Spektator. Jaargang 4

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Vowel Harmony in two languages of Surinam.
Norval S.H. Smith

Samenvatting:

Dit artikel gaat over Creooltalen, of zoals ze in het Nederlands wel heten ‘mengeltalen’. Historisch gezien zijn deze talen namelijk ontstaan door ‘vermenging’ van verschillende talen. In dit artikel hebben wij het alleen over de zogenaamde Engels-gebaseerde Creooltalen gesproken door groepen van Afrikaanse oorsprong. Dit zijn talen waarin de kern van de woordenschat oorspronkelijk Engels is, met daarnaast een sterk variërend aantal woorden uit Afrikaanse talen, en waarvan de grammatische struktuur een aantal typerende gemeenschappelijke kenmerken vertoont.

We beperken ons tot enkele fonologische aspekten van twee van deze talen die in Suriname worden gesproken - Saramakaans en Sranan. Het is bekend dat verschillende Creooltalen met een Engelse basis verschijnselen vertonen die verder uitsluitend in Afrikaanse talen voorkomen. In dit artikel proberen we aan te tonen dat een bepaald verschijnsel - ‘cross-height vowel harmony’ genoemd - waarvan het bestaan buiten Afrika nooit vermoed is, ook te vinden is in deze Creooltalen van Suriname.

The various Creole languages spoken throughout the world by groups of African origin vary a great deal in the degree to which they have preserved phonological features typical of African languages.

Three features that have been noted as occurring in various Creole languages are the following:

a	the preservation of the typically African complex labial-velar stops // and //. These have been noted in a number of Creole languages, e.g. Gullah of the Sea Islands of the Southern U.S.A. (Turner, 1949). Such stops occur also in Saramaccan, a language of the Bush-Negros of Surinam, not only in lexical items of African origin, but also in words of English origin, where // has replaced the cluster /kw/, e.g. /éti-éti/ corresponding to English quite /kwajt/.
b	the fact syllables may only be closed if the final element is a nasal, and otherwise must be open. In the case of English words ending in a consonant other than a nasal an extra vowel is added to give an open syllable structure. Compare: English loose /lu:s/ Saramaccan /lúsu   pie / pi:s/   /písi/ This feature appears in all three Creole languages of Surinam, Saramaccan, Sranan and Djuka. It does not occur in other Creole languages, cf. Jamaican/kos/ curse (Saramaccan /kósi/).
c	The fact that Saramaccan, apparently uniquely among Creole languages, is a tone language. In other words lexical items may be distinguished from each other solely by the fact that particular syllables carry different tone-heights. The stress contrasts of lexical items of European origin are reinterpreted as tone contrasts (high tone replaces stress, low tone replaces unstress).

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The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Saramaccan, again uniquely among Creole languages, also possesses another feature typical of African (particularly West and Centra1 African) languages - vowel harmony. Although a number of publications have appeared recently which have directly or indirectly been concerned with Saramaccan phonology (Voorhoeve, 1959; Donicie and Voorhoeve, 1963; and particularly Rountree, 1972) the existence of this feature seems to have escaped notice. We will also show that this feature was once present in the neighbouring Sranan.

Although vowel harmony systems occur all over the world, they are particularly common in Africa and Northern Eurasia. They generally involve the vowel system being divided up into two subsystems such that in any particular morpheme or word only vowels belonging to one of the subsystems will occur.

In many cases the two subsystems are mutually exclusive - no vowel may belong to both subsystems. A case of this kind is seen in Nzima (Ladefoged, 1964) where we have the two subsystems:



Equally common, however, are systems where we get an overlap between the two subsystems. This is the case in Saramaccan where we get:



Here the units /i, u, a/ are common to both subsystems. This system is quite frequent in African languages, for instance W. African Yoruba and Idoma (Ladefoged, 1964) and the Congolese language Enya (Spa, 1973).

It is to be noted that the types of vowel harmony that we have just illustrated are typically African and differ from the Northern Eurasian types of vowel harmony, which typically involve subsystems of front versus back vowels and/ or rounded versus unrounded vowels. These African types of vowel harmony are known as cross-height vowel harmony and it would appear to be the case that Saramaccan presents the only example of such a system occurring outside Africa. Stewart (1971), referring to this type of vowel harmony, says that they are ‘apparently found nowhere outside Africa south of the Sahara’.

Thus in Saramaccan we may have on the one hand morphemes constructed out of the vowels /i, e, a, o, u/ or on the other hand morphemes constructed out of the vo-

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wels /i, ∊, a, ɔ, u/ (vowel harmony in Saramaccan appears to be restricted to the morpheme). This implies of course that it is impossible to have any morpheme which contains within it any combination of /e/ or /o/ with /∊/ or /ɔ/. For example we have morphemes like:

A				B
béso	wesó	dónke	bófo	bέt∊	dk∊	bsɔ

while morphemes like those under C do not occur:

C
*békɔ	*d∊pó	*hódɔ

Either of the two groups of mid vowels may cooccur with high or low vowels, e.g.:

A		B
kadje	bósi	azέ	hni

In the dictionary of Donicie and Voorhoeve (1963) I have only been able to find four apparent exceptions to the restrictions stated here. These are:

1	adónisi-dɔ	a kind of white wood
2	bó	to blow
3	boobέ/b∊∊bó	breadfruit tree
4	sέmb∊-té/	very long ago
	sέmp∊-tén

Of these the first would appear to be a fossilized compound involving the word for door -/dɔ/. The second is probably a misprint, i.e. bóǒ (/bòέ/) for bòǒ (/bɔ>/). We can be fairly sure of this, firstly since /bɔ/ is given in Huttar's description of the Upper Surinam River dialect (Huttar, 1972), and secondly since words of this type, deriving from English words of the form



always have vowels of constant quality in Saramaccan. Compare:

Gloss	English	Saramaccan
free	fri:	fií
true	tru:	tuú
play	ple:/plej	p∊έ
grow	gro:/grow	gɔ

Thus we can assume that this is also the case with the word blow.

The third example, /boobέ/ or /b∊∊bó/ according to dialect, would appear to result from a compound of the English word bread with the Dutch word boom (tree). In Saramaccan bread has become /b∊έ∊/, while although boom does not appear in Saramaccan itself it does appear in Sranan and Djuka (Huttar, 1972) in

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the form bon. The orthographic n here indicates vowel nasalization, which is a weak (Voorhoeve, 1959) and unstable feature in Saramaccan (cf. example 4) above), so that its nonappearance here is no problem. The dialect alternative /boob/ displays metathesis of the vowels between the two morphemes in this word, which would seem to indicate that it, synchronically, is not regarded as a compound.

The last example, /sέmb∊-té/ or /sέmp∊-tén/, obviously contains the word / té (n) time and so is also (synchronically?) a compound.

Thus we are left with one real exception, the third, out of some 1650 entries in Donicie and Voorhoeve (1963).

A second aspect of vowel harmony in Saramaccan is the restriction that, although the mid-vowels /∊/ and /ɔ/ may be preceded in the same morpheme by /a/, they may not be followed by it. We have found seven apparent exceptions to this rule:

1	bɔngɔmá	a kind of vegetable
2	bɔngɔma	threshold bar
3	mɔngɔpita	gallows
4	ndɔkimá	black magician
5	sɔlánga	so long as
6	ɔndɔfa	however
7	mɔfína	miserable

The first of these is apparently a compound of /bɔngɔ/ park with a nominalizing suffix /ma ∼ má/ (Donicie and Voorhoeve, 1963). The second and fourth are possibly fossil compounds involving the same nominalizing suffix whose first elements no longer occur independently. The third word, which also has an older form in /b-/ (op. cit.) could involve the same root as the first or second words. The fifth word is a patent compound both of whose constituent elements, /sέ/ and /lánga/, occur in present-day Saramaccan. The sixth word plainly contains /fá/ manner (compare also /ún-fá/ how). The last exception I cannot explain. It may be in fact that the restriction is less general - applying only to cases where midvowels directly precede low vowels. In that case the third, fourth and last exceptions disappear.

We can see how this constraint against the occurrence of /a/ after low-mid vowels has operated if we examine a class of words of English origin. These are words ending in English in orthographic-er. ([ə(r)]). This is normally represented in Saramaccan by /-a/. Compare:

bitter	bíta
finger	fínga
hammer	háma
water	wáta

However, if a word of this class has a low-mid vowel in its first syllable in Saramaccan we do not get final /-a/. Thus:

better	bέt∊
letter	lέt∊
remember	mέmb∊

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A more modern example which might indicate that this restriction still has some force is /mɔt∊/ outboard motor.

Since Sranan, the most important Creole language of Surinam, shows no distinction between high-mid vowels /e/ and /o/ and low-mid vowels /∊/ and /ɔ/, it is not possible to directly determine whether it once had vowel harmony too. However, if we examine the words deriving from English words in -er, we can see that this language must also have had vowel harmony once, since the restriction on low-mid vowels being followed by /a/ has left clear reflection of its presence.

	English	Saramaccan	Sranan
(i)	master	mása	másra
	finger	fínga	fínga
	water	wáta	wátra
(ii)	remember	mémbɛ	mémre
	pepper	pɛpɛ	pépre
Cf.also	bottle	báta	bátra
as against	kettle	kétɛ	kétre

Thus where Saramaccan has / ɛ / in the second syllable, Sranan has /e/ despite the fact that words of the pattern /CeCa/, which we would expect here, are perfectly possible in Sranan. The situation is only explicable if we assume that Sranan also originally had low-mid vowels where Saramaccan now bas them.

We have tried to show in this paper that Saramaccan has cross-height vowel harmony. We hae also tried to demonstrate the existence ofa constraint in the vowel harmony system against /a/ after low-mid vowels. Further we have tried to show that a similar vowel harmony system was once present in the neighbouring Sranan language. By this demonstration we have shown up the presence of yet another African feature in the phonological systems of Creole languages.

What can we conclude from the presence of these African features? The Creole languages of Surinam, removed as they were from English influence for nearly three hundred years, can be expected to show archaic features which might have disappeared in other English-based Creoles due to the continued standardizing influence of English. This is especially true of Saramaccan, whose speakers are the descendants of slaves who escaped in the earliest days of the settlement in Surinam and thus had been free from large scale influence from any European language for a long period. Thus African features which appear in these languages but not in other English-based Creoles can reasonably be assumed to have been present at an earlier stage. With the discovery of still more African influences on the Surinam Creole languages we must change our ideas on what the other English-based Creole languages were like at an early period.

Bibliography

Donicie A. en J. Voorhoeve, 1963. De Saramakaanse Woordenschat, Amsterdam.

Hall R., 1966. Pidgin and Creole Languages, Ithaca, N.Y.

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Huttar G.L., 1972. ‘A Comparative Word List for Djuka’. In: Languages of the Guianas, J.E. Grimes, ed., Norman, Okla.

Ladefoged P., 1964. A Phonetic Study of West African Languages, Cambridge.

Rountree S.C., 1972. ‘The Phonological Structure of Stems in Saramaccan’. In: Languages of the Guianas, J.E. Grimes, ed., Norman, Okla.

Spa J.J., 1973. Traits et Tons en Enya: Phonologie Générative d'une Langue Bantoue, MRAC-AA 20, Tervuren.

Stewart J.M., 1971. ‘Niger-Congo, Kwa’. In: Current Trends in Linguistics 7, Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Hague.

Turner L.D., 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, Chicago.

Voorhoeve J., 1959. ‘An Orthography for Saramaccan’. Word 15, pp. 436-45.