Suriname folk-lore
(1936)–Melville J. Herskovits, Frances S. Herskovits– Auteursrecht onbekend
[pagina 116]
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2. orthographyIn taking down the taki-taki text, we have employed a phonetic orthography rather than the traditional Dutch method of writing this speech. In the light of the body of literature dealing with taki-taki, and of the texts given in the language, it may be well to indicate our reasons for doing this. In considering the manner in which taki-taki is usually written, it is soon seen that the letters of the European alphabet come to have that standardised significance characteristic of the letters of any written language, and hence, for the purposes of scientific analysis, such rendition makes for loss of accuracy. To cite but one example, there is no symbol in European orthography which represents the nasalisation that is so outstanding a characteristic of Suriname speech. But nasalisation is also an outstanding characteristic of African speech, and if correspondences with African languages are to be traced, this cannot be neglected. In order, therefore, to secure a reproduction of taki-taki which might be most adaptable for a study of African relationships, we employed a phonetic system of notation, and we found that, having done this, we were also in a position to analyze the variations in the speech of a given individual, as, man or mą for ‘man’, of uma or umą for ‘woman’, of wą, wan, or wąn, for the numeral ‘one’. To make our system clear to those accustomed to taki-taki written with Dutch spelling, we give here an excerpt from Van Cappelle's collection of tales, with an interlinear rendering of our own notation of the words, and a word-for-word translation.Ga naar voetnoot1
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 117]
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|