G. Huttar Sources of Ndjuka African vocabulary In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 59 (1985), no: 1/2, Leiden, 45-71 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:20:24PM via free access GEORGE L. HUTTAR SOURCES OF NDJUKA AFRICAN VOCABULARY* Identification of historical sources of features of a language may focus on particular items (phones, morphemes) or on particular relations- hips and structures (relative clauses, serial verb constructions, vowel systems). What humankind shares universally either by genes or envi- ronment may significantly constrain the latter, as Bickerton, for exam- ple, has so imaginatively explored (1981). Likewise, universals of speech production and perception put limits on the inventory of phones to be found in any human language. By contrast, the mor- phemes found in different languages vary considerably from language to language, within mostly phonologically imposed limits. These considerations suggest that while study of syntactic structures of, for example, some creole languages may reveal a good deal about the human language capacity in general, it is correspondingly difficult to use for identifying historical sources of those Creoles. Conversely, study of the form and meaning of individual lexical items in various languages will tell us less about human language generally, but will be correspondingly easier for us to use for historical purposes. Both areas of inquiry are worthy of our serious attention. In this paper I engage primarily in the more straightforward historical question, Where do particular lexical items in Ndjuka1 come from? In particular, I am looking at those items that appear not to be of European (English, Dutch, Portuguese, French) or Amerindian (Cariban, Arawak) origin - i.e., those that I consider reasonable candidates for being of African origin. Study of the lexicons of West Atlantic, or circum-Caribbean, Creoles has so far identified or hypothesized two major African sources of Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:20:24PM via free access 46 GEORGE L. HUTTAR lexical items: Kwa (especially Akan and Ewe-Fon) and Bantu (espe- cially kiKongo). Cassidy and Le Page (1967, 1980) on Jamaican and Daeleman (1972) on Saramaccan, respectively, come readily to mind. In investigating historical sources of lexical items in a West Atlantic Creole, there are some specific methodological traps one must avoid. A common one has been to give preference to one source over another for an item that by formal and semantic criteria could have reasonably come from either of two (or more) sources. When one's bias rules out European etyma in favor of African ones, as appears to have happened frequently in Delafosse (1925), in some of Lichtveld's examples (1928- 1929), and even occasionally in Daeleman's work2 (1972), we have a case of what some would leap to call substratomania. By contrast, substratophobia results in giving the preference to European forms over African ones. Other possibilities include favoring Portuguese over English (see, e.g., Herskovits 1931) or African over Amerindian.3 Two other snares are the Scylla-Charybdis pair of casting one's net too wide in Africa, pulling in all sorts of languages that are unlikely to have been represented in the slave trade to a particular New World destination, and on the other hand looking at only a small number of African languages and drawing too specific conclusions about sources of particular West Atlantic items (see Dalby 1971, R. Price 1975: 472). Research into shipping records and other sources about how many slaves were shipped when to which immediate and ultimate New World destination from which African ports drawing on which parts of the African hinterland can now tell us quite a bit about which languages are likely or unlikely to have been included in the background of a particular Creole. Postma's work (1970, 1972, 1975, 1976), much of which is summarized by R. Price (1976), has been especially helpful with regard to the Dutch slave trade, which during the eighteenth century shipped the vast majority of its human cargo to Suriname.4 Nevertheless, such research cannot rise above the accuracy and speci- ficness of its sources, which must often remain limited. For example, Falconbridge (1788: 13) mentions the extreme care taken by the black traders to prevent the Europeans from gaining any intelligence of their modes of proceeding; the great distance inland from whence the negroes are brought; and our ignorance of their language (with which, very frequently, the black traders themselves are equally unacquainted). The other danger mentioned above, that of preferring one potential source over another, can never be completely avoided, as long as we remain better acquainted with some sources than others, even if we do Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:20:24PM via free access SOURCES OF NDJUKA AFRICAN VOCABULARY 47 manage to escape ideological biases to which comtemporary Afro- American studies may be especially prone. Not only may ignorance of, say, Cariban languages of Suriname encourage us to be too easily satisfied with identifying a particular African source. Also within African languages we may have excellent resource material on one language but virtually none on another, closely related one that from an extralinguistic historical standpoint is an equally likely source of, for example, Ndjuka items.5 Careful attention to sound correspondences can obviously narrow the range of likely sources in many cases. An additional dimension that may help us sort out at least general categories of sources - European vs. African vs. Amerindian -is that of domain of vocabulary. We have some knowledge of activities carried out on plantations, for example, and may take some assumptions about topics likely to be handled between European and African interlocutors. On such a basis we can expect certain semantic domains to reflect heavier European influence, others to reflect more input from African sources - and in the case of Suriname, at least, others from Amerindian languages. Not only can these expectations suggest where to look hardest if we are interested in, for example, African origins. They also must be taken into account when trying to decide between, say, an African and a European source for the same creole item. For this study I have assumed the following about Suriname planta- tion slaves: 1) Some activities important to them, though carried out fairly openly, were not discussed in much detail with their white overseers and masters, simply because the latter were not interested - e.g., drum- ming and dancing. 2) Some activities important to them were more deliberately kept hidden from white surveillance, and hence seldom if ever spoken about with whites - e.g., medicine preparation and sorcery. 3) Items and activities of European but not African culture came into the slaves' experience only through contact with the whites (or with other slaves who had encountered them through contact with whites) and their languages - e.g., sugar cultivation and European articles of clothing. 4) Many areas of plantation life were not culture specific, but common to all - e.g., common human activities such as eating, sleeping, and sex, and major features of the natural environment such as common birds, water, and sky. In these areas a high proportion of lexical items Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:20:24PM via free access 48 GEORGE L. HUTTAR were taken into the developing Creoles from the languages of the masters. 5) Nevertheless, even in the sorts of areas mentioned in (4), the more specific meanings were more likely to be labeled by the slaves by some non-European form (see R. Price 1976: 36n). For example, generic//*/ 'fish' < fish, foo (Sranan fowru) 'bird' < fowl, bon 'tree' < Dutch boom, and udu 'tree' < wood all show clear European origins, while a large number of specific flora and fauna names do not. 6) Items of the natural environment encountered not on the plantations but only later in the interior had little chance of being labeled by European forms, except by compounding or other semantic expansion of already adopted forms (see Hancock 1980). 7) Activities and items learned from Amerindians, whether on the plantations or after escape, were frequently labeled by Amerindian (chiefly Cariban) forms -e.g., fish poisons and implements used in the processing of cassava. These assumptions have led me to assume as a practical guide a division of domains as follows:6 European etyma likely: aspects of everyday plantation life known by both slaves and masters and spoken about between the two groups; generic terms for items of the natural environment of the plantations; and items of European cultural origin. Amerindian etyma likely: items of material culture borrowed from Indians, either directly or through contact with Indian wares bought by plantation owners (Neumann 1967: 73) and specific terms for some items of the natural environment of the interior.7 African etyma likely: items of social, religious, and material culture "retained" from Africa or developing within the nascent black socie- ties; specific terms for some items of the natural environment of the plantations and of the interior; and aspects of everyday life that slaves wished to keep at least partly secret from Europeans. I return now to the question of where in Africa the first Ndjukas (or their African-born parents) may have come from. During the entire Atlantic slave trade period slaves were taken by several nations from coastal ports all the way from the Senegambia to Angola. These ports in turn drew on areas of varying depths into the interior. Patterson, in reference to the slaves of Jamaica, concludes that "Apart from the two extremities of the trading areas of the west coast - the Senegal and Congo rivers - few of the slaves came from an area more than two or three hundred miles inland" (1967: 126).