Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke
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Pidgin and Creole Languages JOHN E. REINECKE 1904–1982 Pidgin and Creole Languages Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke Edited by Glenn G. Gilbert Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 In- ternational (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require per- mission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Cre- ative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824882150 (PDF) 9780824882143 (EPUB) This version created: 17 May, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. © 1987 University of Hawaii Press All Rights Reserved CONTENTS Preface viii Acknowledgments xii Introduction 1 John E. Reinecke: His Life and Work Charlene J. Sato and Aiko T. Reinecke 3 William Greenfield, A Neglected Pioneer Creolist John E. Reinecke 28 Theoretical Perspectives 39 Some Possible African Creoles: A Pilot Study M. Lionel Bender 41 Pidgin Hawaiian Derek Bickerton and William H. Wilson 65 The Substance of Creole Studies: A Reappraisal Lawrence D. Carrington 83 Verb Fronting in Creole: Transmission or Bioprogram? Chris Corne 102 The Need for a Multidimensional Model Robert B. Le Page 125 Decreolization Paths for Guyanese Singular Pronouns John R. Rickford 146 Utterance Structure in Basilang Speech John H. Schumann 156 Pacific Area 181 Early Pidginization in Hawaii Richard R. Day 183 The History of Research into Tok Pisin 1900-1975 Peter Mühlhäusler 201 vi CONTENTS Atlantic Area 247 Suprasegmentals in Guyanese: Some African Comparisons Hazel Carter 249 A Preliminary Classification of the Anglophone Atlantic Creoles with Syntactic Data from Thirty-Three Representative Dialects Ian Hancock 310 Portuguese in the New World, West Africa, and Asia 399 Portuguese Creoles of West Africa and Asia Luiz Ivens Ferraz 401 The Portuguese Element in the American Creoles Morris Goodman 430 Creole Influence on Popular Brazilian Portuguese John Holm 490 Amerindian 523 Metacommunicative Functions of Mobilian Jargon, An American Indian Pidgin of the Lower Mississippi River Region Emanuel J. Drechsel 525 Narrative Structure in Chinook Jargon Dell Hymes and Henry Zenk 541 Africa 567 Is Songay a Creole Language? Robert Nicolaï 569 Notes 590 Contributors 618 vii PREFACE This book is for the memory of John E. Reinecke, a man whose humanistic activism and sharp-hewn scholarship helped to shape the scientific study of pidgin and creole languages throughout much of the twentieth century. Reinecke was both a social reformer and a leading sociolinguistic researcher working with creole languages and societies that derive from diverse groups of people thrown into close social contact. Most notably, Reinecke’s keen sense of social justice has had a telling effect on the social history of Hawaii. Along with his persistent efforts to obtain a fair and equal share for wage earners in sharply stratified societies, his attention early became focused on their language. By encouraging others to study what he called “marginal languages,” he was able to bring to them (and to the extraordinary issues—theoretical and practical—which they raise) a measure of prestige, both in the eyes of their speakers and in the increased attention accorded them by stu- dents of language and society. The book presents a description of Reinecke’s life and work, the text of his own last paper on creolistics, and seventeen papers which reflect the range and vitality of the field that he did so much to open. Some of the papers reflect the issue which has come to dominate creole studies—the debate over the role of universals and of specific substrata as competing ex- planations of the amazing similarities that creoles, and perhaps pidgins also, exhibit across the world. Many describe the in- tense language contact within which language contraction and expansion occur (they do this either directly, or by supplying new data which will eventually feed such descriptions), and some are our belated response to calls which Reinecke made in the 1930s. Fifty years ago, he saw the need for the kind of comparative studies which are only now under way—in, for example, Hazel Carter’s paper, which represents a pioneering viii PREFACE attempt to compare the suprasegmentals of English-based Creoles on both sides of the Atlantic. In his last years, Reinecke strongly supported research on contact languages with non-Eu- ropean lexical bases. He thought this was the area from which future creole studies would derive the greatest theoretical and practical gain, and in this volume six papers answer his call by analyzing such pidgins and creoles. In John Reinecke’s career, one can distinguish two periods in which he devoted his time to the sociolinguistic study of creole societies. In the first, which ran from around 1932 to 1940, Reinecke began his work on Hawaiian Creole English, which culminated in his M.A. thesis, Language and Dialect in Hawaii (1935). It was in 1932 that he launched his postal survey of the language varieties of the Hawaiian Islands, but the limited perspective offered by Hawaii alone did not long satisfy him. Between 1934 and 1940, he set out to investigate what was known of all the creole languages and trade jargons that had then been reported. Reinecke preferred to think of them as mar- ginal languages, a notion he had adopted from the sociologist Robert E. Park, who later encouraged him to prepare his doc- torate in Race Relations at Yale. In his dissertation, a formidable work of 880 pages, Marginal Languages: A Sociological Study of Creole Languages and Trade Jargons (1937), he was able to integrate what he knew from Hawaii with information from the rest of the world, gathered in lengthy correspondence and from a program of reading which required astonishing energy and bibliographical skill to bring together the scattered and usually obscure texts that were relevant. Until Reinecke, nobody had attempted such an ambitious, worldwide typological survey, and in both the quality of organization and quantity of information, the dissertation remains to this day the most complete survey of the world’s pidgins and creoles. Reinecke’s main interest, as revealed in the “Outline for Study of Each Language” that he prepared for his marathon correspondence, was always the social constraints on the for- mation, use, and status of each language, as well as the structure of the language and its geographic distribution. At times, he anticipated present debates in creole studies by asking his correspondents about features common to all creoles, as opposed to possible African language substrate el- ements, that might account for the structure of United States Black English, the English-based Caribbean Creoles, and other languages historically related to them. He urged then, and later did much to encourage, further study of “the European creole ix PREFACE dialects which arose among West African slaves, with special emphasis upon their phonology and intonation” (letter to Melville J. Herskovits, Sept. 15, 1936). His correspondence often revealed information which changed accepted ideas in creole studies; regarding Guyana, for example, Reinecke was told only a few days before his dissertation went to the binder that Dutch Creole survived “far up the Berbice River,” thus en- abling him to show that Hugo Schuchardt had been mistaken in reporting its extinction. Reinecke taught himself an impressive array of lan- guages—his German, without formal training, was good enough for him to attempt a translation of Schuchardt, and his Dutch al- lowed him to follow the witty and idiomatic style of Hesseling’s writings on Negerhollands. Indeed, he treasured his own brief contact with Hesseling and always saw himself as the amateur among European professionals in the field. Yet, in many ways, he was the most gifted inheritor of that tradition, a perfect ex- ample of the creolist who, as Derek Bickerton noted in 1976, needs both the competence of a polyglot and the memory of an elephant. In the late 1960s, Stanley Tsuzaki, a University of Hawaii lin- guist specializing in language contact, rediscovered Reinecke’s work, and judged his M.A. thesis to be on a par with the finest efforts of American sociolinguists in this century. Tsuzaki was able to arrange for the publication of the thesis in 1969, but, more significantly, he persuaded Reinecke to return to his study of creole languages after decades of academic exile and work in the labor movement. Together, the two produced the first scholarly bibliography of a creole, English in Hawaii: An Anno- tated Bibliog raphy (1966), and began to collect the material for what has become the standard reference work of creole studies: A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages (1975). For Rei- necke, the bibliography may have seemed a first step in revising his own encyclopedic dissertation of 1937, a gigantic task which turned out to be unrealizable; but the bibliography, revised and expanded in the pages of the quarterly newsletter The Carrier Pidgin, which he served as editor, proved a lifetime’s work. With modest support from the National Endowment for the Human- ities, Tsuzaki and Reinecke assembled an impressive collection of printed and manuscript material and made the University of Hawaii one of the great world research centers for pidgin and creole languages. x PREFACE Reinecke returned to his work on “marginal languages” as other scholars were taking a new interest in the subject.