PART I. ANNANCY STORIES.
When the hoes stop clicking and you hear peals of laughter from the field, you may know that somebody is telling an Annancy story. If you go out, you will find a group of Negroes round the narrator, punctuating all the good points with delighted chuckles. Their sunny faces are beaming, and at the recital of any special piece of knavery on Annancy's part ordinary means of expression fail, and they fling themselves on the ground and wriggle in convulsions of merriment.
Annancy is a legendary being whose chief characteristic is trickery. A strong and good workman, he is invariably lazy, and is only to be tempted to honest labour by the offer of a large reward. He prefers to fill the bag which he always carries, by fraud or theft. His appetite is voracious, and nothing comes amiss to him, cooked or raw. No sooner is one gluttonous feast over than he is ready for another, and endless are his shifts and devices to supply himself with food. Sometimes he will thrust himself upon an unwilling neighbour, and eat up all his breakfast. At another time he carries out his bag and brings it home full of flesh or fish obtained by thieving. He is perfectly selfish, and knows no remorse for his many deeds of violence, treachery and cruelty. His only redeeming point is a sort of hail-fellow-well-met-ness, which appeals so much to his associates that they are ready almost, if not quite, to condone his offences.
Annancy has a defect of speech owing to a cleft palate, and pronounces his words badly. He speaks somewhat like Punch, through his nose very rapidly, and uses the most countrified form of dialect. He cannot say "brother," and has to leave out the th owing to the failure of the tongue to meet the palate, so he says "bro'er." He even pretends he cannot say "puss," and turns it into "push." Strings of little words he delights in, such as, in the [Brother Death] story, the often-repeated "no mo so me no yerry," an expressive phrase difficult to render into good English. It means "I must have failed to hear." The words are "no more so me no hear," equivalent to "it must be so (that) I (do) not hear," the "no more" having something of the force of the same words in the colloquial phrases, "no more I do," "no more I will." When, for instance, to the remark, "I thought you didn't like the smell of paint," we make the rejoinder "no more I do," Priscian strives in vain to disentangle the words and reduce them to rule of syntax, but they mean "Well! I do not." Thus "no more me hear" would be "Well! I do not hear." The "so" introduces the hypothetical element and the "no" before "yerry" is a reduplicated negative.
Thus far for the sense. Now for the pronunciation. The accent indicates where the stress of the voice falls, and unless the accent is caught, the phrase will not run off the tongue. This is how it goes:
nŏ mŏ | sō mě nŏ | yerry.
As an illustration of the necessity of right placing of the accent, take the name of that town in Madagascar, which we so often saw in our papers a few years ago, Antananarivo. Most of us just nodded our heads at it, but never tried, or at least only feebly, to articulate it. With all this "an an" it was the same sort of hopeless business as the deciphering of the hieroglyphics of those writers whose words seem to be composed of nothing but m's. And yet how simple, and easy to say, the word is when we catch the accent. First "an"; then stop a little; "tánana," same values as traveller; and finally "rivo." French sounds for the vowels of course, An-tananarivo. This grouping of accents is that which in music is known as rhythm. Rightly grouped they make musical sense, wrongly grouped—and alas! how often we hear it—musical nonsense. See the stuttering hopelessness and helplessness of án-tán-án-á—there might be any number more of "an-an"s to follow, and compare with this the neat satisfying form Antánanarivo. So let no bungler read in the story of [Brother Death] "no mó so mé no yerry" with halting and panting, but let him reel off as quickly as he can "no mo so me no yerry" with just the accent that he would use in this phrase:—"It is here that I want you." Remember, too, that the o's have the open sound of Italian, and not the close sound of English. So is exactly like sol (the musical note) with the l left out, and not as we pronounce it. And above all, speed.
When the stranger lands in Jamaica and hears the rapid rush of words, and the soft, open vowels, he often says: "Why, I thought they talked English here, but it sounds like Spanish or Italian!" The difficulty in understanding a new language lies in the inability to distinguish the point where one word ends and the next begins. The old puzzle sentence, Caille a haut nid, taupe a bas nid, shows this very well. The ear catches the sound but fails to differentiate the words, and, their real identity being disguised, the listener has a sort of impression of modern Greek or Italian, writing these fragments in his brain oni, bani.
Just as hopeless is negro English to the newcomer, and the first thing to do is to set about learning it. And well it repays investigation. It is the boast of the English language that it has got rid of so much superfluous grammatical matter in the way of genders, inflections and such-like perplexities. True, it has abolished much that was evil, and enables us to speak and write shortly and to the point. But negro English goes a step further, and its form is still more concise. Compare these expressions: