Lingos of the same type as Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English are found in other parts of the world where whites and natives meet and have to find some medium of communication. Thus a Danish doctor living in Belgian Congo sends me a few specimens of the ‘Pidgin’ spoken there: to indicate that his master has received many letters from home, the ‘boy’ will say, “Massa catch plenty mammy-book” (mammy meaning ‘woman, wife’). Breeze stands for air in general; if the boy wants to say that he has pumped up the bicycle tyres, he will say, “Plenty breeze live for inside,” live, being here the general term for ‘to be’ (Beach-l. stop); ‘is your master in?’ becomes ‘Massa live?’ and the answer is ‘he no live’ or ‘he live for hup’ (i.e. he is upstairs). If a man has a stomach-ache he will say ‘he hurt me for belly plenty too much’—too much is thus used exactly as in Beach-la-mar and Chinese Pidgin. The similarity of all these jargons, in spite of unavoidable smaller differences, is in fact very striking indeed.
It may be time now to draw the moral of all this. And first I want to point out that these languages are not ‘mixed languages’ in the proper sense of that term. Churchill is not right when he says that Beach-la-mar “gathered material from every source, it fused them all.” As a matter of fact, it is English, and nothing but English, with very few admixtures, and all of these are such words as had previously been adopted into the English speech of those classes of the population, sailors, etc., with whom the natives came into contact: they were therefore justified in their belief that these words formed part of the English tongue and that what they learned themselves was real English. The natives really adhere to Windisch’s rule about the adoption of loan-words (above, XI § [10]). If there are more Chinese words in Pidgin than there are Polynesian ones in Beach-la-mar, this is a natural consequence of the fact that the Chinese civilization ranked incomparably much higher than the Polynesian, and that therefore the English living in China would adopt these words into their own speech. Still, their number is not very large. And we have seen that there are some words which the Easterners must naturally suppose to be English, while the English think that they belong to the vernacular, and in using them each party is thus under the delusion that he is rendering a service to the other.
This leads me to my second point: those deviations from correct English, those corruptions of pronunciation and those simplifications of grammar, which have formed the object of this short sketch, are due just as much to the English as to the Easterners, and in many points they began with the former rather than with the latter (cf. Schuchardt, Auf anlass des Volapüks, 1888, 8; KS 4. 35, SlD 36; ESt 15. 292). From Schuchardt I take the following quotation: “The usual question on reaching the portico of an Indian bungalow is, Can missus see?—it being a popular superstition amongst the Europeans that to enable a native to understand English he must be addressed as if he were deaf, and in the most infantile language.” This tendency to meet the ‘inferior races’ half-way in order to facilitate matters for them is by Churchill called “the one supreme axiom of international philology: the proper way to make a foreigner understand what you would say is to use broken English. He speaks it himself, therefore give him what he uses.” We recognize here the same mistaken notion that we have seen above in the language of the nursery, where mothers and others will talk a curious sort of mangled English which is believed to represent real babytalk, though it has many traits which are purely conventional. In both cases these more or less artificial perversions are thought to be an aid to those who have not yet mastered the intricacies of the language in question, though the ultimate result is at best a retardation of the perfect acquisition of correct speech.
My view, then, is that Beach-la-mar as well as Pidgin is English, only English learnt imperfectly, in consequence partly of the difficulties always inherent in learning a totally different language, partly of the obstacles put in the way of learning by the linguistic behaviour of the English-speaking people themselves. The analogy of its imperfections with those of a baby’s speech in the first period is striking, and includes errors of pronunciation, extreme simplification of grammar, scantiness of vocabulary, even to such peculiarities as that the word too is apprehended in the sense of ‘very much,’ and such phrases as you better go, etc.
XII.—§ 7. Mauritius Creole.
The view here advanced on the character of these ‘Pidgin’ languages is corroborated when we see that other languages under similar circumstances have been treated in exactly the same way as English. With regard to French in the island of Mauritius, formerly Ile de France, we are fortunate in possessing an excellent treatment of the subject by M. C. Baissac (Étude sur le Patois Créole Mauricien, Nancy, 1880; cf. the same writer’s Le Folk-lore de l’Ile-Maurice, Paris, 1888, Les littératures populaires, tome xxvii). The island was uninhabited when the French occupied it in 1715; a great many slaves were imported from Madagascar, and as a means of intercourse between them and their French masters a French Creole language sprang up, which has survived the English conquest (1810) and the subsequent wholesale introduction of coolies from India and elsewhere. The paramount element in the vocabulary is French; one may read many pages in Baissac’s texts without coming across any foreign words, apart from the names of some indigenous animals and plants. In the phonetic structure there are a few all-pervading traits: the front-round vowels are replaced by the corresponding unrounded vowels or in a few cases by , and instead of [ʃ, ʒ] we find [s, z]; thus éré heureux, éne plime une plume, sakéne chacun(e), zize juge, zunu genou, suval cheval: I replace Baissac’s notation, which is modelled on the French spelling, by a more phonetic one according to his own indications; but I keep his final e muet.
The grammar of this language is as simple as possible. Substantives have the same form for the two numbers: dé suval deux chevaux. There is no definite article. The adjective is invariable, thus also sa for ce, cet, cette, ces, ceci, cela, celui, celle, ceux, celles. Mo before a verb is ‘I,’ before a substantive it is possessive: mo koné I know, mo lakaze my house; in the same way to is you and your, but in the third person a distinction is made, for li is he or she, but his or her is so, and here we have even a plural, zaute from ‘les autres,’ which form is also used as a plural of the second person: mo va alle av zaut, I shall go with you.
The genitive is expressed by word-order without any preposition: lakase so papa his father’s house; also with so before the nominative: so piti ppa Azor old Azor’s child.
The form in which the French words have been taken over presents some curious features, and in some cases illustrates the difficulty the blacks felt in separating the words which they heard in the French utterance as one continuous stream of sounds. There is evidently a disinclination to begin a word with a vowel, and sometimes an initial vowel is left out, as bitation habitation, tranzé étranger, but in other cases z is taken from the French plural article: zozo oiseau, zistoire, zenfan, zimaze image, zalfan éléphant, zanimo animal, or n from the French indefinite article: name ghost, nabi (or zabi) habit. In many cases the whole French article is taken as an integral part of the word, as lérat rat, léroi, licien chien, latabe table, lére heure (often as a conjunction ‘when’); thus also with the plural article lizié from les yeux, but without the plural signification: éne lizié an eye. Similarly éne lazoie a goose. Words that are often used in French with the so-called partitive article keep this; thus disel salt, divin wine, duri rice, éne dipin a loaf; here also we meet with one word from the French plural: éne dizéf an egg, from des œufs. The French mass-word with the partitive article du monde has become dimunde or dumune, and as it means ‘people’ and no distinction is made between plural and singular, it is used also for ‘person’: éne vié dimunde an old man.