Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2009

The Sranan verb taigi ‘say to, tell’ is used when a dative object is identified, but in the 18th and 19th centuries taki ‘say, tell, speak, talk’ served this function. This paper explores the early uses of taki alongside variants taki gi and taki na, which paired the optionally ditransitive verb with an optional dative marker. Working from a corpus of Sranan texts spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, I consider the distributions of the three variants and the distinctive uses of gi and na as dative markers to argue for the eventual triumph and contraction of taki gi, looking to the superstrate and substrate languages for potential models. I submit that taki gi was idiomatized and the string syntactically reanalyzed with the result that gi was reinterpreted as an obligatory, rather than optional, dative marker, and that this reanalysis resulted in the decline of taki as an optionally ditransitive verb.

To quantify the degree to which the structure of superstrate and substrate languages influence that of a creole, this paper compares the nearly 100 grammatical features of Guiné-Bissau Creole Portuguese surveyed in Baptista, Mello, & Suzuki (2007) with the corresponding structures in Balanta (one of the creole’s substrate/adstrate languages) and Portuguese (its superstrate), proceeding from one area of syntax to another. However, tables summarizing the presence or absence of features in each of the three languages are not organized by area of syntax but rather by the patterns of the features’ presence or absence in the three languages, allowing a quantification of the various patterns of influence, e.g. the percentage of cases in which a feature is found in the creole only, in the creole and its superstrate only, in the creole and its substrate only, or in all three. These percentages are then discussed regarding what support they might lend to the various hypotheses purporting to explain the sources of creole language structures: the influence of superstrate and substrate languages, universals, creole-internal innovations, and the convergence of all or some of these. The issue of Balanta being both a substrate and an adstrate language with many speakers bilingual in the creole is also discussed, as is the dated bias in the very grammatical categories chosen for the survey, which assumes an Atlantic creole prototype based on ‘Kwa’ rather than West Atlantic languages, the Niger-Congo subfamily to which Balanta belongs.

This paper argues that Scrabble can be used as a tool to help maintain and grow all levels of Haitian Creole literacy and it provides the technical details for developing the game. The rules of the English version are given to introduce the game’s basic structure. Haiti’s educational, sociolinguistic, and literacy conditions are presented in order to put in context the orthographic form proposed for the Haitian Creole version. An overview of game culture in Haiti shows Scrabble’s potential for success. Previous research on the adaptation of Scrabble into Latin by means of a quantitative corpus-linguistic method is examined. Difficult aspects of standard Haitian Creole orthography (IPN) are discussed in order to expose potential pitfalls in design. Quantitative analysis of a Haitian Creole textual corpus provides an empirical basis for the distribution of letter tiles and their point values. Problems encountered in test-games played by Haitian-American university students and Haitian elementary and high school students inform the final proposal. The paper examines the work necessary for the successful introduction of Haitian Creole Scrabble and it provides independent evidence of the game’s cognitive benefits. Haitian Creole Scrabble is argued to be a creative and special method for expanding and strengthening literacy in Haitian Creole and other creole languages.

More than 38,000 Chinese came to Australia to prospect for gold in the second half of the 19th century. Most of them originated from the Canton region of China (now Guangdong), where Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) was an important trading language. This article describes a recently discovered source that throws light on the nature of CPE used in Australia during that period — a 70 page notebook written in a form of English by a Chinese gold miner, Jong Ah Siug. The article presents some background information about Chinese immigrants in the region where Jong worked (Victoria), and evidence that some CPE was spoken there. It goes on to describe Jong’s notebook and the circumstances that led to him writing it. The main part of the article examines the linguistic features of CPE and other pidgins that are present in the notebook, and discusses other lexical and morphosyntactic features of the text. Some features are typical only of CPE, such as the use of my as the first person pronoun. On the other hand, some features are more characteristic of Australian or Pacific pidgins — for example, the use of belong in possessive constructions. Still other features have not been recorded for any pidgin, such as the use of been as a locative copula. The analysis shows that Jong’s text contains a mixture of features from CPE and other pidgins, as well as features of interlanguage, including some resulting from functional transfer from Jong’s first language, Cantonese.