The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics
The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics
The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics
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Katseff Page Page numbers<br />
Berbice Dutch Creole Postposition English Preposition(s)<br />
jenda in<br />
k<strong>and</strong>i near, to the side <strong>of</strong>, over<br />
<strong>of</strong>ro across, over<br />
ondro under<br />
tosn between, in<br />
Table 1. Berbice Dutch Creole prepositions <strong>and</strong> their English equivalents.<br />
Various other categories were recorded as well, but they are excluded from the above<br />
table for clarity.<br />
Two observations are immediately clear from the chart. First, BDC has an expansive <strong>and</strong><br />
well-developed set <strong>of</strong> spatial vocabulary items. Second, BDC spatial propositions <strong>and</strong><br />
English spatial prepositions are divided very differently. This, <strong>of</strong> course, is a trivial<br />
finding; while possible that BDC prepositions might align more closely with the<br />
superstrate language, Dutch, there is no reason to expect BDC prepositions to overlap in<br />
any systematic way with English.<br />
It is difficult to know (without enlisting the aid <strong>of</strong> a native Dutch speaker) which<br />
prepositions are used in each <strong>of</strong> the sentences in my corpus. As an approximation, I<br />
turned to the Levinson et al survey, which included Dutch spatial expressions.
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