Die Creol taal

250 years of Negerhollands texts

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Preface

The present book is an anthology of texts in Negerhollands, the now extinct creole language of the current US Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix) which must have been spoken for at least 250 years. In spite of the fact that the Virgin Islands (originally so named by Columbus) have been a Danish protectorate for over two centuries, their main inhabitants at the time of emergence of the Negerhollands language were Dutch plantation owners and their slaves, who were originally from West Africa. This explains why the largest part of the Negerhollands lexicon is of Dutch origin, and why in other components the language displays African traits, and characteristics that are similar to those of many other creole languages in the Caribbean.

The Dutch-based creole language of the US Virgin Islands is referred to by several names. In The Netherlands it usually goes by the name of Negerhollands (‘Negro-hollandic’), as originally christened by van den Bergh in 1840, analogous to, for instance, Neger-Engels (‘Negro-English’) and Neger-Frans (‘Negro-French’), and used in the important publications of Hesseling and de Josselin de Jong. In works written in English, Creole Dutch or Virgin Islands Dutch Creole can also be found. As noted in de Josselin de Jong's publications, the native Virgin Islanders call the language die how Creol (Negerhollands for ‘the old Creole’), which means: the language of former days, which is not spoken any more. When in 1736 Negerhollands was first called Carriolse (‘Creole’) (see e.g. Stein 1982a), it became the first language to be called a creole language. Later on in the 18th century, Danish and German missionaries called it die Creol spraak or die Creol taal (both Negerhollands for ‘the Creole language’). Since the latter was the first one mentioned in the more significant translations, we have chosen it to be the main title of our book. Because of the association of this book with its predecessors, Hesseling's Het Negerhollandsch der Deense Antillen and de Josselin de Jong's Het Huidige Negerhollandsch, and because this name is already in use in the field of Creole linguistics, we have used the name Negerhollands for the language which is the subject of this publication.

This anthology consists of a wide variety of texts from different periods in history. It grew originally out of a project to create a computerized databank of 18th-century manuscripts in Negerhollands. These manuscripts were produced by the Moravian mission and recently rediscovered in the Moravian archives in Herrnhut by Peter Stein. The project, which was carried out by the editors of this book, extended over more than two years, from September 1991 to December 1993, during which some 2000 manuscript pages and 500 printed pages were entered into the computer, in a diplomatic edition that stayed as close to the originals as possible. As these manuscripts are in a state of decay and will probably share the sad fate of innumerable documents in innumerable archives around the world, they have been put on microfilm. Photocopies made from these films formed the material that the editors used in the transcription. The reasons for building this digital database of Negerhollands are two-fold: first, the manuscripts themselves deserve preservation from total obliteration; secondly, the unique linguistic material that they contain has to be made accessible for research into

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creole languages. Preservation in a digital form has several advantages, the main one of which is that it makes possible automated search procedures. The outcome of the whole project also has its disadvantages, however. One important one is that a publication in a digital format is not as accessible to the wider public as a book can be. Furthermore, the database consists almost exclusively of bare 18th-century Negerhollands texts, which may be difficult to work with even for creole language specialists. These were the main reasons for the present annotated publication of a selection of these manuscripts in book format.

Inspired by Creole Drum, the anthology of Surinamese Creole literature edited by Jan Voorhoeve and Ursy Lichtveld (1975) and now a collectors' item, we wished to place the Moravian texts in a wider linguistic and historical context. This resulted in a collection of material containing a great variety of texts from different historical phases. This volume can also be seen as a tribute to Dirk Christiaan Hesseling who in 1905 published the first anthology of Negerhollands texts, based on what was available at the time.

This work consists of three parts: the introduction, the texts and the bibliography. In the introduction, edited by Pieter Muysken, Negerhollands and the interest in this language will be dealt with. The main subjects contain important historical and linguistic information like the genesis of the language, the 18th-century variety of Negerhollands and variation within the Negerhollands material.

The main part of this publication consists of texts. The texts presented here cover nearly the whole period of existence of Negerhollands, and we hope that their chronological order reflects the historical development of the language itself. This anthology furthermore contains texts of as many different types as possible, with which we hope to have captured also the full range of actual stylistic and sociolinguistic varieties of the former Negerhollands language. Next to passages from manuscripts, we have also included sections from rare printed sources. At the end of the second part of this anthology, we present some field notes Frank Nelson made in the 1930s and some transcriptions of recordings Gilbert A. Sprauve and Robin Sabino made of stories told by the last native speaker of Negerhollands, Mrs. Alice Stevens.

The third part of this book is the annotated bibliography of manuscripts and printed publications in and about Negerhollands. It is partly based on the bibliography Peter Stein published in Amsterdam Creole Studies (1986) and is an attempt to present as comprehensive a list as possible of publications and documents pertaining to the Negerhollands language.

In the interpretation of the Negerhollands material in all its aspects, for example the etymology of the lexicon, phonological properties, historical development, etc., we have drawn extensively upon the expertise of Hans den Besten, as becomes apparent from the footnotes. Peter Stein, who is without a doubt the one who knows the most about the Negerhollands letters, selected some of them for this anthology and wrote the introductions in the pertinent section.

All Negerhollands material that does not represent a literal translation of parts of the Bible is provided with an English translation at the end of each subsection. We regret that this sometimes necessitates leafing back and forth a bit, but it turned out to be unavoidable. The difficult work of rendering of the Negerhollands texts and the

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glosses into free translations was done by Pieter Muysken. All texts are furthermore accompanied by literal morpheme-by-morpheme translations in English, placed directly under the corresponding Negerhollands morphemes.

Many readers will ask why the Negerhollands language is not presented in Dutch, since this is its lexifier language which at the same time would allow us to leave many things untranslated. On the other hand one could think of German or Danish because those were the native languages of the people responsible for the documentation of the language, who also played an important role in the history of the Islands and their inhabitants. However, there are several reasons for presenting the Negerhollands language through the medium of English.

In the first place, apart from the fact that a bare presentation of the texts would not contribute to their analysis in a consistent manner, we have personally experienced that leaving the Negerhollands untranslated would require too much of even the Dutch non-specialist. Secondly, few Dutch, or Danish, or German speakers understand the other two languages sufficiently well, while many know English. Furthermore, not many English-speaking creole linguists are familiar enough with Dutch to be able to interpret the Negerhollands material easily without a translation. Yet the most important reason for choosing English as the ‘meta-language’ is that Negerhollands is primarily part, of the cultural heritage of the Virgin Islands. The accessibility of the published Negerhollands material should therefore in the first place concern the inhabitants of the Virgin Islands, who display a great interest in their heritage and who mainly speak English Creole and English. Negerhollands being an extinct language, the Virgin Islanders deserve access to it in the language best known to them, which is English.

The original database project of 18th-century Negerhollands manuscripts was financed by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Scientific Research (NWO, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) and the P.J. Meertens-Institute for Dialectology, Folklore/European Ethnology and Onomastics (P.J. Meertens Instituut voor Dialectologie, Volkskunde en Naamkunde), which is an institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen). The project was carried out at the Institute for General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Hans den Besten (University of Amsterdam), Pieter Muysken (University of Amsterdam) and Peter Stein (University of Regensburg).

It will be clear that the supervisors of the original project also played an essential role in the realization of the present anthology.

For the acquisition of several sources of Negerhollands texts, we were additionally helped by Professors Frank Nelson, Robin Sabino and Gilbert A. Sprauve, who generously contributed their field notes to this anthology, and by Frau Pastorin Baldauf from the Archiv der Brüder-Unität in Herrnhut and Paul Olsen of the Rigsarkiv in Copenhagen, who pointed out the whereabouts of several documents to us and let us work in their archives. Furthermore, providing the Negerhollands texts with morphemic glosses was greatly facilitated by the interlinear text analysis programme ‘Shoebox’ developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. For realignment of the

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glosses after manipulation of character size we could turn to the software developed by Rolandt Tweehuysen of the Institute for General Linguistics in Amsterdam.

Most of the illustrations were provided by the Public Record Office of Utrecht and the University Library of Amsterdam. We are grateful for the help we had in finding and photographing the originals. The University Library of Amsterdam supported the edition of this anthology by waiving the usual compensation for reproduction rights.

Finally, the publication of this book also became possible through partial financial support from NWO, and technical assistance from the Institute for the Functional Study of Language and Language Use (IFOTT). We gratefully acknowledge the help of these people and institutions, and take the responsibility for all errors which may remain.

Amsterdam, 14 November 1995

The editors,

Cefas van Rossem

Hein van der Voort