8 The study of Negerhollands
In some sense the study of Negerhollands starts in the 18th century, with the publication of Magens (1770), the first grammar written of any creole language, and perhaps the most important work about Negerhollands. In the same period C.G.A. Oldendorp, a German, printed a grammatical sketch of the language in his voluminous book ‘History of the Moravian Brethren in the Virgin Islands’ from 1777, which could have been written beforehand. Just after 1802 another grammar was written by the Moravian missionaries, but this one has never been published.
In the 19th century, various scholars devoted some attention to the language: the Danish linguist R.K. Rask contrasted Greenland Inuit, a morphologically very complex language, with the morphologically extremely simple Negerhollands (± 1810). He argued against J.C. Adelung's claim (1809) to the effect that Negerhollands was nothing but corrupted Dutch. The American librarian and scholar Van Name compared Negerhollands with Papiamentu, Trinidad French Creole, and Sranan (1869-70) and noted many common features. Next is the study mainly based on written texts by the Danish doctor E. Pontoppidan in 1881. In 1905 the Dutch Hellenist and creolist avant la lettre D.C. Hesseling wrote his monumental Het Negerhollands, which is a comprehensive historical study. In this work material from the Herrnhut archive is used next to Danish printed material, which Hesseling prefers for its greater naturalness. The Austrian Romance scholar Hugo Schuchardt corresponded with a remote relative of the aforementioned J.M. Magens, namely A. Magens, who wrote to him in Negerhollands in 1883 and supplied a number of proverbs. Schuchardt (1914) was thus able to comment on Pontoppidan (1881) and Hesseling (1905).
In 1926 de Josselin de Jong published the stories in Negerhollands collected in 1922/3, and more than a decade later in 1936 F.G. Nelson collected words and short texts on St. Thomas, which remained unpublished but appear here in print for the first time, revised in 1993/4 by Nelson himself.
During the last two decades, the linguists A.V. Adams Graves, R. Sabino and G.A. Sprauve have published their research on the spoken language of the last native speakers. Graves worked with about five informants. In the period 1980-1987 many recordings were made by Sprauve and by Sabino of the last fluent speaker of Negerhollands, Mrs Alice Stevens.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, P. Stein has been publishing articles on the material he discovered in 1982 in the Unitäts Archiv in Herrnhut. In about the same period, i.e. 1983-1987, T. Stolz published on Negerhollands, mainly on the basis of the de Josselin de long materials. Finally, since the mid-1980s H. den Besten, P. Muysken, C. van Rossem and H. van der Voort have been working on Negerhollands and the Negerhollands materials. A first product of their Negerhollands database project (in cooperation with P. Stein) appears in the present book.
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