Finally, I would point the contrast between these makeshift languages and slang: the former are an outcome of linguistic poverty; they are born of the necessity and the desire to make oneself understood where the ordinary idiom of the individual is of no use, while slang expressions are due to a linguistic exuberance: the individual creating them knows perfectly well the ordinary words for the idea he wants to express, but in youthful playfulness he is not content with what is everybody’s property, and thus consciously steps outside the routine of everyday language to produce something that is calculated to excite merriment or even admiration on the part of his hearers. The results in both cases may sometimes show related features, for some of the figurative expressions of Beach-la-mar recall certain slang words by their bold metaphors, but the motive force in the two kinds is totally different, and where a comic effect is produced, in one case it is intentional and in the other unintentional.

XII.—§ 11. Romanic Languages.

When Schuchardt began his studies of the various Creole languages formed in many parts of the world where Europeans speaking various Romanic and other languages had come into contact with negroes, Polynesians and other races, it was with the avowed intention of throwing light on the origin of the Romanic languages from a contact between Latin and the languages previously spoken in the countries colonized by the Romans. We may now raise the question whether Beach-la-mar—to take that as a typical example of the kind of languages dealt with in this chapter—is likely to develop into a language which to the English of Great Britain will stand in the same relation as French or Portuguese to Latin. The answer cannot be doubtful if we adhere tenaciously to the points of view already advanced. Development into a separate language would be imaginable only on condition of a complete, or a nearly complete, isolation from the language of England (and America)—and how should that be effected nowadays, with our present means of transport and communication? If such isolation were indeed possible, it would also result in the breaking off of communication between the various islands in which Beach-la-mar is now spoken, and that would probably entail the speedy extinction of the language itself in favour of the Polynesian language of each separate island. On the contrary, what will probably happen is a development in the opposite direction, by which the English of the islanders will go on constantly improving so as to approach correct usage more and more in every respect: better pronunciation and syntax, more flexional forms and a less scanty vocabulary—in short, the same development that has already to a large extent taken place in the English of the coloured population in the United States. But this means a gradual extinction of Beach-la-mar as a separate idiom through its complete absorption in ordinary English (cf. above, p. [228], on conditions at Mauritius).

Do these ‘makeshift languages,’ then, throw any light on the development of the Romanic languages? They may be compared to the very first initial stage of the Latin language as spoken by the barbarians, many of whom may be supposed to have mutilated Latin in very much the same way as the Pacific islanders do English. But by and by they learnt Latin much better, and if now the Romanic languages have simplified the grammatical structure of Latin, this simplification is not to be placed on the same footing as the formlessness of Beach-la-mar, for that is complete and has been achieved at one blow: the islanders have never (i.e. have not yet) learnt the English form-system. But the inhabitants of France, Spain, etc., did learn the Latin form system as well as the syntactic use of the forms. This is seen by the fact that when French and the other languages began to be written down, there remained in them a large quantity of forms and syntactic applications that agree with Latin but have since then become extinct: in its oldest written form, therefore, French is very far from the amorphous condition of Beach-la-mar: in its nouns it had many survivals of the Latin case system (gen. pl. corresponding to -orum; an oblique case different from the nominative and formed in various ways according to the rules of Latin declensions), in the verbs we find an intricate system of tenses, moods and persons, based on the Latin flexions. It is true that these had been already to some degree simplified, but this must have happened in the same gradual way as the further simplification that goes on before our very eyes in the written documents of the following centuries: the distance from the first to the tenth century must have been bridged over in very much the same way as the distance between the tenth and the twentieth century. No cataclysm such as that through which English has become Beach-la-mar need on any account be invoked to explain the perfectly natural change from Latin to Old French and from Old French to Modern French.

[CHAPTER XIII]
THE WOMAN

§ 1. Women’s Languages. § 2. Tabu. § 3. Competing Languages. § 4. Sanskrit Drama. § 5. Conservatism. § 6. Phonetics and Grammar. § 7. Choice of Words. § 8. Vocabulary. § 9. Adverbs. § 10. Periods. § 11. General Characteristics.

XIII.—§ 1. Women’s Languages.

There are tribes in which men and women are said to speak totally different languages, or at any rate distinct dialects. It will be worth our while to look at the classical example of this, which is mentioned in a great many ethnographical and linguistic works, viz. the Caribs or Caribbeans of the Small Antilles. The first to mention their distinct sex dialects was the Dominican Breton, who, in his Dictionnaire Caraïbe-français (1664), says that the Caribbean chief had exterminated all the natives except the women, who had retained part of their ancient language. This is repeated in many subsequent accounts, the fullest and, as it seems, most reliable of which is that by Rochefort, who spent a long time among the Caribbeans in the middle of the seventeenth century: see his Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles (2e éd., Rotterdam, 1665, p. 449 ff.). Here he says that “the men have a great many expressions peculiar to them, which the women understand but never pronounce themselves. On the other hand, the women have words and phrases which the men never use, or they would be laughed to scorn. Thus it happens that in their conversations it often seems as if the women had another language than the men.... The savage natives of Dominica say that the reason for this is that when the Caribs came to occupy the islands these were inhabited by an Arawak tribe which they exterminated completely, with the exception of the women, whom they married in order to populate the country. Now, these women kept their own language and taught it to their daughters.... But though the boys understand the speech of their mothers and sisters, they nevertheless follow their fathers and brothers and conform to their speech from the age of five or six.... It is asserted that there is some similarity between the speech of the continental Arawaks and that of the Carib women. But the Carib men and women on the continent speak the same language, as they have never corrupted their natural speech by marriage with strange women.”

This evidently is the account which forms the basis of everything that has since been written on the subject. But it will be noticed that Rochefort does not really speak of the speech of the two sexes as totally distinct languages or dialects, as has often been maintained, but only of certain differences within the same language. If we go through the comparatively full and evidently careful glossary attached to his book, in which he denotes the words peculiar to the men by the letter H and those of the women by F, we shall see that it is only for about one-tenth of the vocabulary that such special words have been indicated to him, though the matter evidently interested him very much, so that he would make all possible efforts to elicit them from the natives. In his lists, words special to one or the other sex are found most frequently in the names of the various degrees of kinship; thus, ‘my father’ in the speech of the men in youmáan, in that of the women noukóuchili, though both in addressing him say bába; ‘my grandfather’ is itámoulou and nárgouti respectively, and thus also for maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin—all of these are different according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with the names of some, though far from all, of the different parts of the body, and with some more or less isolated words, as friend, enemy, joy, work, war, house, garden, bed, poison, tree, sun, moon, sea, earth. This list comprises nearly every notion for which Rochefort indicates separate words, and it will be seen that there are innumerable ideas for which men and women use the same word. Further, we see that where there are differences these do not consist in small deviations, such as different prefixes or suffixes added to the same root, but in totally distinct roots. Another point is very important to my mind: judging by the instances in which plural forms are given in the lists, the words of the two sexes are inflected in exactly the same way; thus the grammar is common to both, from which we may infer that we have not really to do with two distinct languages in the proper sense of the word.