Chereads / Super English / Chapter 28 - 28. Varieties of English (Part-7)

Chapter 28 - 28. Varieties of English (Part-7)

Harris, born in 1848 in Eatonton, Georgia, was a painfully shy newspaperman

with a pronounced stammer who grew up deeply ashamed that he was

illegitimate. He became fascinated with the fables and language of former slaves

during the period just after the Civil War and recorded them with exacting

diligence in stories that were published first in the Atlanta Constitution and later

compiled into books that enjoyed a considerable popularity both in his lifetime

and after it. The formula was to present the stories as if they were being told by

Uncle Remus to the small son of a plantation owner. Among the best known

were Nights with Uncle Remus (1881), The Tar Baby (1904), and Uncle Remus

and Br'er Rabbit (igo6). All of these employed the patois spoken by mainland

blacks.

But Harris also produced a series of Gullah stories, based on a character called

Daddy Jack. This was a considerably different dialect, though Harris thought it

simpler and more direct. It had— indeed still has—no gender and no plurals.

Dem can refer to one item or to hundreds. Apart from a few lingering West

African terms like churrah for splash, dafa for fat, and yeddy or yerry for hear,

the vocabulary is now almost entirely English, though many of the words don't

exist in mainstream English. Dayclean, for instance, means "dawn" and trut

mout (literally "truth mouth") means "a truthful speaker." Other words are

truncated and pronounced in ways that make them all but unidentifiable to the

uninitiated. Nead is Gullah for underneath. Learn is lun, thirsty is tusty, the other

is turrer, going is gwan.

Without any doubt, the most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan

da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America.

Tristan is the most isolated inhabited place in the world, 1,500 miles from the

nearest landfall, and the local language reflects the fact. Although the inhabitants

have the dark looks of the Portuguese who first inhabited the islands, the family

names of the Soo-odd islanders are mostly English, as is their language—though

with certain quaint differences reflecting their long isolation from the rest of the

world. It is often endearingly ungrammatical. People don't say "How are you?"

but "How you is?" It also has many wholly local terms. Pennemin is a penguin;

watrem is a stream. But perhaps most strikingly, spellings are often loose. Many

islanders are called Donald, but the name is always spelled Dondall. Evidently

one of the first users misspelled it that way generations ago and the spelling

stuck.