“Pidgin-English” is a singular form of speech which the Chinese
language assumes when the natives are first attempting to use English.
_Pidgin_ means _business_. You are made by it to think of the dialect
which we fall into in talking to infants. If any one can explain why
infants are supposed to understand us better when we make our words
terminate in _ee_ or _y_, he may proceed and explain the natural
philosophy of Pidgin-English. In talking to a Chinaman you find
yourself, as it were, addressing an infantile capacity, imitating his
own Pidgin way of speaking, even in talking to an adult. I will give
one or two specimens of pidgin-English, which I found in print. The
first is Norval’s Narrative, taken, as the reader hardly needs to be
informed, from the Rev. Dr. Home’s tragedy of “Douglass.”