“Fellow” or “feller” is another tricky one. “Feller” precedes almost every noun—“One feller house,” and so on. “Me go three feller Sunday” means “I was gone three weeks.”
A man is usually a “boy,” a woman a “mary.” But often, linguistically, a man’s a “man,” for a’ that. The personal pronoun is always masculine: “Dis feller mary he go.” Repetition gives a verb an increasing value. When you say, “He go, go, go, go, GO,” that’s a long, tired journey. Then for effect you add, “long way too much.” “Too much” means “very.” Example: “Him good feller too much”—quite a compliment.
“Senake” is “snake” or “worm,” and in hookworm lectures you refer to hatched larvae as “pickaninny senake.” “Gelass” is “glass,” and refers to a microscope, telescope or anything else with a lens in it.
The frequent use of “belong” (or “belonga”) is confusing, and “along” is worse. Loosely speaking, “belong” is possessive. “Knifie belong me” is “my knife” and about the only way to translate “Dis fellow knifie belong dis fellow mary belong house belong Keop” would be “The knife of the native woman who lives in the Captain’s house”—a pretty clumsy way of making your point. “Along” generally expresses movement or approach: “Ship stop along place.” On some remote islands, God is expressed by “Big Feller Walk along Top.”
“Blut” is blood (German), and is combined with “sabe” (Spanish) in “You altogether fellow, you sabe string belong blut?” when you want to know if everybody understands the nature of the blood stream. “Altogether fellow” expresses “everybody.”
“Kaikai” is “eat.” Your heart is a “pump,” your lungs “wind,” and when you show a hookworm picture in your lecture the “illustration” is a “ficshure.”
Their use of “behind” doesn’t express much until you are informed that it may mean either “afterward” or “pretty soon.” “Behind me show you dis feller” equals “After I have shown you this.”
To the uninitiated, pure pidgin does not make the slightest sense. German priests have learned it—and naïvely used its Chaucerian obscenities—without knowing a word of English.
In giving you just a flash of my first public success with the language, I assure you that I have anglicized it down to a point where the pidgin-wise native would have a hard time making head or tail out of it. But head or tail would be lost to the reader if I gave the unedited version.
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