arwee tahk

"A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.”
Noam Chomsky

the Yiddish-speaking sociolinguist Max Weinreich observed  that “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot” (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”)

This post isn’t about our family directly, but about our evolving culture in the Caribbean, with a focus on language.  I always felt that I grew up bilingual, and I became particularly aware of that working at Young Island in the late 1970s.  I would greet our guests at the dock and they would assume I was from Scandinavia, Holland, maybe Wales, but once I interacted with other staff members along the way, their initial conviction would be reversed by my speech and they would accept that I was indeed local.  In my world, family, school and books were in standard English and the rest was varying degrees of our Caribbean-speak.  To this day, in Canada, high spirits still shift me back into Vinci.    
      
I had always assumed that our colloquial expressions had West African origins, like djombi / jumby.  The Gullah people (African-Americans of the coastal regions and Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia and northeast Florida) share much of our vernacular – oonuh /you [plural], nyam /eat), buckruh /white man, and benne /sesame [as in Trinidad benne balls].  

The surprise has been coming to realise the European origins of words and customs that we may have thought of as uniquely West Indian.

Eastertime at Twenty Hill, Mummy always had us set egg whites in pony glasses out in the sun so we could see our futures.   Now that I think of it I am not sure if it was a Vincentian custom or one Mummy brought with her from Trinidad.  Some years ago, I was reading about the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts…

It all started on a late December day in 1691, when nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams engaged in a common adolescent game: telling fortunes by dropping an egg white into a glass. On a good day, this old English custom provided the girls with a taste of rebellion from their austere Puritan life. On this day, to their horror, the egg white took the shape of a coffin. The girls panicked.

Same custom, although apparently not an Easter tradition.  Turns out egg divination has roots in Europe.

I have gathered below a few discoveries that have surprised me, especially because these terms of European origin were not heard from speakers of standard English, but mostly always from people of African origin deploying dialect. 

Most recently, courtesy of Oprah’s magazine…

A cwtch (rhymes with butch) is a Welsh word that means a small cosy place, a cupboard. 
"Cwtch" also has another meaning. It is another kind of small place, it is the act of creating a small space between you and another. It is like a hug ... but much much better! There are degrees of cwtching. To "cwtch-up" is to snuggle up with someone.

I grew up saying “cutch up with me” – apparently something of the Welsh crossed the Atlantic and became a part of the Caribbean idiom.

In Newfoundlander Donna Morrissey’s  Kit’s Law a chunk of wood is referred to as a junk, just like in the Caribbean!

Turns out a guernsey, or gansey, is a seaman's knitted woollen sweater – in our childhood, that’s what polo-type shirts were called.

The dictionary reveals that mamaguy means to try to deceive, especially with flattery or untruth, and that it is a verb originated from Spanish mamar gallo, literally to make a monkey of.

From Josephine Tey’s, Daughter of Time,  “…perhaps Richard longed to ‘larn’ him.”  How many times did I hear “that will larn him?!

           

A melee turns out to be a French word for a fracas. 

Bull pizzle is English - pizzle being an old English word for penis.
 

According to the Oxford English dictionary, Skylarking is a term from the late 17th century (originally in nautical use) for passing time by playing tricks or practical jokes; indulging in horseplay.

And the word rank, meant to denote stench, I came across in Chapter 19 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks --rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

I’d love to hear of your discoveries.  We Caribbean people take justifiable pleasure in building a celebratory culture of our own on the backs of sorry history.  Our DNA, language, and culture are a proud amalgam, and it seems fitting that our contemporary existence has blurred our separate origins.  I recently saw this video which demonstrates rather well that we are really all one.

I leave you with the words of Mpho Tutu, daughter of Desmond Tutu

Ubuntu recognizes in the most profound way that we are interdependent, and that any action that I perpetrate against you has consequences for me and for my life. And so, the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you—is a more Western expression of the concept of Ubuntu. What you do to me lives on in you.

Just one more thing - Di Gud Nyuuz bout Jiizas! In 2012, after years of meticulous translation from the original Greek, the Bible Society in Jamaica released the first patois translation of the New Testament, or “Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment.” 

The New King James Bible’s version of Luke reads:

“And having come in, the angel said to her, ‘Rejoice, highly favoured one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women.”’

The patois version reads:

“Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, ‘Mieri, mi av nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad riili riili bles yu an im a waak wid yu aal di taim.”

Dat is arwee tahk…

One love,

Lisbie x