Cefas Van Rossem

Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen | KNAW · Meertens Institute

In Virgin Islands Dutch Creole the 3PL-pronoun SENDER can also be used as a plural marker:

- man - man

- men - man sender

In Papiamentu we see the pronoun NAN ''3PL' also following a singular noun to indicate plurality:

the house - e kas

the houses - e kasnan.

In Berbice Dutch the suffix -APU is used to indicate whether a noun is plural, however the form APU is not the pronoun of 3PL:

woman - jerma

women - jermapu.

The VIDC plural marker can also be used to indicate plurality of a relative pronoun:

- the man who walks on the street - die man die lo na pad;

- the men who walk on the street: - die man sender, DIE SENDER lo na pad.

Do you perhaps have examples of languages in which this last mentioned phenomenon is common?

Thanks in advance!

Cefas van Rossem

Meertens Institute, the Netherlands

In the early twentieth century some Virgin Islands Dutch Creole wordlist were composed. A large one, from 1926, is alphabetically ordered. A smaller one, from 1936 seems to be chronologically/thematically ordered. I suppose the order of the words and the contents of these words reveal information about the actual conversation/interview. For instance, one list starts with words of welcome, while another one contains sentences like 'I have told you enough, this afternoon' (or, in my words, 'Let's quit') and 'you can write your book now.' (again 'Let's quit').

Can anyone help me to find studies about the composition of wordlists during fieldwork? I remember an article about the Crimean Gothic wordlist, of which is said it only contains  elements which could be observed during the conversation. I am interested in comparable studies.

Thanks in advance!

Cefas

The language in eighteenth century Virgin Islands Dutch Creole manuscripts at first sight differs from the spoken variety of this language which was recorded in the twentieth century. A closer look, using Bell's  (1984) Audience Design Model, shows that the influence of the Referee blurs the situation. Several words and constructions appear to be word for word translations from European religious source texts or were included to educate the audience. The texts also look more or less 'broken Dutch'-like because of etymological orthography, ignoring Creole pronunciation. I consider this to be the influence of the referee/the tradition, and not as influence of an author connecting best to his audience of Creole speakers. Do you agree with me? 

In my corpus of Dutch Creole texts there are several eighteenth century variants of the same text. However, the chronological distance between the oldest and the youngest variants is only about forty years. In traditional philology, for instance of medieval texts, fifty years between the variants was already considered to be too close for reliable diachronic research. Can you help me with related literature? Thanks in advance!

Eighteenth century Dutch Creole texts (Danish Antilles, today's US Virgin Islands) may look somewhat articifial, but they show a bulk of linguistic elements which can be attributed as Auditor Design (a linguistic gesture of the translator toward the auditors of the texts). I suppose both slaves and missionaries belonged to this group of auditors. A comparable Creole variety is Church Sranan of Surinam.

These varieties not only differ in their missionary vocabulary, but also in orthography, morphology and syntax. Can you help me with examples of other (Creole) languages in which such a missionary variety, used by both missionaries and (former) slaves, was used.?