OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis. Jaargang 3
(1984)– [tijdschrift] OSO–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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The creole base: looking for the pure creole
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of historical research: to endlessly debate some obscure and minute point which does not lead to any significant advance of knowledge. In regard to the first and third questions, the answers to these are primarily linguistic in nature and may actually be one and the same question. Nevertheless, most linguists have separated them, and of the two, the third has been the more successfully answered. To date, creolists (Bickerton 1981, Markey 1982, and summarized in Byrne 1983) have identified approximately twelve characteristics which are similar if not identical in the creoles of the world. We really don't have the space to list and discuss them here, but suffice it to say that the characteristics represent syntactic and semantic bits and pieces of an overall unified grammatical whole. That is, to really understand the grammar of a language or a group of languages, we have to see the grammar in entirety. Small fragments, while fascinating in themselves, simply cannot and do not give the complete linguistic picture. A language is of course made up of its parts, but each part has its function in the overall working of the system and if we separate them, we cannot know how they fit together to form the unified whole. This now leads us back to the first question, or what exactly is a creole. As mentioned previously, many creole linguists have dedicated themselves to studying the more peripheral (i.e. noncentral) elements of language such as the sounds and/or the origin and makeup of individual words. However, to really understand how a language or group of languages work, one needs to study and analyze their grammars. Yet, to recapitulate, for the few linguists who have studied the syntax and semantics of creole languages, other problems exist which have made it extremely difficult up to now to answer our question. Let us look for a moment as to why this should be. The basic problem for linguists who study the grammar of the creoles is that they have to work with skewered data, examples of languages which are much less than pure creoles. These languages in the vast majority of cases have changed dramatically since their inception and/or were less than complete creoles from the beginning. Thus, it has been very difficult for creole linguists to identify and separate those elements which are intrinsically creole from those that are later developments or were ‘borrowed’ from some other language during their formative stage. The first set or circumstances, or creoles that have changed considerably since their creation, has come about in the following way. When the process of creolization takes place, a somewhat idealized version of the situation as seen in Figure 1 has the new creole first juxtaposed with another (usually European) socially dominant language from which the creole has acquired most of its vocabulary.   Figure 1: Stage 1 of creole life cycle; the linguistic and social relationship with (European) standard language when a creole is first formed.
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However, the speakers of the two languages at this initial stage were normally strictly segregated with contact between the two groups rare if existent. It should also be pointed out that the speakers of each language could not understand those of the other because of the great grammatical differences (among others) between the two speech forms. If at some time after Stage 1 the social barriers were weakened or eliminated (as happened in the Caribbean and the Guyanas in the last century with the abolition of slavery), then the creole speakers had more contact with the ‘ruling class’ and began to add linguistic characteristics from the standard into the creole. Thus, as seen in Figure 2 taken from Day (1974: 40), at Stage 2 a sort of continuum of different speech levels begins to form at the creole end of the spectrum, with each higher level from this extreme representing a mode of speech with increasingly more numerous standard features.  Figure 2: Stage 2 of the creole life cycle with different speech levels beginning to form from the creole extreme as a result of the eradication of social barriers to contact.
After Stage 2 has solidified, a few speakers may eventually incorporate so many standard features that their speech will almost be like the standard language. When and if this happens, we have Stage 3 of the life cycle and this is characterized by a whole series of speech levels from the deep creole to the standard. This uninterrupted chain of speech varieties is known as the Creole Continuum and is actually made up of many more levels than are able to be captured in Figure 3, again reproduced from Day (1974: 39).  Figure 3: Stage 3, the Creole Continuum.
The last phase of the process, or Stage 4 of the life cycle, takes place when the lower levels of the continuum, or the most creole-like forms, begin to disappear due to the ever-present linguistic pressure from the socially more prestigious standard. The people will therefore gradually forget their most creole-like speech and converse at levels more like the standard. This is called Decreolization and is represented by Figure 4. Note that the lost creole and creole-like levels are represented by the broken circles and that | |||||||||||||||||||
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depending on how far the process of decreolization has progressed within a particular community, there will be greater or fewer of these lost levels.  Figure 4: Stage 4, Decreolization.
Most of the creoles of at least the Caribbean area fall somewhere between Figures 2 and 4. That is, a continuum exists in most cases with greater or lesser degrees of decreolization. Hence, linguists have had to sift through these complex developments in an attempt to find the basic elements of creole languages, a job which has thwarted even the most respected and meticulous of investigators.Ga naar eind1 However, we have just recently learned that the task of finding the creole base is even more complex than we have presented so far in this paper. Due to the recent work of Baker in analyzing the creole formative process, apparently all creolization is not the same; some of these languages underwent imperfect or partial creolization. Hence, a given ‘creole’ could have begun life anywhere to the right or left of the arrows in Figure 5, from the deepest possible creole to almost standard-like speech.   Figure 5: Possible starting points of any given ‘creole’ based on the level of initial creolization.
We now know, then, that previous conclusions concerning basic creole grammar may be wrong because the languages that were dealt with may not have been complete creoles to begin with. How therefore can we ever discover what constitutes the basic elements of creole languages? Let's take a look first at the main points of Baker's work and then apply them to Saramaccan. Baker (1984) summarizes the demographic (i.e. population) factors which are integrally associated with the process of creolization and the resultant creole depth of the new language. These are:
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The importance of each of these events was explained in Baker's encyclopedia-like doctoral thesis (almost 900 pages) in the course of studying and comparing the differential creolization of three Indian Ocean creoles. Basically (and leaving out many details and the more complex processes) he concluded that the amount of contact that the slaves had with the ‘ruling class’ (the standard language speakers) determined whether a deep creole, a partial creole, or a version of the standard language would form. If there was little or no contact, a deep creole would be the result; conversely, if some or intense contact ensued, then a speech type somewhere between a creole and the standard would form. To be more specific, Baker found first that a slave population must be larger than that of a ‘ruling class’ or the slaves will have adequate contact to learn the standard language and a creole would not ensue. Moreover, if the slaves remain the numerically inferior group for a long period of time, then the conditions will be optimal for the slaves to pass the standard (or a facsimile of the standard) on to their children or to any new arrivals. However, if new slaves in large numbers are constantly arriving (and from many diverse linguistic backgrounds) and their numbers rapidly surpass the ‘ruling class’ (Baker's Event 1), then there will neither be the time nor the availability to learn the standard language and they will be forced to develop a language from their own resources - a creole language. Subsequent to Baker's first sequence of events, if the slave immigration continues and is not abruptly stopped, then the slaves and their children will continue in the process of creole formation and pass on fewer and fewer features from the language of the ‘ruling class’. That is, the process is continual with each series of arrivals learning a language with fewer and fewer standard characteristics. Eventually and again if the immigration of slaves continues, a deep creole will solidify as a new language, but may then begin a new cycle through the development of a continuum (see Figure 3) and decreolization (see Figure 4). Alternatively, if immigration is stopped at any time before a deep creole has time to develop, then the new language will solidify at a less than deep creole level (with greater or fewer standard features depending on when the immigration was stopped), and will itself also probably begin the development of a continuum and decreolization (at least a type of decreolization from where the language solidified). It should now be evident why linguists have been unable to find the creole base. The processes described have resulted in incredibly complex linguistic developments. But now that we understand the process of creolization better, it should be a bit less difficult to determine the creole base, that is if we can find a creole that underwent very deep creolization and has not changed too much since it was formed. Let's look then at Saramaccan and see where it fits in with Baker's scheme of things. All details in the following discussion on Suriname and the Saramaka are from Richard Price (1976: 1-39) unless otherwise specifically stated. The chronological history of Suriname began, for all intents and purposes, with the arrival from Barbados in 1651 of one hundred English and 200 slaves. The settlement continued to expand in the ensuing years until by 1665, there were 40 or 50 plantations with 1500 English and around 3,400 slaves. Then in 1667 (17 years after the first arrivals), the Dutch captured the Colony and the English gradually left until by 1675, most were gone (Byrne 1984a), taking with them only the slaves acquired in 1667 and before. The Dutch, for their part, continued to import Africans until a fairly stable slave population of 50,000 was reached in 1750 (as compared to approximately 2,500 Europeans at the same time). The value of the English presence in Suriname was more than just the founding of the Colony; during their few years there, the groundwork was | |||||||||||||||||||
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laid for the eventual development of Suriname's creole languages. The predecessor of Sranan Tongo, the coastal creole and Suriname's national language (Voorhoeve and Lichtveld 1975: 275-76), began during the English presence (Voorhoeve 1971: 307) and in turn, it influenced to a greater of lesser degree the development of Suriname's Bush Negro creoles (Djuka, Matawai, Aluku (Boni), Kwinti, Paramaka, and Saramaccan). Most of these languages are English-based, which means that the majority of their words, but not their grammars, come from English and this could only have come about during the English Period (1651-67). This also means that during the intervening years before the English completely left, the English slaves must have passed on to the newly-arrived Dutch slaves their English-based precursor to a creole language (which is called a pidgin and in its early form is primarily just a collection of relatively few vocabulary items without much real grammar (Bickerton and Odo 1976)). The Saramaka, the oldest of the Bush Negro tribes, formed as a result of runaway slaves (called Maroons) banding together in the bush after their escape from the plantations. While it is not certain exactly when the tribe began, the Saramaka themselves say it was around 1630-40 (Price and Price, ms.) when small groups of French, English, and Sephardic Jews (and their slaves) inhabited Suriname. Whatever the case, with the coming of the English from Barbados in 1651, and later the Portuguese Jews (1666) and the Dutch (1667), slaves escaped in large numbers, primarily to the Para region just south of Paramaribo, and most certainly the nucleus of the Saramaka bush community began forming at least by this time. We can be fairly sure of this because by 1712, when these people refused to accept any additional escapees into their villages and the other bush tribes thereby began to form, the Saramaka society, and presumably the language, was already well formed (Price, ms.). Moreover, by 1718 it appears that there had been at least three generations of Saramaka based on a statement by a Mr. Herlein (1718: 116; translation by Price 1976: 30). He says: These runaways had lived here (in the forest) so long that they had already married children who in their whole life had never seen a white man. Based on the above observations, and noting that Mr. Herlein could have visited a Saramaka village which was formed later than some others (for the Saramaka live in many small villages), then these people must have begun coalescing at the latest around 1670 or 1680. Now let's turn to the Saramaccan language and see what the available facts can tell us about its creation. Price (1976: 32) notes that all the slaves escaping before 1680 were African-born (the very latest time that the tribe could have formed) and of those escaping after this date, we can deduce that possibly 99% or more were African-born. Moreover, the great majority of these slaves had ten years or less in the Colony, and many had fewer than five years. The importance of this data is that the progenitors of the Saramaka (and the Saramaccan language) could only have spoken to each other in the pidgin that they learned during their relatively short stay on the plantations. They certainly couldn't have had much use for their native African languages since they came from a section of that continent (Price 1976: 13) which is dominated by six different language groups (de Groot 1983: 25), with each group containing various individual languages. Who knows, then, how many different languages were represented in these early communities? Any one slave might thereby have been able to converse with a handful of his fellow maroons, but no more. Hence, for all practical purposes, the early Saramaka needed to rely on the pidgin, however imperfect for everday communication, that they picked up during their time on the | |||||||||||||||||||
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plantations. Returning once again to Baker's explanation of creolization, we pointed out that the depth of a creole depended primarily on the availability of the slaves' contact with the masters' European language. In applying this criterion to the Suriname situation, note that:
These maroons were thus left to their own devices in forming their new language. So, when the first children were born into the new community, all that they heard when learning their first language (i.e. as they formed the creole, for these are the ones who change a pidgin into a creole - the children) was:
We can therefore conclude, by using Baker's criterion of the availability of a European language, that Saramaccan must have been pretty near the deepest form of creole possible when it was created by the children in the bush.Ga naar eind2 In addition, because of its remote locale and inaccessibility until fairly recently, Saramaccan has not been ‘contaminated’ (at least not to any meaningful degree) by contact with a European language as has the vast majority of the creoles which have been studied to date. We might thus expect Saramaccan to still represent those structures and elements which we will call the deepest creolization. With this in mind, let's now look at some of the things in Saramaccan which we have deduced are representative of this deepest creolization.
3.0 After a thorough and quite complicated analysis (to be seen in its entirety in Byrne (forthcoming), but greatly simplified for our purposes in this brief survey), we can reduce the most fundamental of the organizational principles which were present in early Saramaccan to two. These are:
That is, by 2) is meant that there were and are no sentences like... to go to the store or... for her to eat the cake in English; there are only full sentences like he had gone to the store or she ate the cake - or sentences with a subject, a verb, and some kind of indication of the time of the action. The entire analysis of Saramaccan of course cannot be presented here, so let's just look at a small bit of the language to get the idea of how the above-mentioned organizational principles work. In Saramaccan (as well as all of the Suriname creoles), fu (from English for (Byrne 1983a)) comes before full sentences whose outcome isn't quite certain.
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In 1) above, fu ‘for’ (seen as faa (fu + a ‘for he’)) comes before a luku di wosu, and, as can be seen by the translation, it isn't certain whether or not this action happened (i.e. whether or not Kofi actually looked at the house). However, it's not at all clear (at least by the translation) that what follows fu is a complete sentence, but in 2), it should be since both a subject, a ‘he’, and an indication of time, nan ‘present’ or ‘future’, are found before go ‘go’.
The problem with the translation in 1) (as compared with 2)) is simply due to the inability of English or Dutch to translate a sentence of that type as anything other than an infinitive, or, in other words, as an incomplete sentence. However, the translation does not in any way change the fact that what follows fu in 1), or a luku di wosu, is a complete sentence in Saramaccan, as are all sentences in the language. But what about fu itself? If we said that there were no prepositions in Saramaccan, and fu looks suspiciously like a preposition, then what is going on? As a matter of fact, there are a few prepositions in the language today, but fu is not one of them (at least not in the examples that we are looking at). Fu is actually 1) a verb which 2) represents a complete sentence by itself within the larger overall sentence. This may sound strange, especially for those accustomed to hear and speak European languages, but there are good reasons for thinking the way we do. Let's look at points 1 and 2 more closely to see what is meant here. Concerning point 1, the claim that fu is a verb is based on the way that these types of words can be moved to the front of a sentence in Saramaccan. When a Saramaka wishes to emphasize the action represented by a particular verb, he moves it to the front and also leaves an exact copy of the item in the position from where it was moved. To understand this process a bit better, note sentences 3a, b below.
When naki ‘hit’ in 3a) is emphasized as in 3b), the Saramaccan speaker simply moves this verb to the front and at the same time repeats it in its original position. It would now be reasonable to suppose that if fu were also a verb, then it too should be allowed to move to the front of a sentence with a copy of itself left behind. Using sentence 3a) once again, we can see in 4) that when fu moves, it follows exactly the same pattern as 3b) (which is exactly the same pattern as the other verbs in the language and which strongly suggests that fu is in fact a verb).
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Turning to point 2, we can now not only absolutely confirm that fu is indeed a verb, but also represents a complete sentence by itself. This is true because like all verbs in Saramaccan and never other types of words, fu can have the time marker bi before it as in 5a, b).
In addition, because of the time marker bi before fu, we know from the extremely complex and technical work of Chomsky (1981, 1982) that when an indicator of time is allowed on or next to a verb in a language, then that verb has a subject (like he in he works at the store), but the subject may or may not be actually spoken. Thus, with fu being a verb and moreover, having a subject understood to exist, then fu has all the necessary ingredients to be a complete sentence (Byrne, ms., 1983, 1984b, forthcoming). Additional evidence for this quite surprising conclusion can easily be found in Saramaccan. We know that there is an extra space, usually empty, before sentences in English and Dutch (and other languages) because when we make questions, we put the question word into this empty space as in 6a, b).
In Saramaccan, the same empty space also exists before sentences. We can prove this by making questions as in English and Dutch, and, additionally, by moving nouns, verbs and prepositional phrases to the front of a sentence (something which most, if not all, creole languages allow to be done).
In 7b-e) above, in each case something is put at the beginning of the sentence. There therefore must be an empty space before sentences in Saramaccan or otherwise these elements would have had nowhere to move. But remember | |||||||||||||||||||
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that we said that fu and what follows are also complete sentences, so why shouldn't there be an empty space before these too? The answer to this question is that there are empty spaces and this can be easily proven by 8) and 9) below.
In 8), we can see that a di wenke ‘to the store’ can go before fu. Of course, someone might say that a di wenke naturally follows kë ‘want’ and so 8) doesn't show anything. But notice in 10) that a di wenke does not naturally go with kë; it is totally unacceptable (as indicated by *).
So, a di wenke in 8) must go in the empty space before fu, giving added proof that fu represents a complete sentence by itself. 9), for its part, shows that there is also an empty space before di womi go a di wenke. Notice in that sentence that hën ‘HE’ (or emphasized he) pushes di womi ‘the man’ out of its normal position before go. The only place for di womi to go is to the empty space, which, again, proves that what follows fu in Saramaccan is a complete sentence. Thus, although we have only looked at a few examples of fu, we have found that fu and those elements that come before and after are indeed complete sentences within an overall larger sentence. What we have just proved is quite exciting for we can finally see the actual grammatical mechanisms of the deepest form of creolization. We now know that there are basically nouns and verbs and that many of the verbs represent complete sentences in themselves. In addition, a sentence in Saramaccan is really much more complex than it might look on the surface. Let's take 7a) again as an example (repeated here as 11)).
From what we have just concluded, this simple-looking sentence is actually composed of three complete sentences with an empty space in front of each and (which we didn't prove but which is nevertheless true) with each sentence on top of the other somewhat like Figure 6.  Figure 6: How complex sentences are put together in Saramaccan.
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Another quite fascinating aspect of the sentences from Saramaccan which have been presented here is that we can actually see how an element moves from one position to another until it reaches the spot where it wants to stop. Now this process of movement has been talked about, but has never before actually been shown to be true, as far as I know. At any rate, to exemplify what is meant, let's once again take sentence 7a)(i.e. 11)). Notice in this sentence that a di wenke is in its natural or normal position, so to speak. Then in sentence 8), repeated as 12), a di wenke has jumped to the empty space before fu.
The only way it could have gotten to this position, according to how people describe such movement, was to first pass through the empty space after fu, which we know exists from sentence 9). Unfortunately, we do not have data with a di wenke in this position, but the idea nevertheless seems valid since we find this element in every other empty space in the overall sentence. Thus, we also find a di wenke in the first empty space as was shown in sentence 7d), repeated here as 13).
This final extraordinary insight can now be graphically illustrated by Figure 7.  Figure 7: How movement works in Saramaccan (and other languages).
4.0 There are, of course, many other mysteries concerning creoles and languages in general which Saramaccan solves. Many of these will be discussed in Byrne (forthcoming). For now, however, it is hoped that from what has been presented the reader will have a better understanding of creole languages and the importance of Saramaccan among these languages and all languages for that matter. Saramaccan is truly a remarkable language and we owe a debt of thanks to the Saramaka for such a creation for it may finally enable us to unlock the enigma of probably our most basic attribute as human beings - that of language.Ga naar eind* | |||||||||||||||||||
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References
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