire_ _paia_ fire, cook, ripe
_dry_ _tlai_, _delai_ dry
French: _courir_ _kuli_ run
_la bouche_ _labus_ (_labush_) mouth
_le mouton_ _lemuto_ sheep
The forms in parentheses are those of the French glossary (1853).
It will be noticed that many of the French words have the definite
article affixed (a trait noticed in many words in the French Creole
dialect of Mauritius). More than half of the words in Hale’s
glossary beginning with _l_ have this origin, thus _labutai_ bottle,
_lakloa_ cross, _lamie_ an old woman (la vieille), _lapushet_ fork
(la fourchette), _latlá_ noise (faire du train), _lidú_ finger,
_lejaub_ (or _diaub_, _yaub_) devil (le diable), _léma_ hand, _liplét_
missionary (le prêtre), _litá_ tooth. The plural article is found in
_lisáp_ egg (les œufs)--the same word in which Mauritius French has
also adopted the plural form.
Some of the meanings of English words are rather curious; thus, _kol_
besides ‘cold’ means ‘winter,’ and as the years, as with the old
Scandinavians, are reckoned by winters, also ‘year.’ _Sun_ (_son_)
besides ‘sun’ also means ‘day.’ _Spos_ (often pronounced _pos_), as in
Beach-la-mar, is a common conjunction, ‘if, when.’
The grammar is extremely simple. Nouns are invariable; the plural
generally is not distinguished from the singular; sometimes _haiu_
(_ayo_) ‘much, many’ is added by way of emphasis. The genitive is shown
by position only: _kahta nem maika papa?_ (lit., what name thou father)
what is the name of your father? The adjective precedes the noun, and
comparison is indicated by periphrasis. ‘I am stronger than thou’ would
be _weke maika skukum kahkwa naika_, lit. ‘not thou strong as I.’ The
superlative is indicated by the adverb _haiás_ ‘great, very’: _haiás
oliman okuk kanim_, that canoe is the oldest, lit., very old that
canoe, or (according to Gibbs) by _elip_ ‘first, before’: _elip klosh_
‘best.’
The numerals and pronouns are from the Chinook, but the latter, at any
rate, are very much simplified. Thus the pronoun for ‘we’ is _nesaika_,
from Chinook _ntshaika_, which is the exclusive form, meaning ‘we
here,’ not including the person or persons addressed.
Like the nouns, the verbs have only one form, the tense being left
to be inferred from the context, or, if strictly necessary, being
indicated by an adverb. The future, in the sense of ‘about to, ready
to,’ may be expressed by _tike_, which means properly ‘wish,’ as _naika
papa tike mimalus_ (_mimelust_) my father is about to die. The verb ‘to
be’ is not expressed: _maika pelton_, thou art foolish.
There is a much-used verb _mámuk_, which means ‘make, do, work’ and
forms causatives, as _mamuk chako_ ‘make to come, bring,’ _mamuk
mimalus_ ‘kill.’ With a noun: _mamuk lalam_ (Fr. la rame) ‘make oar,’
i.e. ‘to row,’ _mamuk pepe_ (make paper) ‘write,’ _mamuk po_ (make
blow) ‘fire a gun.’
There is only one true preposition, _kopa_, which is used in various
senses--to, for, at, in, among, about, etc.; but even this may
generally be omitted and the sentence remain intelligible. The two
conjunctions _spos_ and _pi_ have already been mentioned.
XII.--§ 9. Chinook continued.
In this way something is formed that may be used as a language in
spite of the scantiness of its vocabulary. But a good deal has to
be expressed by the tone of the voice, the look and the gesture of
the speaker. “The Indians in general,” says Hale (p. 18), “are very
sparing of their gesticulations. No languages, probably, require less
assistance from this source than theirs.... We frequently had occasion
to observe the sudden change produced when a party of the natives, who
had been conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner,
with whom it was necessary to speak in the Jargon. The countenances,
which had before been grave, stolid and inexpressive, were instantly
lighted up with animation; the low, monotonous tone became lively and
modulated; every feature was active; the head, the arms and the whole
body were in motion, and every look and gesture became instinct with
meaning.”
In British Columbia and in parts of Alaska this language is the
prevailing medium of intercourse between the whites and the natives,
and there Hale thinks that it is likely to live “for hundreds, and
perhaps thousands, of years to come.” The language has already the
beginning of a literature: songs, mostly composed by women, who sing
them to plaintive native tunes. Hale gives some lyrics and a sermon
preached by Mr. Eells, who has been accustomed for many years to preach
to the Indians in the Jargon and who says that he sometimes even thinks
in this idiom.
Hale counted the words in this sermon, and found that to express
the whole of its “historic and descriptive details, its arguments
and its appeals,” only 97 different words were required, and not a
single grammatical inflexion. Of these words, 65 were from Amerindian
languages (46 Chinook, 17 Nootka, 2 Salish), 23 English and 7 French.
It is very instructive to go through the texts given by Hale and to
compare them with the real Chinook text analysed in Boas’s _Handbook of
American Indian Languages_ (Washington, 1911, p. 666 ff.): the contrast
could not be stronger between simplicity carried to the extreme point,
on the one hand, and an infinite complexity and intricacy on the other.
But though it must be admitted that astonishingly much can be expressed
in the Jargon by its very simple and few means, a European mind, while
bewildered in the entangled jumble of the Chinook language, cannot
help missing a great many _nuances_ in the Jargon, where thoughts are
reduced to their simplest formula and where everything is left out that
is not strictly necessary to the least exacting minds.
XII.--§ 10. Makeshift Languages.
To sum up, this Oregon trade language is to be classed together with
Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English, not perhaps as ‘bastard’ or ‘mongrel’
languages--such expressions taken from biology always convey the wrong
impression that a language is an ‘organism’ and had therefore better
be avoided--but rather as makeshift languages or minimum languages,
means of expression which do not serve all the purposes of ordinary
languages, but may be used as substitutes where fuller and better ones
are not available.
The analogy between this Jargon and the makeshift languages of the
East is closer than might perhaps appear at first blush, only we must
make it clear to ourselves that English is in the two cases placed in
exactly the inverse position. Pidgin and Beach-la-mar are essentially
English learnt imperfectly by the Easterners, the Oregon Jargon is
essentially Chinook learnt imperfectly by the English. Just as in
the East the English not only suffered but also abetted the yellows
in their corruption of the English language, so also the Amerindians
met the English half-way through simplifying their own speech. If
in Polynesia and China the makeshift language came to contain some
Polynesian and Chinese words, they were those which the English
themselves had borrowed into their own language and which the yellows
therefore must think formed a legitimate part of the language they
wanted to speak; and in the same way the American Jargon contains such
words from the European languages as had been previously adopted by
the reds. If the Jargon embraces so many French terms for the various
parts of the body, one concomitant reason probably is that these names
in the original Chinook language presented special difficulties through
being specialized and determined by possessive affixes (my foot, for
instance, is _lekxeps_, thy foot _tāmēps_, its foot _lelaps_, our (dual
inclusive) feet _tetxaps_, your (dual) feet _temtaps_; I simplify the
notation in Boas’s _Handbook_, p. 586), so that it was incomparably
easier to take the French _lepi_ and use it unchanged in all cases,
no matter what the number, and no matter who the possessor was. The
natives, who had learnt such words from the French, evidently used
them to other whites under the impression that thereby they could
make themselves more readily understood, and the British and American
traders probably imagined them to be real Chinook; anyhow, their use
meant a substantial economy of mental exertion.
The chief point I want to make, however, is with regard to grammar. In
all these languages, both in the makeshift English and French of the
East and in the makeshift Amerindian of the North-West, the grammatical
structure has been simplified very much beyond what we find in any
of the languages involved in their making, and simplified to such an
extent that it may be expressed in very few words, and those nearly the
same in all these languages, the chief rule being common to them all,
that substantives, adjectives and verbs remain always unchanged. The
vocabularies are as the poles asunder--in the East English and French,
in America Chinook, etc.--but the morphology of all these languages
is practically identical, because in all of them it has reached the
vanishing-point. This shows conclusively that the reason of this
simplicity is not the Chinese substratum or the influence of Chinese
grammar, as is so often believed. Pidgin-English cannot be described,
as is often done, as English with Chinese pronunciation and Chinese
grammar, because in that case we should expect Beach-la-mar to be
quite different from it, as the substratum there would be Melanesian,
which in many ways differs from Chinese, and further we should expect
the Mauritius Creole to be French with Malagasy pronunciation and
Malagasy grammar, and on the other hand the Oregon trade language to
be Chinook with English pronunciation and English grammar--but in none
of these cases would this description tally with the obvious facts.
We might just as well say that the speech of a two-year-old child in
England is English with Chinese grammar, and that of the two-year-old
French child is French modelled on Chinese grammar: the truth on the
contrary, is that in all these seemingly so different cases the same
mental factor is at work, namely, imperfect mastery of a language,
which in its initial stage, in the child with its first language and
in the grown-up with a second language learnt by imperfect methods,
leads to a superficial knowledge of the most indispensable words, with
total disregard of grammar. Often, here and there, this is combined
with a wish to express more than is possible with the means at hand,
and thus generates the attempts to express the inexpressible by means
of those more or less ingenious and more or less comical devices, with
paraphrases and figurative or circuitous designations, which we have
seen first in the chapters on children’s language and now again in
Beach-la-mar and its congeners.
Exactly the same characteristics are found again in the _lingua
geral Brazilica_, which in large parts of Brazil serves as the
means of communication between the whites and Indians or negroes
and also between Indians of different tribes. It “possesses neither
declension nor conjugation” and “places words after one another without
grammatical flexion, with disregard of _nuances_ in sentence structure,
but in energetic brevity,” it is “easy of pronunciation,” with many
vowels and no hard consonant groups--in all these respects it differs
considerably from the original Tupí, from which it has been evolved by
the Europeans.[52]
Finally, I would point the contrast between these makeshift languages
and slang: the former are an outcome of linguistic poverty; they
are born of the necessity and the desire to make oneself understood
where the ordinary idiom of the individual is of no use, while slang
expressions are due to a linguistic exuberance: the individual creating
them knows perfectly well the ordinary words for the idea he wants to
express, but in youthful playfulness he is not content with what is
everybody’s property, and thus consciously steps outside the routine
of everyday language to produce something that is calculated to excite
merriment or even admiration on the part of his hearers. The results
in both cases may sometimes show related features, for some of the
figurative expressions of Beach-la-mar recall certain slang words by
their bold metaphors, but the motive force in the two kinds is totally
different, and where a comic effect is produced, in one case it is
intentional and in the other unintentional.
XII.--§ 11. Romanic Languages.
When Schuchardt began his studies of the various Creole languages
formed in many parts of the world where Europeans speaking various
Romanic and other languages had come into contact with negroes,
Polynesians and other races, it was with the avowed intention
of throwing light on the origin of the Romanic languages from a
contact between Latin and the languages previously spoken in the
countries colonized by the Romans. We may now raise the question
whether Beach-la-mar--to take that as a typical example of the kind
of languages dealt with in this chapter--is likely to develop into
a language which to the English of Great Britain will stand in the
same relation as French or Portuguese to Latin. The answer cannot
be doubtful if we adhere tenaciously to the points of view already
advanced. Development into a separate language would be imaginable
only on condition of a complete, or a nearly complete, isolation from
the language of England (and America)--and how should that be effected
nowadays, with our present means of transport and communication? If
such isolation were indeed possible, it would also result in the
breaking off of communication between the various islands in which
Beach-la-mar is now spoken, and that would probably entail the speedy
extinction of the language itself in favour of the Polynesian language
of each separate island. On the contrary, what will probably happen is
a development in the opposite direction, by which the English of the
islanders will go on constantly improving so as to approach correct
usage more and more in every respect: better pronunciation and syntax,
more flexional forms and a less scanty vocabulary--in short, the same
development that has already to a large extent taken place in the
English of the coloured population in the United States. But this
means a gradual extinction of Beach-la-mar as a separate idiom through
its complete absorption in ordinary English (cf. above, p. 228, on
conditions at Mauritius).
Do these ‘makeshift languages,’ then, throw any light on the
development of the Romanic languages? They may be compared to the very
first initial stage of the Latin language as spoken by the barbarians,
many of whom may be supposed to have mutilated Latin in very much the
same way as the Pacific islanders do English. But by and by they learnt
Latin much better, and if now the Romanic languages have simplified the
grammatical structure of Latin, this simplification is not to be placed
on the same footing as the formlessness of Beach-la-mar, for that is
complete and has been achieved at one blow: the islanders have never
(i.e. have not yet) learnt the English form-system. But the inhabitants
of France, Spain, etc., did learn the Latin form system as well as the
syntactic use of the forms. This is seen by the fact that when French
and the other languages began to be written down, there remained in
them a large quantity of forms and syntactic applications that agree
with Latin but have since then become extinct: in its oldest written
form, therefore, French is very far from the amorphous condition of
Beach-la-mar: in its nouns it had many survivals of the Latin case
system (gen. pl. corresponding to _-orum_; an oblique case different
from the nominative and formed in various ways according to the rules
of Latin declensions), in the verbs we find an intricate system of
tenses, moods and persons, based on the Latin flexions. It is true that
these had been already to some degree simplified, but this must have
happened in the same gradual way as the further simplification that
goes on before our very eyes in the written documents of the following
centuries: the distance from the first to the tenth century must have
been bridged over in very much the same way as the distance between
the tenth and the twentieth century. No cataclysm such as that through
which English has become Beach-la-mar need on any account be invoked to
explain the perfectly natural change from Latin to Old French and from
Old French to Modern French.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] The etymology of this name is rather curious: Portuguese _bicho de
mar_, from _bicho_ ‘worm,’ the name of the sea slug or trepang, which
is eaten as a luxury by the Chinese, was in French modified into _bêche
de mer_, ‘sea-spade’; this by a second popular etymology was made into
English _beach-la-mar_ as if a compound of _beach_.
My sources are H. Schuchardt, KS v. (Wiener Academie, 1883); id. in
ESt xiii. 158 ff., 1889; W. Churchill, _Beach-la-Mar, the Jargon
or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific_ (Carnegie Institution of
Washington, 1911); Jack London, _The Cruise of the Snark_ (Mills &
Boon, London, 1911?), G. Landtman in _Neuphilologische Mitteilungen_
(Helsingfors, 1918, p. 62 ff. Landtman calls it “the Pidgin-English
of British New Guinea,” where he learnt it, though it really differs
from Pidgin-English proper; see below); “The Jargon English of Torres
Straits” in _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to
Torres Straits_, vol. iii. p. 251 ff., Cambridge, 1907.
[49] Similarly the missionary G. Brown thought that _tobi_ was a
native word of the Duke of York Islands for ‘wash,’ till one day he
accidentally discovered that it was their pronunciation of English
_soap_.
[50] There are many specimens in Charles G. Leland, _Pidgin-English
Sing-Song, or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect, with
a Vocabulary_ (5th ed., London, 1900), but they make the impression
of being artificially made-up to amuse the readers, and contain a
much larger proportion of Chinese words than the rest of my sources
would warrant. Besides various articles in newspapers I have used W.
Simpson, “China’s Future Place in Philology” (_Macmillan’s Magazine_,
November 1873) and Dr. Legge’s article “Pigeon English” in _Chambers’s
Encyclopædia_, 1901 (s.v. China). The chapters devoted to Pidgin in
Karl Lentzner’s _Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of
some Mixed Languages_ (Halle, 1892) give little else but wholesale
reprints of passages from some of the sources mentioned above.
[51] See _An International Idiom. A Manual of the Oregon Trade
Language, or Chinook Jargon_, by Horatio Hale (London, 1890). Besides
this I have used a _Vocabulary of the Jargon or Trade Language of
Oregon_ [by Lionnet] published by the Smithsonian Institution (1853),
and George Gibbs, _A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon_ (Smithsonian
Inst., 1863). Lionnet spells the words according to the French fashion,
while Gibbs and Hale spell them in the English way. I have given them
with the continental values of the vowels in accordance with the
indications in Hale’s glossary.
[52] See Martius, _Beitr. zur Ethnogr. und Sprachenkunde Amerikas_
(Leipzig, 1867), i. 364 ff. and ii. 23 ff.