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.