Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. By Lorenzo Dow Turner. Pp. xi, 317. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. | Language | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)
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Copyright © 1950 Linguistic Society of America
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References
1 See Reed Smith, Gullah, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina 190.14–21 (1926).
2 Robert A. Hall jr., Melanesian Pidgin English: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary 7–8 (Baltimore, 1943).
3 On St. Helena Island there were 2000 slaves to 200 whites (Guion B. Johnson, A Social History of the Sea Islands with Special Reference to St. Helena Island, South Carolina 127 [Chapel Hill, 1930]). ‘On St. Helena Island today there are approximately twenty-five Negroes to one white person’ (Mason Crum, Gullah: Negro Life in the Carolina Sea Islands 54 [Durham, N. C., 1940]). On Johasee Island the plantation overseer was the only white man resident the year round (Crum 42). Plantation owners and their families normally tried to spend the malaria season, November to May, at inland or Northern resorts; see Lawrence Fay Brewster, Summer Migrations and Resorts of South Carolina Low Country Planters, Historical Papers of the Trinity College Historical Society (Durham, N. C., 1942).
4 ‘It is not likely that the African characteristics of the negroes have stood in the way of their acquiring a better English, but rather that they have learned as much from the white man as he gave them opportunity to learn’ (George P. Krapp, The English Language in America 1.253 [New York, 1925]).
Even religious instruction for the slaves proceeded slowly, in the face of objections to giving them any education at all and legal prohibitions against teaching them to write. See Crum 173–231, passim.
5 Guy B. Johnson, Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina 9–10 (Chapel Hill, 1930).
6 Edisto Island was not connected with the mainland by a bridge and causeway till 1918 (Crum 29); an all-weather road has been available for little more than a decade. On one field trip Turner was trapped on the causeway by a spring tide and had to abandon his car.
7 Peonage was not officially abolished till 1907 (ex parte Drayton et al., Federal Reporter 153.986–97. Extra-legal forms of peonage have been tolerated since that time (Crum 29).
8 Bennett, Gullah: A Negro Patois, South Atlantic Quarterly 7.332–47 (1908), 8.39–52 (1909); Smith, op.cit. (fn. 1); Johnson, Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1930); St. Helena Songs and Stories, in T. J. Woofter jr., Black Yeomanry 44–81 (New York, 1930); Stoney and Shelby, Black Genesis (New York, 1930); Gonzales, The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (Columbia, S. C., 1922); Crum, op.cit. (fn. 3).
9 Bennett, Gonzales, Stoney, and Shelby are professional writers; Smith is a folklorist with traditional philological training; Johnson is a sociologist; Crum is a religious educator. Only Johnson has undertaken any serious study of the American Negro. Accounts by Krapp and other students of the English language are largely derivative from Bennett.
10 Stoney has had some acquaintance with West Indian Negro English. Significantly, he is less inclined than most to reject the possibility of African influence.
11 Slavery, peonage, dispossession from lands acquired by purchase after the Civil War (see Crum 322–43), the disabilities of the Southern caste system, and the fanning of anti-Negro prejudice by Southern politicians have led to secretiveness and suspicion in Negro responses to white investigators; see Reed Smith 11, Crum 27, 80. For a literary interpretation of this secretiveness, see DuBose Heyward, Porgy 174–83 (New York, 1925).
Turner reports (11–2) that the late Guy S. Lowman jr., principal field worker for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, found considerable difficulty in interviewing Gullah informants, even though Turner was accompanying him. Despite the myth that Southerners understand the Negro and know how to deal with him, I encountered the same difficulty in interviewing South Carolina and Georgia Negro informants for the Atlas.
12 Possibly Southern writers on Gullah have been led to discount the possibility of African influence by their own appreciation of the psychology of the plantation owner, who would naturally not wish a large proportion of new slaves to come from any single tribe or language area, lest they be able to conspire against him in a language that he and the privileged and trusted slaves of the plantation staff could not understand.
Work on the plantations was generally performed by gangs. A new slave was customarily introduced to his task by being assigned to a gang of experienced slaves, much as replacement troops are incorporated into battle-experienced units.
13 It is not surprising that many English relic-forms seldom heard elsewhere in North America should be found in Gullah; geographical and cultural isolation would favor the retention of any forms that had once attained currency, whatever their origin.
14 ‘To express other than the simplest ideas, plain actualities, is, however, difficult’ (Bennett, South Atlantic Quarterly 7.338); ‘intellectual indolence, or laziness, mental and physical, which shows itself in the shortening of words, the elision of syllables, and modification of every difficult enunciation’ (ibid. 8.40); ‘it is the indolence, mental and physical, of the Gullah dialect that is its most characteristic feature’ (ibid. 8.49).—‘Gullah, that quaint linguistic mongrel’ (E. Stanhope Sams, Preface to Reed Smith's Gullah, 5).— ‘Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers and by the white servants of the wealthier colonists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was gradually adopted by the other slaves’ (Gonzales, Black Border 10).— ‘Simple language concepts of the unseasoned slaves . . . with their simple dialects’ (Crum 113).
This traditional interpretation appears to stem from Bennett's article; examination of later interpretations of Gullah shows that even much of Bennett's phraseology has been taken over practically unchanged. See for instance G. P. Krapp, The English of the Negro, American Mercury 2.193 (1924).
It should not be necessary to refute the myth that phonemic systems and allophones are racially determined; yet as late as 1949 an allegedly scientific newspaper column (A. E. Wiggam, Let's Explore Your Mind, 3 July 1949) announced that the Negro is unable to pronounce post-vocalic /-r/ because his lips are too thick.
Attribution of features of Gullah phonology to English peasant speech is probably fanciful, since peasantry made up a relatively small proportion of the pre-Revolutionary settlers; see Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (New York, 1938). The rapid tempo of Gullah speech is evidence enough that the alleged indolence is a purely mythical explanation.
15 ‘To a person who is not familiar with West African culture, it might seem possible to explain Gullah culture entirely in terms of western influence’ (W. R. Bascom, Acculturation among the Gullah Negroes, American Anthropologist N.S. 43.43–50 [1941]).
16 One may suggest that, despite possible African etyma, it is unlikely that the personal names [|pidi] and [|kusn] are of African origin, to say nothing of the place names Coosaw, Pedee, Tybee, Wahoo, Wando, and Wassaw (307). The Pedee were one of the Siouan tribes in South Carolina; Coosaw, especially in the longer place name Coosawhatchie, is probably Muskoghean. The possibility that any of the coastal place names in Georgia are of African origin is remote, since that colony prohibited slavery in its original organization under Oglethorpe.
17 1 have recently learned that Turner some time ago completed the manuscript of such a sketch; its publication, however, is not likely in the near future.
18 Emphasis on vocabulary borrowings can lead to such basic misinterpretations of linguistic method as the statement sometimes heard that, because of its many lexical items derived from Romance, English is now no longer a Germanic but a ‘mixed language’.
19 Nathaniel Hey ward, greatest of the rice planters, always bought ‘fresh Africans as long as that cheap supply remained available’ (Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery 249–50 [New York, 1918], quoted by Crum 44–5).
20 All these writers, most of them white Southerners, reason from common linguistic misconceptions, which may be summarized as follows:
- (1)
(1) Any form different from what I call standard is therefore inferior. - (2)
(2) Any form associated with a less privileged social class is therefore inferior. - (3)
(3) Any form associated with a caste to which the stigma of inferiority is attached is therefore inferior.
The fallaciousness of such assumptions, and of others on which the traditional attitudes toward American Negro culture have been based, is pointed out in M. J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941).
21 The instability of Gullah personal names and the discrepancy between Gullah name-giving practices and those of white Americans was noted particularly by Northern white teachers brought South by the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War to staff the new schools for Negroes. See Crum 313.
22 In Some Sources of Southernisms (University, Alabama, 1948), M. M. Mathews attempts to derive the folk term doney ‘sweetheart’ through a Gullah personal name from the latter's suggested African etymon, Bambara [|doni] ‘a burden’. However, the Linguistic Atlas records doney most frequently in areas where there is least reason to suspect Negro influence: the Shenandoah Valley and central and western North Carolina.
23 Preliminary field work in the South, and all records from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina were made by Lowman prior to 1941. Field work in South Carolina, eastern Georgia, and northeastern Florida was completed by me in the summer of 1941 and in 1946–8, under grants from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the American Council of Learned Societies.
24 See Julian J. Petty, The Growth and Distribution of Population in South Carolina, State Planning Board, Bulletin 11 (Columbia, S. C, 1943).
25 Pinto is used chiefly for the old-fashioned hexagonal coffin (occasionally pentagonal, with the omission of the foot board); informants often explain the name by commenting that the narrowness of the coffin pins the corpse's toes together—a spurious etymology which was seldom questioned prior to Turner's investigations.
26 Despite possible Kongo (Angola) and Kikongo (Belgian Congo) etyma, and suggested related words from other African languages, it is problematical whether Southern tote ‘to carry’ is really of African origin. True, tote in this sense is characteristic of the Southeastern States; but tote road, tote team, tote wagon, and tote sled, as well as tote itself (more often meaning ‘to haul’ than ‘to carry‘) have been recorded in northern New England, upstate New York, northern Michigan, and northern Minnesota, where African influence is unlikely. Despite the fact that no satisfactory English etymon for tote has been proposed, its occurrence in these Northern states suggests that such an etymon is nevertheless probable, and that the prevalence of tote in the South Atlantic States may be due to reinforcement by a homonymous synonym of African origin rather than to African sources alone.
Turner does not list tacky ‘horse’, generally recorded along the South Carolina Coast in the form marsh tacky, and often supposed to be of African origin. Presumably the proposed African etyma are dubious.
27 It would have been very useful if Turner had indicated the geographical distribution within the Gullah country of each lexical item, including personal names. In an earlier report, he suggested that groups of words and names traceable to particular African languages were found clustered in particular Gullah communities, and that this geographical distribution can be correlated with the pattern of slave settlement. See Linguistic Research and African Survivals, ACLS Bulletin 32.73 (1941).
28 It is interesting, and hardly coincidental, that the morphemes [da] ‘a verb of incomplete predication’ and [pas], used to introduce a term of comparison, correspond to similarly used morphemes in Taki-Taki and Haitian Creole respectively. See R. A. Hall jr., The Linguistic Structure of Taki-Taki, Lg. 24.100-1, 109 (1948); Suzanne Silvain-Comhaire, Le créole haītien: Morphologie et syntaxe 43–4, 50 (Wetteren and Port-au-Prince, 1936).
29 An onomatopoetic variant /
, -dùŋk/ seems to be confined to the Georgetown area.
30 Such phrases as put the mouth on ‘hex’ are also frequently heard, and are considered to be of Negro origin.
31 The significance of similarities in phonemic structure rather than in phonetic details was pointed out by Sapir, Sound Patterns in Language, Lg. 1.37–51 (1925).
32 See Diedrich Westermann and Ida C. Ward, Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages (London, 1933).
33 This uniformity is shown in Turner's field records, now in the files of the Linguistic Atlas. It was confirmed by Lowman in a report to Kurath after Lowman had made sample recordings from all of Turner's principal informants.
34 Such a phonemic distinction occurs, for instance, in my own speech between the stressed syllabics of ribbing /ríbɨn/ and ribbon /rɨbən/. See G. L. Trager and H. L. Smith jr., An Outline of English Phonology, preliminary draft (Washington, 1949).
35 See Trager, The Theory of Accentual Systems, Sapir Memorial Volume 131–45 (Mentha, Wis., 1941).
36 See for instance Bennett, South Atlantic Quarterly 7.337; Johnson, Folk Culture on St. Helena Island 17.
37 Such as was constructed by R. S. Wells, The Pitch Phonemes of English, Lg. 21.27–39 (1945), or by K. L. Pike, The Intonation of American English (Ann Arbor, 1945).
38 G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch, The Syllabic Phonemes of English, Lg. 17.223–46 (1941); W. E. Welmers, A Descriptive Grammar of Fanti 20–3 (Lang. Diss. 39, 1946); C. T. Hodge, An Outline of Hausa Grammar 17 (Lang. Diss. 41, 1947).
39 The occurrence of this story (in telling it the informant used the African-derived cooter ‘turtle‘) is interesting because the Catawba not only lived very far inland but traditionally avoided contact with Negroes and were in turn avoided by them.
40 J. H. Greenberg, Some Problems in Hausa Phonology, Lg. 17.316–23 (1941); W. E. Welmers and Z. S. Harris, The Phonemes of Fanti, JAOS 62.318–33 (1942); C. T. Hodge and E. E. Hause, Hausa Tone, JAOS 64.51–2 (1944); and the references cited in fn. 38.
41 The implications are not confined to the linguistic interpretation of Gullah. Obviously, the demonstration of a persisting African linguistic heritage suggests the persistence of other African cultural traits, and controverts the Southern myth of Negro inferiority and cultural poverty. An awareness of these implications of Turner's book is probably responsible for some Charlestonians labeling favorable press notices elsewhere as ‘nigger propaganda’, and for the fact that no Charleston newspaper has yet published a review of the book, though one was written by request.
42 The Intonation of American English 105–6.