A Different, not an Incorrect, Way of Speaking, Pt 2
One of the serious failings of West Indian society is that, though it has evolved into a home where the progeny of slaves and indentured servants are substantially in charge of their own affairs, it continues to be a plantation in much of its linguistic sense of itself. So while we have invented a great deal of language in the West Indies, as we had to, we have also had a tendency to prefer language from other people - people whose peoplehood we perceive as being more prestigious than ours.
The evidence of our self-diminishing preference is not hard to find. It is there in questions like 'Bati-mamselle is a word? Wa is di real word? Not dragon fly?' It is there in the Trinbagonian returning home from a not-too-long stay in the United States flaunting an American accent - in a place where it is not needed for comprehension of message. It is there in the preference of (especially) youth for American formulae such as 'an stuff', 'yeah, right', 'I'm outta here', and 'Duh', when we have the perfectly good 'an ting', 'yuh lie!/Yuh jokin!/ A joke y'aa mek!', 'Ah gone', and 'So you en know dat?', which we created right here in West Indian space. And it is there in people like Tony Cozier, Michael Holding, and Reds Pereira choosing 'swipe' over a good, good home-created (onomatopoeic) word like 'voop' in both their West Indian and international cricket commentary.
In this week's column, I will focus on another routine aspect of Trinbagonian speech, our system of pronouns, which some of us mistakenly think is a corruption of English. (By the way, 'Trinbagonian' is another of our creations.)
We consciously know what the pronouns of English are; after all, we were taught them in school. But many of us may not consciously know the Trinbagonian pronouns, perhaps do not recognise a difference between English and Creole in this area of language. For the purposes of my discussion of Trinbagonian pronouns, the interesting English fact is that to stress pronouns you have to raise the pitch of your voice in producing them. So that in the sentence 'I'm talking to you', if you want to stress 'you', you have to raise your pitch on the word or pronounce it more loudly than the neighbouring words, as in 'I'm talking to YOU' (where capital letters indicate stress). You may, of course, not want to stress it. But whether you stress it or not, the word remains 'you', and that is another crucial point for our comparison.
You can therefore stress English pronouns by voice pitch, and the stressed pronouns retain the same shape as their unstressed counterparts.
Not so in Creole. We speak a considerable amount of English in Trinidad and Tobago, so we can and do stress pronouns by voice pitch. But that is the English way. The Trinbagonian way is basically to lengthen the vowel of the pronoun for stress or place a higher tone on the rhyme (i.e., the vowel and any consonant after it), as well as to use a higher voice pitch. To give you a better sense of it, I will list some of pronouns below in unstressed-stressed pairs:
UNSTRESSED STRESSED Yu Yuu Shi Shii Hi Hii Dem DEM
There is a clear difference between a sentence like 'Shi tell mi' and 'Shii tell mi'. The pronoun in the first sentence has a short vowel (spelt with a single letter), while the one in the second has a long one (spelt with a doubled letter). The short vowel shows a lack of stress, while the long vowel shows stress; the speaker must raise his pitch on the long vowel.
Unlike what obtains in English, therefore, there is a different pronoun for stress, in addition to a higher voice pitch.
A better example of the difference between English and Creole pronouns comes in the sentence 'Panday hii gone and call for civil disobedience'. In the sentence, the pronoun 'hii' refers to 'Panday' and in fact stresses that word. The pronoun in this kind of sentence has to be one with the long vowel; the short-vowel pronoun just will not do. The sentence 'Panday hi gone and call for civil disobedience' is ungrammatical Creole (if the hi is intended to refer to Panday).
In the case of dem vs. DEM, the latter carries a higher voice pitch. Consider the difference between 'Mannin DEM en backing dong' and 'Dem a carl me'. Just like the long vowel in 'hii', the higher pitch on DEM expresses stress. Interestingly, the 'DEM' after 'Mannin' is used to pluralise 'Mannin' associatively, in a way that is not available in English. So that the Creole phrase 'Mannin DEM' translates as something like 'Manning and company'.
The sentence 'Dem a carl mi' may have posed some problems for Trinidadians despite the fairly long history of union between Tobago and Trinidad. It is a typically Tobagonian sentence which would be translated 'De callin mi' in Trinbagonian Creole. In Tobagonian Creole, 'dem' is produced in the sentence with a low voice pitch or tone and contrasts with 'DEM', which is produced with a higher tone. But in Trinidadian Creole, low-tone 'dem' does not exist.
These facts should tell us that the Creole is not a corruption of English, but a reorganisation and restructuring of it. Such a restructuring must have been subconscious, because, ironically, we consciously prefer other people's language even though we have perfectly good creations here at home.
We have been taught some of the facts of English in the school system, but have we been taught the Creole - our own - facts?
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