Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 11, Issue 2, 1996

In an early Caribbean colony the conversion from other crops to sugar monoculture utterly transformed the colony's society and arguably its language as well. A comparative quantitative analysis of the populations of Haiti and Martinique makes the case that the initial period of creole genesis on each island extended as much as 50 years beyond the introduction of sugar growing. The reconstruction of the ethnic distribution of the African population brought to the French Caribbean in the late 17th century suggests that speakers of Gbe dialects would have been numerically dominant in Haiti during the first several decades of the sugar era. This fact may seem to lend plausibility to Lefebvre and Lumsden's application of the Relexification Hypothesis, but a number of vexing issues call this hypothesis into question.

It is often assumed that creolization involves a break in the transmission of grammar. On the basis of data drawn from the TMA system of Haitian creole, as compared with those of its source languages — French, the superstratum language, and Fongbe, one of the substratum languages — this paper argues that creolization does not involve a break in transmission of grammar. The properties of the Haitian creole TMA system are shown to reflect in a systematic way those of its contributing languages. While the syntactic and the semantic properties of the TMA markers of the creole parallel those of Fongbe, the markers' phonological form appears to be derived from phonetic strings found in the superstratum language. This systematic division of properties is predicted by the hypothesis that relexification has played a major role in the formation of the creole. The fact that the lexical entries of the creole have phonological representations which are derived from phonetic strings found in the superstratum language is the visible signal that creolization involves the creation of a new language. The fact that the lexical entries of the creole show semantic and syntactic properties that parallel those of the languages of the substratum argues that there has been no break in the transmission of grammar in the formation of the creole.

In the following, it will be demonstrated that the orthography devised by Cassidy for Jamaican Creole1 is upheld under a reevaluation in the context of present day generative phonology. In this respect, modifications proposed by Devonish and Seiler (1991) will be argued against. The analysis focuses primarily on the distribution of vowel phonemes in Jamaican Creole in relation to its orthography.