A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 311
the formation of compounds that are loan-translations of African metaphors: door-mouth
(a doorway, or the place just outside the doorway of a small house or hut) can be
compared with Yoruba iloro enu (threshold; literally porch mouth) and Hausa baki (a
mouth, an opening, an entrance); and strong-eye (firm, determined) is possibly a loantranslation
from Twi n’ani yε deŋ (strong-eye, insolent, self-willed). It is often difficult to
be certain about etymologies in Caribbean creoles. Cassidy points out that kakanabu
(foolishness, nonsense) at first appears African, with the initial reduplication and the final
vowel [u], but it turns out to be quite regularly derived from cock-and-a-bull, as in “a
cock-and-bull story.” Conversely, dutty (earth, soil; excrement) at first appears to be a
regular Jamaican development of Standard English dirt, dirty; however, the main source
turns out to be Twi (soil, earth), with some influence from the English words.
More recent developments are recorded fully in print and especially as regards music in
the electronic media. The speech of the Rastafari (a religious and social movement that
arose during the 1940s among the Jamaican poor and was energized by a sense of
identification with Africa, and specifically Ethiopia) has given new forms to pronouns:
you is eliminated for being divisive and I and I is used instead, as well as for I and for me.
From popular culture Jamaican English and the world at large have received the words
reggae and ska.
The variety of creoles in the Caribbean can be illustrated by versions of sentences in as
many as thirty-three different languages. 36 The Standard English sentence “The dog of
the man who lives in that house is named King” becomes in Jamaican Creole [di ma:n wa
lIb i:na da da:g njεm kIŋ]; in Trinidad Creole [di dat tu di man dat
lIvεn In dat ne:m kIŋ]; in Caymans Creole [da man hu lrv In da i dag
ne:m kIŋ]. Comparisons can be made with African creoles. In Nigerian Creole the
sentence takes the form [di we na di man we lif da haυs gεt am, i nem kiŋ] and
in Krio, the creole language of Sierra Leone, [di man we tap na da os nεm kiŋ].
Phonetic transcription is useful for those who have studied it, though not for the
general public, and the question of the written representation of creole languages is part
of the unresolved complex of political, social, and psychological issues surrounding the
linguistic question. A modified standard orthography with markings for tone is another
way of representing speech on paper, as in these examples of Jamaican English:
36
See Ian Hancock, “A Preliminary Classification of the Anglophone Atlantic Creoles with
Syntactic Data from Thirty-three Representative Dialects,” in Pidgin and Creole Languages:
Essays in Memory of John E.Reinecke, ed. Glenn G.Gilbert (Honolulu, 1987), pp. 264–333.