Die Creol taal
(1996)–Cefas van Rossem, Hein van der Voort–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd250 years of Negerhollands texts
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4 Negerhollands: a brief sketchWithout pretending to be either complete or original we shall now illustrate a few features of Negerhollands, in part through the analysis of a few Negerhollands proverbs from Magens' grammar of 1770. Magens was a Danish citizen born on St. Thomas. His 80 page booklet is written in Danish and is the first ever printed grammar of a creole language. It follows the model of Latin grammar, and it gives a large number of sentence examples, fragments of everyday speech, and proverbs, e.g.:
‘A pumpkin cannot give birth to a calabash.’ Dutch: Een pompoen kan geen kalebas voortbrengen.
Example (1) demonstrates the fixed Subject - Negation - Verbal Complex - Complement word order of Negerhollands. It contrasts with that of Dutch, where the auxiliary kan occupies the second position, and the main verb voortbrengen occurs at the end of the sentences, preceded by the object. There is also a difference with respect to the position of the negation. Generically used nouns, common in proverbs, do not get an article. Notice also the occurrence of both Spanish or Portuguese (together labeled as Ibero-Romance) elements: parie ‘give birth to’ (< parir), and Dutch ones: kan ‘can’. The form no ‘not’ can be both English and Spanish, but the latter is more probable.
‘He gets what he deserves.’
Sentence (2) contains the all-purpose locative preposition na (probably <Port. na < em a ‘in the (fem.)’; cf. also Du. naar ‘to’, older form na). There is an example of fronting for the purpose of focus or stress: In a construction with da, sut is placed early in the secondary clause and becomes emphasized (da sut). The particle ha (<Du. had ‘had’ or a dialectal form of the infinitive of the verb ‘have’) is used to mark tense. Notice that hem, the stressed non-subject form of the pronoun in Dutch, is used for the subject, the direct and the indirect object in Negerhollands. Some of the particles used to mark tense, mood and aspect in Negerhollands derive from verbs. As a result there is a small class of frequently used homophonous verbs and particles. lo (assumed to derive from Dutch loop ‘walk’) belongs to this class, and it is not always clear in what capacity it is used. A 20th-century example in which it occurs as a main verb, a verb which introduces a purpose clause, and a progressive aspect marker, in that order, is: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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‘He has to go home to do what is there waiting for him.’
Consider now another 18th-century proverb:
‘(S)he loves her/his children.’
In (4) we encounter an example of the invariant possessive pronoun si (Negerhollands has no grammatical gender) (<Du. masc. SG. zijn) and of the (pidgin-like) periphrastic adverb alteveel ‘all too much’ as a degree marker. Hesseling (1933) argues that the use of wil (<Du. willen ‘want’) for ‘love’ also betrays Papiamentu influence, since in Ibero-Romance querer means both ‘love’ and ‘want’.
‘I can't help seeing it.’
Example (5) is given here to illustrate two phonological features: the replacement of Dutch /ö:/ (in Du. deur [dö:r] ‘door’), a marked sound and therefore difficult to learn, by /e:/ in deer and the occurrence of, it appears, an extra vowel in hogo, which yields an (unmarked, i.e. easy to learn and to pronounce) CVCV-patternGa naar voetnoot5. Such vowels are termed epithetic. Later in this introduction we will return to the issue of whether, and to what extent, Negerhollands has epithetic vowels.
‘They do with him/her as they please.’
Example (6) shows that the particle yt ‘out’ can be used as a verb, meaning ‘go out’, unlike Dutch. This type of reinterpretation from a particle to a verb is typical of the relation between a creole language and its lexifier. It is furthermore preceded by the perfective aspect marker ka (<Port./Spa. acabar ‘finish’), an element which occurs in many creole languages in one form or other. The article (when present) is invariant die ‘that’. It is not unusual in creole languages and, for that matter, in other language families for the article to be derived from the demonstrative pronoun. Notice that in the second clause there is no inversion of subject and verb, as in Dutch (where we would have had springt het kleine kind ‘jumps the little child’; in this respect the Subject-Verb-Complement order of Negerhollands is very strict. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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‘Nobody takes care of widows and orphans.’
Here we notice a typical creole possessive construction with both the possessor Dootman preposed to the noun and the resumptive third person possessive sie. While in an earlier example we had deer ‘door’ from Du. deur, here we have the more usual form door (20th century do:/do:r) possibly derived from English, or from the 17th century Du. variant form door. In both of the previous examples there is a particle marking duration or habitual, le, possibly from Dutch leggen ‘lay’. Many descriptions of Negerhollands mention a shift in the tense/mood/aspect system in the course of time, but concentrate only on a change in the lexical items involved. An example is the gradual replacement of the durative marker le by lo, which was accomplished at the beginning of the 19th century. Because of the association of lo with its original verbal meaning ‘go’ (<Du. loop ‘walk’), this element is ambiguously used as a progressive marker and a (near?) future marker, thus entering in competition with the older, well established future marker sa(l). The following 20th-century example clearly indicates that lo must have different functions:
‘I will accompany you.’
Another proverb:
‘I pity you to the point of crying for you, of wiping my eyes with a stone.’
In sentence (9) it is striking that the first person pronoun expressing the subject here, mie, is derived from Du. mij ‘me’, a non-subject form; it is furthermore also used possessively. The preposition or conjunction tee may well derive from Port. até ‘until’, and we see that the verbs jammer and kries can be used transitively (with a human object in this case), which they cannot in the language from which they are derived, namely Dutch. Many originally Du. verbs thus have acquired other syntactic properties. A remarkable feature is also the serial verb construction neem ... veeg ... ‘take ... wipe ...’, in which the object of the verb neem is marked as an instrument. Many researchers connect these constructions with West-African languages. Various authors have tried to argue against the existence of serial verb constructions in Negerhollands. Serial verb constructions do not seem to be used very often in earlier Negerhollands, but we did encounter some instances of it, for example in (10): | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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‘They went to bed at ten o'clock.’
In one reading of this example, ‘walking’ and ‘sleeping’ are to be regarded as separate actions whose sequence and consecutiveness is iconically represented by juxtaposition of the verbs (‘walk and then sleep’). In the more probable serial reading, however, walking has an inchoative meaning, and the construction indicates what in non-serializing languages would be expressed through subordination by means of complementizers and the like (‘start to sleep’). In example (11), different subjects are in play:
‘He called one of his servants to him(self).’
Although we have not found abundant evidence so far for verb serialization in earlier sources, later sources such as de Josselin de Jong's texts (1926), in (12) and (13), and recent recordings (cf. Sabino, forthcoming) do abound with serial constructions:
‘You must go where the lions are (and) cut one of his little toes (and) bring it for me.’
‘He told his master that the king was coming to see him.’
In fact, when looking at these 20th century sources of Negerhollands, they give a much more Creole-like impression than the 18th-century sources do (although of course the fact that the 18th-century sources use Dutch orthography is very deceptive). We can at least distinguish ‘complementizer’ serial verbs roep ... kom in (11), aspectual loop ... slaep in (10), directional brin ... ko in (12), and benefactive ko ... gi in (12) serial verbs. Before we finish on the subject of serial verbs, however, we would like to point out that in the 18th century their existence was noticed by Oldendorp. In his manuscript dictionary of 1767-8 (published in Stein forthcoming b), he comments under the entry breng, bring ‘to bring’: ‘In general kom is added to it: Mi breng die kom “I bring it” [lit.: I bring DET come]. bring kom mi die hieso “bring it here to me” [lit.: bring come with DET here].’ [our translation]. Notice, by the way, that bring could also be used without kom, as in (14): | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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‘The king asked where is that thing that he has brought.’
The early writers of Negerhollands were European missionaries, who understood the sentences containing serial verbs, but they did not produce them because they may not have been aware of their peculiarity to creole languages. They possibly even avoided using them because they wanted to follow the European model, which lacks serial verb constructions. This was also the case in the letters written by slaves who were taught by the missionaries to write in Dutch. The rarity of occurrence of serial verbs in our 18th-century Negerhollands material may thus in the first place be due to the missionary factor. A proverb illustrating the use of ka again is:
‘Your enemies will always find something to take revenge.’
Example (15) shows how an etymologically non-verbal element, qwaet ‘angry’, can be used as a predicate ‘become angry’, marked by the verbal particle ka. Literally it says ‘have gotten angry’. A similar example occurred with yt ‘out’ in (6) above. Furthermore, we see the Papiamentu word makut ‘bucket’, and the use of for to form infinitival complements. The forms om and te, characteristic of Dutch non-finite complement clauses, do not occur, and neither does English to. An element such as fu in many creoles is attested to have this function (see Bakker 1987). In example (16) the use of a conjunction meaning ‘for’ can be observed marking infinitive and purposive sentences in the same way:
‘Therefore I have come to baptize with water.’
Another proverb illustrates the copular verb (bin), which has been studied in detail by Sabino(1988):
‘I must suffer for my poverty.’
The area of copula constructions also relates to other parts of the grammar, such as topicalization (a topicalized constituent is introduced by a copula), tense (early Negerhollands had a past and a non-past form of the copula), and the issue of the distinction between verbs and adjectives. This distinction appears to be blurred in many creole languages which do not distinguish overtly between Mary work and Mary tall. The latter issue is all the more pertinent since in many West African languages which | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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may have played a role in the formation of creoles such as Negerhollands, verbs and adjectives belong to the same class. Negerhollands differs, however, from many of the Caribbean creoles (like Berbice Dutch Creole) in that it requires a copular verb (‘to be’) to introduce adjectives in predicative position:
‘It is nice.’
‘Everything ... is nice.’
As mentioned before, Negerhollands follows the ‘creole’ pattern for the ordering of constituents, viz. SVO (Subject-Verb-Object). Surface word order may differ as a result of several processes, of which predicate cleft (verb doubling) is one. Fronted elements in focus constructions are usually introduced by the copula da or dat in Negerhollands, and this seems to be obligatory when the verb is fronted.
‘I really have slept.’ or ‘It is sleeping that I did (sleep).’
Note that none of the variant forms of the copula, i.e. neither the ‘present tense’ form bi(n)/mi nor the ‘infinitival’ form we:s, can be used to introduce fronted elements, although using a copula-like form in such a position is not unusual among Caribbean creoles. The optionality of plural marking is illustrated in the proverb in (20):
‘No reason to get in each other's way.’
Important here is that two apparently plural nouns appear without overt plural marking, one preceded by a numeral and one used as a substance noun. It is possible to mark plurals in Negerhollands through the use of the third person plural pronoun sender (sinu in 20th century NH):
However, the plural is used in much more limited contexts than in Dutch: mostly with animates, and not after an explicit quantifying expression such as a numeral. It is important to note that in many 18th-century texts Dutch morphological plurals occur as well. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The apparent resemblances with Dutch, which are emphasized by the spelling used in the proverbs, do not imply that Negerhollands is a sort of Dutch. Even a superficial glance brings to light a number of differences. What is needed is a systematic study of this 18th-century distant cousin of the Dutch dialects from Holland and Zealand, with special attention being paid to the differences that we find between different kinds of Negerhollands and the embedding of the language in the context of a slave society (cf. van Rossem Forthcoming a). |
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