FAQ #70 - Ebonics - Black English - Creole

On Ebonics

A language is said to have a genetic relation to another language if it shares
deep structural similarities. This genetic relation is not based on shared
vocabulary. For example, although 90% of the English vocabulary is based on
Latin and French, it is not considered a Romance language. The Romance
languages are French, Portugese, Spanish, Romanian and Italian. English is
considera a Germanic langauage because of its shared .

If I remember correctly, there are four levels of structur in language. The
deepest structure is the morphology. The next level is phonology, this is how
words are sounded out. The next level is grammatical and the highest level is
the semantic.

The case for Ebonics was forwarded by Dr. Robert Williams at a
Psycholinguistics conference in St. Louis in 1973. Ebonics, shares
morpholigical and phonological similarities to African languages. Yet despite
the fact that it shares most of it's vocabulary with the English language it is
not considered in the same language genus. It's deep structure and phonolgy is
African.

Specfically, much of Ebonics, like African languages lacks specific
dipthongs. For example,the dipthong endings 'st', 'nd', 'ld' and 'ft' are not
found in West African languages. As Africans spoke English, they exhibit what
is called relexification, which is to modify new words to the phonolgy of the
original language.

M. Bowen 8/95

The Creole Creation;Move Over, Gideon and St. James. This Time God Speaks
Jamaican Patois

By Malcolm Gladwell

AFTER GOD had made the earth and the animals large and small, he
surveyed his creation and saw that it was good. And then He said:
"Mek we mek mankine fi stay like how we stay; mek we mek dem fi fayva we;
and mek dem rule ova all di fish dem inna di sea and all di bird whe' up a sky
an ova di cow dem and ova all di eart, and ova everyting that crawl pon di
eart."
This, obviously, is not standard English. But it should not be entirely
foreign to English speakers. It is Genesis 1:26 as found in a new and
ambitious translation of the Bible into so-called Jamaican "patois," the creole
English spoken in many of the former slave colonies of the West Indies.
For years creole was dismissed by English colonizers and viewed with a
certain shame by many educated Jamaicans. It was thought to be a bastardization
of English, the unfortunate result of untutored African slaves imperfectly
assimilating and interpreting the language of their owners. But the Jamaican
project currently underway by the United Bible Society and a group of Jamaican
religious leaders - the latest in a series of creole translations - is evidence
of the newfound respect that the speech of everyday Caribbean life now
commands.
Jamaican creole, linguists say, is not an underdeveloped pidgin English. It
is not merely a dialect of British or American English. And it is not a marker
of illiteracy and ignorance. Rather it is a living language all of its own.
Creole is a blanket term to describe a class of languages that grew out of
the slave trade in the late 1600s. When slaves from a multitude of African
tribes were captured by European traders, the collision of cultures produced a
kind of hybrid language. Since the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French and
English all participated in the slave trade, numerous creoles were spawned,
based on each one of those languages. In Haiti, for example, French creole is
spoken. In Jamaica, a former British colony, the creole is English-based. What
binds them all together under the term creole is a common grammatical structure
and a vocabulary and syntax that still bristle with words and structures
reflecting the roots of slaves in the Gold Coast and Congo regions of Africa.

To understand creole, then, is in part a historical exercise, since it
moved from old world to new and still lingers in Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra
Leone and throughout the Caribbean - the route taken by the slave traders of
300 years ago. Yet to understand creole is also to gain a window on language
itself, since it provides case studies of how languages develop when people of
widely different backgrounds are thrown together and forced to communicate. It
is what happens to English when it is stripped down and reconstructed along new
lines.
Consider Genesis 1:26, beginning with the first two words.
MEK WE. "Mek," derived from "make" is often used in creole to stand for
"let." The origins of this form are obscure but, interestingly, this usage also
surfaces in the native English spoken in the Italian neighborhoods of South
Philadelphia.
The significant word here, however, is the second, the "we" used here in
place of "us." This is one of the most distinctive features of Jamaican creole:
that it is an uninflected language. In English, nouns get prefixes and
suffixes; pronouns vary and verbs take on different endings to mark different
tenses or contexts. (I go. I am going. I went.) In creole, by contrast, there
is almost none of that. In some instances, one word simply spans all cases.
"We" functions both in its standard English role as subject pronoun but also,
as is the case here, in place of "us" and again in the possessive instead of
"our." There is also no "he" or "she" among the most rural dialects, only "
'im" for both men and women.
When creole speakers want to conjugate a verb, they don't add an ending or
change the word itself. In an uninflected language, the verb is left unchanged.
But another word is added. In creole, for example, "Me go" means "I go," "Me a
go" means "I am going." "Me a go go" means "I am going to go." "Me en go" means
"I went" and so forth.
This type of grammar is called "analytical" by linguists, and it closely
resembles the syntax of West African languages, particularly those of the Kwa
family spoken today in Nigeria and Ghana. This fact has led some linguists to
the conclusion that creole is the result of slaves combining the English
vocabulary of their captors with the grammar they had used in Africa.
Others argue, however, that the roots of creole are probably broader than
that. Many languages, they point out, not just African ones, are uninflected.
And when linguists look at creoles that have developed in parts of the world
with no connection to Africa, they find the same grammatical structures. What
these experts argue is that "analytic" grammar is so logical that it is
probably the kind of communication strategy that anyone would use if forced to
create a language from scratch. In fact, they say, it is very similar to the
type of strategies used by children when they take their first stab at learning
their mother tongue.
Analytic constructions "are simply easier to learn," said Peter Patrick, a
linguist and creole specialist at Georgetown University. "That doesn't mean
that they are less powerful, or less sophisticated. But they are more
transparent."
MEK WE MEK MANKINE. This second "mek" translates directly to "make" in its
standard English meaning. Thus does "mek," in Creole, wear two hats.
"This is a natural result of being a young language," said Patrick. "They
have all the same requirements and needs as older languages but a smaller
lexical stock. So they make some words do triple duty. The categories are less
tightly defined."
Another example of this is the "fi" in the line of scripture, which comes
after "mankine." In this context it translates as the preposition "to," or, as
in archaic English, "for to." But, Patrick points out, it can also double for
"should" or "ought," as in "you fi write this." Not to mention "a," which has
at least nine different uses from a demonstrative - "See a' man de?" ("See that
man there?") to marker of emphasis: "a fas' him run fas' " ("he's really
running fast").
STAY LIKE HOW WE STAY. Here, "stay" has the meaning of being like something
or having the properties of something. "How it stay?" for example, means "what
is it like?" "To mek mankind fi stay like how we stay," in other words, is "to
make mankind to be like how we are like," or literally to make man in God's
image.
The unusual meaning of stay in this context is a reminder that creoles
thrive in countries - like Haiti and Jamaica - where both during and after
slavery, blacks had only limited contact with whites. As a result, some
meanings have evolved quite differently from standard English.
By contrast, blacks never achieved that kind of critical mass in the United
States, which is why whatever creole was spoken by American slaves eventually
died out with repeated contact with standard English. Today American "black
English" bears occasional glimpses of creole forms. For example, the
uninflected form of "to be" crops up in black English: "he bad" for "he is
bad." Also, as in creole, possession is sometimes indicated simply by word
order, not by apostrophes: "Mary mother" for "Mary's mother."
The only place true creole is spoken in the United States is on the remote
islands off the Georgia and Carolina coast, where the descendents of slaves
have lived so long in isolation from the mainland that they still speak what is
known as Gullah - a very close relative of Jamaican creole.
MEK WE MEK DEM FI FAVVA WE: "Let us make them to favor us." Here the
meaning of "favor" is the sense used in Elizabethan English - to resemble -
which points to the fact that the English that slaves used as the basis for
their creole was the vernacular English of the 17th and 18th centuries. Another
hint of this is the "pon" in the last phrase of the Genesis verse, "everyting
that crawl pon di eart." This is derived from "upon." Who today, in standard
spoken English, still uses that word?
AND MEK DEM RULE OVA ALL DI FISH-DEM . . . AN OVA DI COW-DEM. "Di fish-dem"
and "Di cow-dem" here are a classic analytical grammar usage. Instead of adding
an "s" to make cows, the plural is created by adding a separate word, "dem,"
after the noun. To rule over "di cow" would be to rule over one cow. "Dem"
comes from the English pronoun "them." But, in a classic creole combination,
the pattern of using "dem" to make nouns plural is straight from West Africa.
The "dem" usage is also a clue to the intent of the translators. Creoles,
since they are oral languages, are constantly in flux, and throughout Jamaica
one can find speakers at every point along the linguistic continuum, from pure
uninflected creole to language that reflects a stronger influence from
inflected standard English.
" 'im da run," for instance, is classic creole for "he is running." But
depending on the level of education and social class of the speaker, you might
hear that sentence in Jamaica as " 'im a run," " 'im runnin" or "he running,"
as the dialect becomes more and more inflected. That they chose "di cow-dem"
shows that the translators are aiming their Bible to those Jamaicans closest to
their African roots.
"We're targeting the unchurched," said Faith Linton, a Jamaican educator
involved in the translation effort. "We're targeting people in ghetto areas."
As such, in Genesis 1:27 of the Jamaican-Creole Bible, God did not make or
even mek man in his own image. This is the uninflected God: " 'im mek 'im fi
stay like 'ow 'im stay."

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