Die Creol taal
(1996)–Cefas van Rossem, Hein van der Voort–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd250 years of Negerhollands texts
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6 The further development of the languagePerhaps the most interesting part of Creole languages is their genesis. Unfortunately, this often took place in the 17th century for the Atlantic Creoles, so there is no opportunity to consult recordings or informants, and the use of written material is limited to a small number of texts. Negerhollands is, thanks to the activities of 18th-century missionaries, an exception to this. The corpus the missionaries have left for us consists of a bulk of texts in which the oldest stage can be approached closer than is possible for 3. Portrait of Count von Zinzendorf
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other Creole languages. The manuscripts are not always word by word translations of existing religious texts. Texts which are free compositions (in both the Danish and the Moravian tradition) show that the language is used in a quite natural way. These early sources may be especially helpful in the demystification of the early stages of creolization. We think that the material, in the near future accessible by computer, is very interesting for creolists as well as for linguists with interest in other subjects, like historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and Dutch dialectology. Most of our manuscripts have a religious background and are mostly written or translated by missionaries, particularly the Moravians. From 1765 until 1834 books were printed in Negerhollands. The collection includes various kinds of religious texts, from hymnbooks to catechisms, but also linguistic works. The writers and publishers were usually missionaries originating from Denmark or Germany. | |||||||||
6.1 The Moravian mission in the Virgin IslandsThe mission of the Moravian Brethren on the Virgin Islands started in 1732 and began to be successful in 1736. The Moravian Brethren originate from the Protestant movement of the Husites (followers of the reformer Jan Hus who was burnt at the Concilium in Konstanz in 1415). They were persecuted, but the movement never ceased completely. In 1722 a group of refugees came to Upper Lusatia, near the present-day borders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, where they founded the town of Herrnhut. Count Zinzendorf, the owner of the land, offered them this opportunity; he then became the first leader of the young community. Herrnhut became and still is the center of the Moravian Brethren; they are therefore also called Herrnhuters or Herrnhuter (or Evangelische) Brüdergemeine (in Dutch Hernhutters and Evangelische Broedergemeente). They started their worldwide missionary work in 1732 on the Danish Virgin Islands; this work covers a wide range of countries, from Greenland to South Africa, from Surinam to the Himalayas (see Beck 1981). Several aspects of their missionary work have a great linguistic interest:
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The result of all this is that we have a large documentation of the early times of the Moravian mission, descriptions of the local languages and documents about their use. We also have good and valuable information of daily life and problems. For Negerhollands (or carriols, cariolisch, criolisch, creolisch, as they called the language in the first decades of their activities on the Virgin Islands), all of this this means that we have a good documentation in and about that language (cf. Stein 1986b). The documentation of Negerhollands starts with Friedrich Martin's (the leading missionary of the beginning mission) diary notice from 8 November 1736, i.e. only eight months after his arrival on the islands: ‘Br. Cars[tens] war fleissig wolt das neije testament ins carriolse bringen: es ist aber sehr schwer: den sie besteht in all zu vieler Sprachen.’ This passage is intriguing for different reasons. First, of course, the mentioning of the creole (Negerhollands). This was the first time that the word creole is used anywhere for the language. Second, the suggestion is made that the creole was still very heterogeneons. The first letters written by slaves date from the year 1737; they are still written in Dutch, but with more or less strong creole interference. At the beginning of the year 1739 (30 January to 15 February), Count Zinzendorf visited St. Thomas to see the missionaries and their work. On his departure he addressed a letter to the slave community. This letter was written in creole, the first text we have in Negerhollands. We may assume that Zinzendorf did not write the letter in Negerhollands himself; it probabaly was a white settler, Carstens, in whose house Zinzendorf was staying on St. Thomas, who translated the text into Negerhollands. On his way back, Zinzendorf took with him two letters addressed to the Danish king and the Danish queen. The first was written by some male and female slaves, the second by a slave woman in the name of the female slaves; it is written in the African language of that womanGa naar voetnoot11 and translated into Negerhollands. This was the first time that a creole language was used in diplomatic letters for political purposes. The three letters (including Zinzendorf's) were printed only three years later, in 1742 (Zinzendorf 1742). | |||||||||
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Zinzendorf had provided the example, and the slave community followed him: they began to write letters, first to their ‘brethren and sisters’ in Europe, later on also to the Amerindian community in Pennsylvania. In the Unitäts-Archiv at Herrnhut, around 150 such letters written between 1737 and 1768 have been conserved. A large part of this collection is written in Negerhollands, but in many of the early letters a variety of Dutch with lots of creole elements is used. An annotated edition of these unique documents is now being prepared by Peter Stein and Hartmut Beck. Some of them can be found in section II, 1.2 of the present volume. They may prove to be of great interest in research on the first stages of the emergence of Negerhollands. Stein (forthcoming b) notes for example that the particles ka: ‘perfective aspect’ and le ‘progressive aspect’ were lacking in the slave letters from between 1740 and 1750. This could point to a process of gradual creolization, corresponding to the hypothesis of Arends (1989) and Carden and Stewart (1988). However, it could also reflect the development of a written tradition for Negerhollands as a language separate from Dutch. The early authors in Negerhollands did not know how to interpret Negerhollands particles. Since 1754, handwritten liturgical texts (see e.g. Stein 1982b), sermons and other religious documents in Negerhollands have been preserved. The history of printed Negerhollands starts in 1765 with a hymn-and-prayers booklet by the Moravian Brethren. The last Moravian work in the language, the Evangelienharmonie, was printed in 1833 in New York. The most important of the printed texts was the translation of the New Testament (1802). Besides the religious texts (catechisms, hymns, etc.), there are also a few ABC Boekjes. For a complete bibliography see section III and Stein (1986b). Not all translated texts were also printed. Between 1779 and 1785 the translation of large liturgical texts was carried out by the German missionary Johann Böhner, mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. He translated for instance the Old Testament, a compilation of the Gospel (Evangelienharmonie)Ga naar voetnoot12, and the theoretical foundation of the Moravian Brethren's community, Spangenberg's Idea Fidei Fratrum, only one year after its publication in Germany in 1779. In 1795 different manuscripts of the EvangelienharmonieGa naar voetnoot13 and sermons, a catechism and an adaptation of the history of creation were produced, followed shortly after 1802 by a grammar of Negerhollands. It is unknown who exactly translated the Negerhollands New Testament printed in 1802. This Testament and the 1833 edition of the Evangelienharmonie may have been based on a translation by Böhner. In so far as we have more than one manuscript and/or printed version of a specific text, it is necessary to make all the variants available because of their potential linguistic interest. Variation between different editions can tell us something about variation in the spoken language. In 1767, 35 years after the beginning of the mission, Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp was charged with writing a history of the mission on the Danish Virgin Islands. He spent about 18 months on the islands, which resulted, ten years later, in a | |||||||||
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manuscript of more than 3000 pages. It was much more than a history of the mission; it was a compendium of all that was known about the Antillean slave societies, with special emphasis on the Moravian missionaries' activities and the Danish Virgin Islands. In 1777 a shortened version of still more than 1000 pages was published by Bossart (Oldendorp 1777, English translation by Highfield & Barac in 1987). A critical edition of the complete manuscripts is now in progress at the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde at Dresden. The manuscript is also of great linguistic interest, because Oldendorps presents a 60-page critical description of Negerhollands (‘criolisch’) and its use by the missionaries. Regretfully, this part was shortened to 11 pages in the 1777 edition. Oldendorp also discusses the African languages he encountered on the Islands. Oldendorp's visit to the Virgin Islands furthermore resulted in a large manuscript for a dictionary (1770). His Deutsch-criolisches Wörterbuch is a German-Negerhollands dictionary with more than 3400 entries and many examples and critical comments. An edition of the dictionary is in preparation by Peter Stein, and the grammatical section of the mission history will be published by Stein and Eroms. In the midst of the 19th century Negerhollands became increasingly replaced by English. This shift has also been documented in the Moravian materials: Heinrich Wied prepared a manuscript for a creole catechism and hymn book in 1842/43. When he became aware of the shift, he halted, and explained: ‘In den 40er Jahren des 19. Jahrh. verschwand auf den Westindischen Inseln die kreolische Sprache und wurde durch die englische verdrängt (In the 40s of the 19th century, the Creole language disappeared from the West Indian Islands, and became replaced by English)’.Ga naar voetnoot14 Then he went on with English hymns in 1847. | |||||||||
6.2 The Lutheran (Danish) mission in the Virgin IslandsAlready since the late 17th century, ministers of the Danish Lutheran State Church were active on the Virgin Islands, and although slaves were also baptized (at least since 1710, as attested in Lose 1891:1), the ministers primarily served Danish subjects like civil servants and soldiers, in the Danish language. In 1756 a proper Danish Lutheran mission was established for the Virgin Islands, since in the previous year the three islands St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix had been bought from the Danish West-Indian-Guinean Company by King Frederik V and become a Danish state colony. The mission was founded with the objective of converting the slaves. From then on, as it had done in Greenland and like the Herrnhuter mission used to do, the Danish Lutheran mission set itself the task to convert the local population of the colony through the medium of the local language, here Negerhollands. In the preface to Magens' New Testament (1781), the General Church Inspection College writes: | |||||||||
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Die Missioneers ha leer die Creol Tael tit aster tit, en ha begin nu for onderwies na die volgens die Order van Collegium. Dat ha hab deese gesegend Werking, dat die Negers die tevoorn ha how die Leering voor een hard Woord, door die Swaerigheid van die vreemd Tael, na die sellie ha mut ontfang Onderwiesing, ha vind sooveel meer Smaek na die nu, als sellie ha kan vat en verstaen die voorgehowen Leer meer ligt en meer gaw in sender eigen Muder Tael. ‘The missionaries learned the Creole language time after time, and have now begun to teach in it, according to the directive of the Collegium. That has had this blessed effect that the Negroes, who previously found the doctrine tough, because of the difficulty of the strange language in which they had to receive education, have found it so much more agreeable now, as they could grasp and understand the presented doctrine more easily and quickly in their own mother tongue.’ It was furthermore considered desirable that the slaves learn to read, but not necessarily to write (Koch 1905:147). Few of the representatives of the Lutheran Church in the Virgin Islands knew or learned Negerhollands, however. The relation between the Danish mission and the homeland was a different one than that between the Moravians and Germany. There was a chronic lack of funds and housing in the Danish mission, and it was more dependent on the goodwill of the state. The state, however, mainly looked to its commercial interests and did not cooperate much. All in all, as appears from Lose (1891) and Koch (1905), the success of the Danish mission depended less on its adaptability and determination as an organization, than on the character and spirit of its individual agents. The Danish mission was mainly active in the towns, and those who served the plantation population had to travel on foot for miles and therefore had often only access to their parish for one hour a week. The Danish mission ended in 1799. After that year, no new Danish mission ministers were sent to the Virgin Islands anymore, and the black missionary community was incorporated into the general Danish Lutheran parish on the Virgin Islands. Even though the Danish mission was less effective than the Moravian one, their production of documents in Negerhollands was almost as high. The first ten Danish missionaries landed in July 1757 on St. Croix. Most of them died soon, but one who survived was Johan Christopher Kingo, who would be missionary and later minister for more than 25 years. According to Lose (1891), Kingo is said to have compiled a dictionary soon after arrival. Perhaps the anonymous Danish-Negerhollands Vestindisk Glossarium, counting 338 entries, is meant by this work (see van der Voort forthcoming). Kingo is also supposed to have translated Luther's Catechism in 1764, and the Gospel according to Matthew in 1765. Of these works, only the catechism may have been printed as Anonymous (1770). In 1770 Kingo did publish a language primer-cum-catechism. A second group of Danish missionaries had arrived in April 1766, including Erich Röring Wold. Wold nearly starved to death on St. Jan, and he was taken into the house of Stadthauptmand/Stadhoofdman ‘city prefect’ Jochum Melchior Magens as a tutor of his children. Magens was a St. Thomas-born Danish citizen, scholar in philology | |||||||||
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and Lutheran layman. He had already written the aforementioned Negerhollands Grammar (published in 1770, to be edited by Stein & Eroms) and had translated the New Testament before 1770, on which he worked with Wold and which circulated among the Danish missionaries (Lose 1891:23). Together with Wold he also worked on (supposedly) Kingo's catechism and on the translation of hymns which appeared in 1770. When Wold left, Magens refused to cooperate with the church any longer, but kept working on a translation of the Old Testament. In 1777 he was asked by the General Church Inspection College to make a revised edition of the New Testament. Instead he prepared a new translation of it, assisted by missionary Niels Olufsen Alling, who worked on St. Thomas. Alling had already translated 100 hymns, and in 1779 the hymns and the New Testament were in the hands of the College. With the help of Alling, who had returned to Denmark by then for health reasons, the New Testament was rapidly prepared for publication in 1781. The College also received the Old Testament manuscript that year, which, however, like the hymns, was never heard of again. Some works are mentioned in the introduction to the New Testament, to wit a dictionary, a primer-cum-catechism and songbook from 1770, and fragments of the Old Testament. It is certain that not all of them have ever been found. Later, other missionaries and clergy arrived in the Virgin Islands, and they produced a religious Creole reader (Lund 1798), a Bible for children (Oxholm 1822), Creole hymnals (Brandt 1799, Anonymous 1823, 1827, 1834) and a reader-cum-catechism (Praetorius 1827, 1834). It is likely that other manuscripts were also produced by others. For example, missionary August Krejdahl, who was a childhood friend of the linguist Rasmus Rask, had become a very proficient speaker of Negerhollands. Lose (1891:26) mentions the fact that he had also prepared an improved version of ‘the hymnal’. From documents in the Copenhagen State Archive it appears that another translation of the Old Testament was made by the missionary A.W. Volkersen. It is still unclear which works are re-editions or revisions of earlier ones, on which manuscripts they are based, and who the ultimate authors of these manuscripts were. The present whereabouts of several of these works is not known. Careful searching in archives and libraries in Denmark, and possibly Bible Society archives elsewhere, is needed. Thus, we also have a New Testament of Magens and other Danish Lutheran texts from the 18th and 19th century. For linguists and creolists, the competition between the Moravians and the Danish missionaries represents a very lucky circumstance. The existence of two different main sources reinforces the value of the 18th century texts, and at the same time it provides an interesting basis for comparison. | |||||||||
6.3 Interpreting the 18th-century materialsBefore we dismiss the variety of Negerhollands the manuscripts contain as artificial, it should be noted that the German Bible translators were very critical about the use of the ‘right’ language variety. This can be surmised from various letters written around 1770 in the Danish Antilles by German missionaries (amongst them C.G.A. Oldendorp), kept in Herrnhut. For example, the language used in the hymnbook of 1765 is called ‘far too Dutch-like’ by Oldendorp. Another point against the texts not | |||||||||
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being representative is the fact that the quite independent German and Danish sources generally confirm each other. A first set of problems in interpreting these materials is philological: establishing dates, authorship, intertextual relations, deciphering the often complicated handwriting in poorly preserved manuscripts. Many comments on this can be found in the entries in the bibliography. Then we face variation in the texts. This could be due to a number of things, among which:
Quantitative techniques derived from sociolinguistics and variation theory can help us study the types of variation (particularly morpho-syntactic) present in the texts, and to see whether it is possible to isolate the ‘deep’ creole features of the 18th century Negerhollands materials. Many of the documents, particularly from the Danish tradition, may tend to reflect a ‘high’ variety of the creole, contrary to Hesseling's (1905) interpretation, whereas the slaves may have spoken a ‘low’ or ‘deep’ variety. More on this variation in point 7 below. | |||||||||
6.4 Sociolinguistic development of the Virgin Islands society and the fate of NegerhollandsNot enough is known about the linguistic development of the Virgin Islands yet, which was quite complex. What follows is a rough sketch (Fig. 2).  Figure 2: The sociolinguistic situation in St. Thomas in four stages of the development of Negerhollands.
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The central fact is that Negerhollands only really flourished between 1730 and 1830. In 1833 the last text was printed in Negerhollands by the Moravian Brethren, and in 1834 the last printed texts in Negerhollands appeared in the Danish tradition. In 1848 slavery was abolished on the Virgin Islands, and this constituted, perhaps, the final death-blow to Negerhollands. From 1840 onwards Negerhollands was replaced more and more by English among the slaves, particularly when after emancipation the ex-slaves went to the towns. Because Negerhollands was a plantation language and only weakly represented in the towns, the language decayed. A telling testimony is the 1842-1847 manuscript by the German missionary Wied cited above: the first part is in Negerhollands, the second in English (‘Because no one uses Negerhollands anymore’). In 1839 the Moravians started to use English in their sermons and soon gave up Negerhollands in religious services. The Danes were first officially allowed to use English in religious services in 1844. A Danish letter from the West-Indian Government dated 1816, written in St. Croix and requesting more hymnals and prayer books from Denmark, stresses that they should be in Negerhollands, even though that language is rapidly going out of use. The reason given is that Negerhollands-speaking slaves are more obedient and more attached to their owners. Furthermore, keeping Negerhollands alive will keep out ideas circulating in English tracts and newspapers about ‘man's original equality, about the nullity of the colour difference, about the loathsomeness of slavery, etc.’ (Bentzon & Stabell 1816). In 1869 the American scholar Addison Van Name wrote about the extinction of Negerhollands. According to him, the Moravian missionaries had been preaching in Negerhollands until recently, and later on ‘broken English’ (Van Name 1869:160) was used more and more. In 1881 the Danish doctor Erik Pontoppidan published proverbs, a piece from the Bible and a short conversation. According to the latter, Negerhollands was still spoken on St. John and in the more remote corners of St. Thomas. He writes: Now Creole has almost totally disappeared on St. Croix, also in St. Thomas in town only sporadically elderly women are found who still are familiar with the language. Only in the more remote places on the countryside, like in the missions of the Moravian Brethren in ‘Neu Herrnhut’ and ‘Niesky’, and on the small, decayed and halfway neglected island of St. Jan it has maintained itself better. There it is mother- and daily tongue of the older generation, which speaks English poorly and with difficulty, but Low-Creole with fluency; the young on the other hand, have adopted English, and one can certainly say that the Creole | |||||||||
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language will very soon be a dead language; in one generation one will hardly find anyone who can still speak it. (Pontoppidan 1881:131, our translation).Ga naar voetnoot15 In 1904 St. Thomas' Moravian Bishop E.C. Greider wrote to Hesseling that the younger generation speaks a strongly anglicized creole, but the text sent along contains many Negerhollands elements. Hesseling cites the following from Greider's letter of 31 January 1904: The language in its purity is now spoken by a very few old people, principally those living in the country districts. The younger generation speak a mixed dialect that is called Creole, but it contains very many English words...Our people [Hesseling adds: so the more civilized Blacks who do not live on the almost deserted country side] speak a comparatively pure English and there is no patois like in the French or Dutch islands. In fact, if any one wished to study the language as it now is spoken, it would be best to do it immediately. (Hesseling 1905:33-34, our translation). As mentioned before, in 1917 the United States acquired the Virgin Islands from Denmark, yet on the Danish-Dutch Archaeological Expedition to the Antilles of 1922/23, the Dutch anthropologist/linguist/archeologist J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong was able to collect fairy tales and fables in NH, which were published in 1926. Many of those stories feature the famous African-Caribbean practical joker and hero spider Anansi. The narrators and informants were all born between 1841 and 1863, and thus at least 60 years old at that time, which was a reason for de Josselin de Jong to speak of ‘presently rapidly dying Negerhollands’. Yet the death of a language can take a very long time. In 1936 the anglicist and philologist F.G. Nelson still encountered speakers of Negerhollands, and made field notes, some of which are first published in the present book. Negerhollands continued to have a handful of speakers until the late 1970s. In 1987 the (as far as is known) last speaker, Mrs. Alice Stevens, passed away. In an interview in St. Thomas' The Daily News of Monday 15 July 1985 she said: ‘I never let anybody know that I could speak it,’ Alice Stephens says. ‘I decided I wasn't teaching it to no one - not my children, nor my husband. Even my teachers an schoolmates didn't know I could speak Dutch Creole.’ |
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