Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

XII.—§ 1. Beach-la-Mar.

As a first typical example of a whole class of languages now found in many parts of the world where people of European civilization have come into contact with men of other races, we may take the so-called Beach-la-mar (or Beche-le-mar, or Beche de mer English);[48] it is also sometimes called Sandalwood English. It is spoken and understood all over the Western Pacific, its spread being largely due to the fact that the practice of ‘blackbirding’ often brought together on the same plantation many natives from different islands with mutually incomprehensible languages, whose only means of communication was the broken English they had picked up from the whites. And now the natives learn this language from each other, while in many places the few Europeans have to learn it from the islanders. “Thus the native use of Pidgin-English lays down the rules by which the Europeans let themselves be guided when learning it. Even Englishmen do not find it quite easy at the beginning to understand Pidgin-English, and have to learn it before they are able to speak it properly” (Landtman).

I shall now try to give some idea of the structure of this lingo.

The vocabulary is nearly all English. Even most of the words which ultimately go back to other languages have been admitted only because the English with whom the islanders were thrown into contact had previously adopted them into their own speech, so that the islanders were justified in believing that they were really English. This is true of the Spanish or Portuguese savvy, ‘to know,’ and pickaninny, ‘child’ or ‘little one’ (a favourite in many languages on account of its symbolic sound; see Ch. XX § 8), as well as the Amerindian tomahawk, which in the whole of Australia is the usual word for a small axe. And if we find in Beach-la-mar the two Maori words tapu or taboo and kai, or more often kaikai, ‘to eat’ or ‘food,’ they have probably got into the language through English—we know that both are very extensively used in Australia, while the former is known all over the civilized world. Likkilik or liklik, ‘small, almost,’ is said to be from a Polynesian word liki, but may be really a perversion of Engl. little. Landtman gives a few words from unknown languages used by the Kiwais, though not derived from their own language. The rest of the words found in my sources are English, though not always pure English, in so far as their signification is often curiously distorted.

Nusipepa means ‘a letter, any written or printed document,’ mary is the general term for ‘woman’ (cf. above, p. 118), pisupo (peasoup) for all foreign foods which are preserved in tins; squareface, the sailor’s name for a square gin-bottle, is extended to all forms of glassware, no matter what the shape. One of the earliest seafarers is said to have left a bull and a cow on one of the islands and to have mentioned these two words together; the natives took them as one word, and now bullamacow or pulumakau means ‘cattle, beef, also tinned beef’; pulomokau is now given as a native word in a dictionary of the Fijian language.[49] Bulopenn, which means ‘ornament,’ is said to be nothing but the English blue paint. All this shows the purely accidental character of many of the linguistic acquisitions of the Polynesians.

As the vocabulary is extremely limited, composite expressions are sometimes resorted to in order to express ideas for which we have simple words, and not unfrequently the devices used appear to us very clumsy or even comical. A piano is called ‘big fellow bokus (box) you fight him he cry,’ and a concertina ‘little fellow bokus you shove him he cry, you pull him he cry.’ Woman he got faminil (‘family’) inside means ‘she is with child.’ Inside is also used extensively about mental states: jump inside ‘be startled,’ inside tell himself ‘to consider,’ inside bad ‘grieved or sorry,’ feel inside ‘to know,’ feel another kind inside ‘to change one’s mind.’ My throat he fast ‘I was dumb.’ He took daylight a long time ‘lay awake.’ Bring fellow belong make open bottle ‘bring me a corkscrew.’ Water belong stink ‘perfumery.’ The idea of being bald is thus expressed: grass belong head belong him all he die finish, or with another variant, coconut belong him grass no stop, for coconut is taken from English slang in the sense ‘head’ (Schuchardt has the sentence: You no savvy that fellow white man coconut belong him no grass?). For ‘feather’ the combination grass belong pigeon is used, pigeon being a general term for any bird.

A man who wanted to borrow a saw, the word for which he had forgotten, said: ‘You give me brother belong tomahawk, he come he go.’ A servant who had been to Queensland, where he saw a train, on his return called it ‘steamer he walk about along bush.’ Natives who watched Landtman when he enclosed letters in envelopes named the latter ‘house belong letter.’ Many of these expressions are thus picturesque descriptions made on the spur of the moment if the proper word is not known.

XII.—§ 2. Grammar.

These phrases have already illustrated some points of the very simple grammar of this lingo. Words have only one form, and what is in our language expressed by flexional forms is either left unexpressed or else indicated by auxiliary words. The plural of nouns is like the singular (though the form men is found in my texts alongside of man); when necessary, the plural is indicated by means of a prefixed all: all he talk ‘they say’ (also him fellow all ‘they’); all man ‘everybody’; a more indefinite plural is plenty man or full up man. For ‘we’ is said me two fella or me three fellow, as the case may be; me two fellow Lagia means ‘I and Lagia.’ If there are more, me altogether man or me plenty man may be said, though we is also in use. Fellow (fella) is a much-vexed word; it is required, or at any rate often used, after most pronouns, thus, that fellow hat, this fellow knife, me fellow, you fellow, him fellow (not he fellow); it is found very often after an adjective and seems to be required to prop up the adjective before the substantive: big fellow name, big fellow tobacco, another fellow man. In other cases no fellow is used, and it seems difficult to give definite rules; after a numeral it is frequent: two fellow men (man?), three fellow bottle. There is a curious employment in ten fellow ten one fellow, which means 101. It is used adverbially in that man he cry big fellow ‘he cries loudly.’

The genitive is expressed by means of belong (or belong-a, long, along), which also serves for other prepositional relations. Examples: tail belong him, pappa belong me, wife belong you, belly belong me walk about too much (I was seasick), me savvee talk along white man; rope along bush means liana. Missis! man belong bullamacow him stop (the butcher has come). What for you wipe hands belong-a you on clothes belong esseppoon? (spoon, i.e. napkin). Cf. above the expressions for ‘bald.’ Piccaninny belong banana ‘a young b. plant.’ Belong also naturally means ‘to live in, be a native of’; boy belong island, he belong Burri-burrigan. The preposition along is used about many local relations (in, at, on, into, on board). From such combinations as laugh along (l. at) and he speak along this fella the transition is easy to cases in which along serves to indicate the indirect object: he give’m this fella Eve along Adam, and also a kind of direct object, as in fight alonga him, you gammon along me (deceive, lie to me), and with the form belong: he puss-puss belong this fellow (puss-puss orig. a cat, then as a verb to caress, make love to).

There is no distinction of gender: that woman he brother belong me = ‘she is my sister’; he (before the verb) and him (in all other positions) serve both for he, she and it. There is a curious use of ’m, um or em, in our texts often written him, after a verb as a ‘vocal sign of warning that an object of the verb is to follow,’ no matter what that object is.

Churchill says that “in the adjective comparison is unknown; the islanders do not know how to think comparatively—at least, they lack the form of words by which comparison may be indicated; this big, that small is the nearest they can come to the expression of the idea that one thing is greater than another.” But Landtman recognizes more big and also more better: ‘no good make him that fashion, more better make him all same.’ The same double comparative I find in another place, used as a kind of verb meaning ‘ought to, had better’: more better you come out. Too simply means ‘much’: he savvy too much ‘he knows much’ (praise, no blame), he too much talk. A synonym is plenty too much. Schuchardt gives the explanation of this trait: “The white man was the teacher of the black man, who imitated his manner of speaking. But the former would constantly use the strongest expressions and exaggerate in a manner that he would only occasionally resort to in speaking to his own countrymen. He did not say, ‘You are very lazy,’ but ‘You are too lazy,’ and this will account for the fact that ‘very’ is called too much in Beach-la-mar as well as tumussi in the Negro-English of Surinam” (Spr. der Saramakkaneger, p. iv).

Verbs have no tense-forms; when required, a future may be indicated by means of by and by: brother belong-a-me by and by he dead (my br. is dying), bymby all men laugh along that boy; he small now, bymbye he big. It may be qualified by additions like bymby one time, bymby little bit, bymby big bit, and may be used also of the ‘postpreterit’ (of futurity relative to a past time): by and by boy belong island he speak. Another way of expressing the future is seen in that woman he close up born (!) him piccaninny ‘that woman will shortly give birth to a child.’ The usual sign of the perfect is been, the only idiomatic form of the verb to be: you been take me along three year; I been look round before. But finish may also be used: me look him finish (I have seen him), he kaikai all finish (he has eaten it all up).

Where we should expect forms of the verb ‘to be,’ there is either no verb or else stop is used: no water stop (there is no water), rain he stop (it rains), two white men stop Matupi (live in), other day plenty money he stop (... I had ...). For ‘have’ they say got. My belly no got kaikai (I am hungry), he got good hand (is skilful).

XII.—§ 3. Sounds.

About the phonetic structure of Beach-la-mar I have very little information; as a rule the words in my sources are spelt in the usual English way. Churchill speaks in rather vague terms about difficulties which the islanders experience in imitating the English sounds, and especially groups of consonants: “Any English word which on experiment proved impracticable to the islanders has undergone alteration to bring it within the scope of their familiar range of sounds or has been rejected for some facile synonym.” Thus, according to him, the conjunction if could not be used on account of the f, and that is the reason for the constant use of suppose (s’pose, pose, posum = s’pose him)—but it may be allowable to doubt this, for as a matter of fact f occurs very frequently in the language—for instance, in the well-worn words fellow and finish. Suppose probably is preferred to if because it is fuller in form and less abstract, and therefore easier to handle, while the islanders have many occasions to hear it in other combinations than those in which it is an equivalent of the conjunction.

Landtman says that with the exception of a few sounds (j, ch, and th as in nothing) the Kiwai Papuans have little difficulty in pronouncing English words.

Schuchardt gives a little more information about pronunciation, and instances esterrong = strong, esseppoon = spoon, essaucepen = saucepan, pellate = plate, coverra = cover, millit = milk, bock-kiss = box (in Churchill bokus, bokkis) as mutilations due to the native speech habits. He also gives the following letter from a native of the New Hebrides, communicated to him by R. H. Codrington; it shows many sound substitutions:

This means as much as:

There are evidently many degrees of approximation to the true English sounds.

This letter also shows the characteristic tendency to add a vowel, generally a short i, to words ending in consonants. This is old, for I find in Defoe’s Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719, p. 211): “All those natives, as also those of Africa, when they learn English, they always add two E’s at the end of the words where we use one, and make the accent upon them, as makee, takee and the like.” (Note the un-phonetic expressions!) Landtman, besides this addition, as in belongey, also mentions a more enigmatic one of lo to words ending in vowels, as clylo for ‘cry’ (cf. below on Pidgin).

XII.—§ 4. Pidgin.

I now turn to Pidgin-English. As is well known, this is the name of the jargon which is very extensively used in China, and to some extent also in Japan and California, as a means of communication between English-speaking people and the yellow population. The name is derived from the Chinese distortion of the Engl. word business. Unfortunately, the sources available for Pidgin-English as actually spoken in the East nowadays are neither so full nor so exact as those for Beach-la-mar, and the following sketch, therefore, is not quite satisfactory.[50]

Pidgin-English must have developed pretty soon after the first beginning of commercial relations between the English and Chinese. In Engl. Studien, 44. 298, Prick van Wely has printed some passages of C. F. Noble’s Voyage to the East Indies in 1747 and 1748, in which the Chinese are represented as talking to the writer in a “broken and mixed dialect of English and Portuguese,” the specimens given corresponding pretty closely to the Pidgin of our own days. Thus, he no cari Chinaman’s Joss, hap oter Joss, which is rendered, ‘that man does not worship our god, but has another god’; the Chinese are said to be unable to pronounce r and to use the word chin-chin for compliments and pickenini for ‘small.’

The latter word seems now extinct in Pidgin proper, though we have met it in Beach-la-mar, but Joss is still very frequent in Pidgin: it is from Portuguese Deus, Deos (or Span. Dios): Joss-house is a temple or church, Joss-pidgin religion, Joss-pidgin man a clergyman, topside Joss-pidgin man a bishop. Chin-chin, according to the same source, is from Chinese ts’ing-ts’ing, Pekingese ch’ing-ch’ing, a term of salutation answering to ‘thank you, adieu,’ but the English have extended its sphere of application very considerably, using it as a noun meaning ‘salutation, compliment,’ and as a verb meaning “to worship (by bowing and striking the chin), to reverence, adore, implore, to deprecate anger, to wish one something, invite, ask” (Leland). The explanation given here within parentheses shows how the Chinese word has been interpreted by popular etymology, and no doubt it owes its extensive use partly to its sound, which has taken the popular fancy. Chin-chin joss means religious worship of any kind.

Simpson says: “Many of the words in use are of unknown origin. In a number of cases the English suppose them to be Chinese, while the Chinese, on the other hand, take them to be English.” Some of these, however, admit now of explanation, and not a few of them point to India, where the English have learnt them and brought them further East. Thus chit, chitty, ‘a letter, an account,’ is Hindustani chiṭṭhī; godown ‘warehouse’ is an English popular interpretation of Malay gadong, from Tamil giḍangi. Chowchow seems to be real Chinese and to mean ‘mixed preserves,’ but in Pidgin it has acquired the wider signification of ‘food, meal, to eat,’ besides having various other applications: a chowchow cargo is an assorted cargo, a ‘general shop’ is a chowchow shop. Cumshaw ‘a present’ is Chinese. But tiffin, which is used all over the East for ‘lunch,’ is really an English word, properly tiffing, from the slang verb to tiff, to drink, esp. to drink out of meal-times. In India it was applied to the meal, and then reintroduced into England and believed to be a native Indian word.

XII.—§ 5. Grammar, etc.

Among points not found in Beach-la-mar I shall mention the extensive use of piecee, which in accordance with Chinese grammar is required between a numeral and the noun indicating what is counted; thus in a Chinaman’s description of a three-masted screw steamer with two funnels: “Thlee piecee bamboo, two piecee puff-puff, walk-along inside, no can see” (walk-along = the engine). Side means any locality: he belongey China-side now (he is in China), topside above, or high, bottom-side below, farside beyond, this-side here, allo-side around. In a similar way time (pronounced tim or teem) is used in that-tim then, when, what-tim when? one-tim once, only, two-tim twice, again, nother-tim again.

In one respect the Chinese sound system is accountable for a deviation from Beach-la-mar, namely in the substitution of l for r: loom, all light for ‘room, all right,’ etc., while the islanders often made the inverse change. But the tendency to add a vowel after a final consonant is the same: makee, too muchee, etc. The enigmatic termination lo, which Landtman found in some words in New Guinea, is also added to some words ending in vowel sounds in Pidgin, according to Leland, who instances die-lo, die; in his texts I find the additional examples buy-lo, say-lo, pay-lo, hear-lo, besides wailo, or wylo, which is probably from away; it means ‘go away, away with you! go, depart, gone.’ Can it be the Chinese sign of the past tense la, lao, generalized?

Among usual expressions must be mentioned number one (numpa one) ‘first-class, excellent,’ catchee ‘get, possess, hold, bring,’ etc., ploper (plopa) ‘proper, good, nice, correct’: you belong ploper? ‘are you well?’

Another word which was not in use among the South Sea islanders, namely have, in the form hab or hap is often used in Pidgin, even to form the perfect. Belong (belongy) is nearly as frequent as in Beach-la-mar, but is used in a different way: ‘My belongy Consoo boy,’ ‘I am the Consul’s servant.’ ‘You belong clever inside,’ ‘you are intelligent.’ The usual way of asking the price of something is ‘how much belong?’

XII.—§ 6. General Theory.

Lingos of the same type as Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English are found in other parts of the world where whites and natives meet and have to find some medium of communication. Thus a Danish doctor living in Belgian Congo sends me a few specimens of the ‘Pidgin’ spoken there: to indicate that his master has received many letters from home, the ‘boy’ will say, “Massa catch plenty mammy-book” (mammy meaning ‘woman, wife’). Breeze stands for air in general; if the boy wants to say that he has pumped up the bicycle tyres, he will say, “Plenty breeze live for inside,” live, being here the general term for ‘to be’ (Beach-l. stop); ‘is your master in?’ becomes ‘Massa live?’ and the answer is ‘he no live’ or ‘he live for hup’ (i.e. he is upstairs). If a man has a stomach-ache he will say ‘he hurt me for belly plenty too much’—too much is thus used exactly as in Beach-la-mar and Chinese Pidgin. The similarity of all these jargons, in spite of unavoidable smaller differences, is in fact very striking indeed.

It may be time now to draw the moral of all this. And first I want to point out that these languages are not ‘mixed languages’ in the proper sense of that term. Churchill is not right when he says that Beach-la-mar “gathered material from every source, it fused them all.” As a matter of fact, it is English, and nothing but English, with very few admixtures, and all of these are such words as had previously been adopted into the English speech of those classes of the population, sailors, etc., with whom the natives came into contact: they were therefore justified in their belief that these words formed part of the English tongue and that what they learned themselves was real English. The natives really adhere to Windisch’s rule about the adoption of loan-words (above, XI § 10). If there are more Chinese words in Pidgin than there are Polynesian ones in Beach-la-mar, this is a natural consequence of the fact that the Chinese civilization ranked incomparably much higher than the Polynesian, and that therefore the English living in China would adopt these words into their own speech. Still, their number is not very large. And we have seen that there are some words which the Easterners must naturally suppose to be English, while the English think that they belong to the vernacular, and in using them each party is thus under the delusion that he is rendering a service to the other.

This leads me to my second point: those deviations from correct English, those corruptions of pronunciation and those simplifications of grammar, which have formed the object of this short sketch, are due just as much to the English as to the Easterners, and in many points they began with the former rather than with the latter (cf. Schuchardt, Auf anlass des Volapüks, 1888, 8; KS 4. 35, SlD 36; ESt 15. 292). From Schuchardt I take the following quotation: “The usual question on reaching the portico of an Indian bungalow is, Can missus see?—it being a popular superstition amongst the Europeans that to enable a native to understand English he must be addressed as if he were deaf, and in the most infantile language.” This tendency to meet the ‘inferior races’ half-way in order to facilitate matters for them is by Churchill called “the one supreme axiom of international philology: the proper way to make a foreigner understand what you would say is to use broken English. He speaks it himself, therefore give him what he uses.” We recognize here the same mistaken notion that we have seen above in the language of the nursery, where mothers and others will talk a curious sort of mangled English which is believed to represent real babytalk, though it has many traits which are purely conventional. In both cases these more or less artificial perversions are thought to be an aid to those who have not yet mastered the intricacies of the language in question, though the ultimate result is at best a retardation of the perfect acquisition of correct speech.

My view, then, is that Beach-la-mar as well as Pidgin is English, only English learnt imperfectly, in consequence partly of the difficulties always inherent in learning a totally different language, partly of the obstacles put in the way of learning by the linguistic behaviour of the English-speaking people themselves. The analogy of its imperfections with those of a baby’s speech in the first period is striking, and includes errors of pronunciation, extreme simplification of grammar, scantiness of vocabulary, even to such peculiarities as that the word too is apprehended in the sense of ‘very much,’ and such phrases as you better go, etc.

XII.—§ 7. Mauritius Creole.

The view here advanced on the character of these ‘Pidgin’ languages is corroborated when we see that other languages under similar circumstances have been treated in exactly the same way as English. With regard to French in the island of Mauritius, formerly Ile de France, we are fortunate in possessing an excellent treatment of the subject by M. C. Baissac (Étude sur le Patois Créole Mauricien, Nancy, 1880; cf. the same writer’s Le Folk-lore de l’Ile-Maurice, Paris, 1888, Les littératures populaires, tome xxvii). The island was uninhabited when the French occupied it in 1715; a great many slaves were imported from Madagascar, and as a means of intercourse between them and their French masters a French Creole language sprang up, which has survived the English conquest (1810) and the subsequent wholesale introduction of coolies from India and elsewhere. The paramount element in the vocabulary is French; one may read many pages in Baissac’s texts without coming across any foreign words, apart from the names of some indigenous animals and plants. In the phonetic structure there are a few all-pervading traits: the front-round vowels are replaced by the corresponding unrounded vowels or in a few cases by [u], and instead of [ʃ, ʒ] we find [s, z]; thus éré heureux, éne plime une plume, sakéne chacun(e), zize juge, zunu genou, suval cheval: I replace Baissac’s notation, which is modelled on the French spelling, by a more phonetic one according to his own indications; but I keep his final e muet.

The grammar of this language is as simple as possible. Substantives have the same form for the two numbers: dé suval deux chevaux. There is no definite article. The adjective is invariable, thus also sa for ce, cet, cette, ces, ceci, cela, celui, celle, ceux, celles. Mo before a verb is ‘I,’ before a substantive it is possessive: mo koné I know, mo lakaze my house; in the same way to is you and your, but in the third person a distinction is made, for li is he or she, but his or her is so, and here we have even a plural, zaute from ‘les autres,’ which form is also used as a plural of the second person: mo va alle av zaut, I shall go with you.

The genitive is expressed by word-order without any preposition: lakase so papa his father’s house; also with so before the nominative: so piti ppa Azor old Azor’s child.

The form in which the French words have been taken over presents some curious features, and in some cases illustrates the difficulty the blacks felt in separating the words which they heard in the French utterance as one continuous stream of sounds. There is evidently a disinclination to begin a word with a vowel, and sometimes an initial vowel is left out, as bitation habitation, tranzé étranger, but in other cases z is taken from the French plural article: zozo oiseau, zistoire, zenfan, zimaze image, zalfan éléphant, zanimo animal, or n from the French indefinite article: name ghost, nabi (or zabi) habit. In many cases the whole French article is taken as an integral part of the word, as lérat rat, léroi, licien chien, latabe table, lére heure (often as a conjunction ‘when’); thus also with the plural article lizié from les yeux, but without the plural signification: éne lizié an eye. Similarly éne lazoie a goose. Words that are often used in French with the so-called partitive article keep this; thus disel salt, divin wine, duri rice, éne dipin a loaf; here also we meet with one word from the French plural: éne dizéf an egg, from des œufs. The French mass-word with the partitive article du monde has become dimunde or dumune, and as it means ‘people’ and no distinction is made between plural and singular, it is used also for ‘person’: éne vié dimunde an old man.

Verbs have only one form, generally from the French infinitive or past participle, which in most cases would fall together (manzé = manger, mangé; kuri = courir, couru); this serves for all persons in both numbers and all moods. But tenses are indicated by means of auxiliary words: va for the future, té (from été) for the ordinary past, and fine for the perfect: mo manzé I eat, mo va manzé I shall eat, mo té manzé I ate, mo fine manzé I have eaten, mo fine fini I have finished. Further, there is a curious use of aprè to express what in English are called the progressive or expanded tenses: mo aprè manzé I am eating, mo té aprè manzé I was eating, and of pour to express the immediate future: mo pour manzé I am going to eat, and finally an immediate past may be expressed by fék: mo fék manzé I have just been eating (je ne fais que de manger). As these may be combined in various ways (mo va fine manzé I shall have eaten, even mo té va fék manzé I should have eaten a moment ago, etc.), the language has really succeeded in building up a very fine and rich verbal system with the simplest possible means and with perfect regularity.

The French separate negatives have been combined into one word each: napa not (there is not), narien nothing, and similarly nék only.

In many cases the same form is used for a substantive or adjective and for a verb: mo soif, mo faim I am thirsty and hungry; li content so madame he is fond of his wife.

Côte (or à côte) is a preposition ‘by the side of, near,’ but also means ‘where’: la case àcote li resté ‘the house in which he lives’; cf. Pidgin side.

In all this, as will easily be seen, there is very little French grammar; this will be especially evident when we compare the French verbal system with its many intricacies: difference according to person, number, tense and mood with their endings, changes of root-vowels and stress-place, etc., with the unchanged verbal root and the invariable auxiliary syllables of the Creole. But there is really as little in the Creole dialect of Malagasy grammar, as I have ascertained by looking through G. W. Parker’s Grammar (London, 1883): both nations in forming this means of communication have, as it were, stripped themselves of all their previous grammatical habits and have spoken as if their minds were just as innocent of grammar as those of very small babies, whether French or Malagasy. Thus, and thus only, can it be explained that the grammar of this variety of French is for all practical purposes identical with the grammar of those two varieties of English which we have previously examined in this chapter.

No one can read Baissac’s collection of folk-tales from Mauritius without being often struck with the felicity and even force of this language, in spite of its inevitable naïveté and of the childlike simplicity of its constructions. If it were left to itself it might develop into a really fine idiom without abandoning any of its characteristic traits. But as it is, it seems to be constantly changing through the influence of real French, which is more and more taught to and imitated by the islanders, and the day may come when most of the features described in this rapid sketch will have given place to something which is less original, but will be more readily understood by Parisian globe-trotters who may happen to visit the distant island.

XII.—§ 8. Chinook Jargon.

The view here advanced may be further put to the test if we examine a totally different language developed in another part of the world, viz. in Oregon. I give its history in an abridged form from Hale.[51] When the first British and American trading ships appeared on the north-west coast of America, towards the end of the eighteenth century, they found a great number of distinct languages, the Nootka, Nisqually, Chinook, Chihailish and others, all of them harsh in pronunciation, complex in structure, and each spoken over a very limited space. The traders learnt a few Nootka words and the Indians a few English words. Afterwards the traders began to frequent the Columbia River, and naturally attempted to communicate with the natives there by means of the words which they had found intelligible at Nootka. The Chinooks soon acquired these words, both Nootka and English. When later the white traders made permanent establishments in Oregon, a real language was required; and it was formed by drawing upon the Chinook for such words as were requisite, numerals, pronouns, and some adverbs and other words. Thus enriched, ‘the Jargon,’ as it now began to be styled, became of great service as a means of general intercourse. Now, French Canadians in the service of the fur companies were brought more closely into contact with the Indians, hunted with them, and lived with them on terms of familiarity. The consequence was that several French words were added to the slender stock of the Jargon, including the names of various articles of food and clothing, implements, several names of the parts of the body, and the verbs to run, sing and dance, also one conjunction, puis, reduced to pi.

“The origin of some of the words is rather whimsical. The Americans, British and French are distinguished by the terms Boston, Kinchotsh (King George), and pasaiuks, which is presumed to be the word Français (as neither f, r nor the nasal n can be pronounced by the Indians) with the Chinook plural termination uks added.... ‘Foolish’ is expressed by pelton or pilton, derived from the name of a deranged person, one Archibald Pelton, whom the Indians saw at Astoria; his strange appearance and actions made such an impression upon them, that thenceforward anyone behaving in an absurd or irrational manner” was termed pelton.

The phonetic structure is very simple, and contains no sound or combination that is not easy to Englishmen and Frenchmen as well as to Indians of at least a dozen tribes. The numerous harsh Indian velars either disappear entirely or are softened to h and k. On the other hand, the d, f, r, v, z of the English and French become in the mouth of a Chinook t, p, l, w, s. Examples:

The forms in parentheses are those of the French glossary (1853).

It will be noticed that many of the French words have the definite article affixed (a trait noticed in many words in the French Creole dialect of Mauritius). More than half of the words in Hale’s glossary beginning with l have this origin, thus labutai bottle, lakloa cross, lamie an old woman (la vieille), lapushet fork (la fourchette), latlá noise (faire du train), lidú finger, lejaub (or diaub, yaub) devil (le diable), léma hand, liplét missionary (le prêtre), litá tooth. The plural article is found in lisáp egg (les œufs)—the same word in which Mauritius French has also adopted the plural form.

Some of the meanings of English words are rather curious; thus, kol besides ‘cold’ means ‘winter,’ and as the years, as with the old Scandinavians, are reckoned by winters, also ‘year.’ Sun (son) besides ‘sun’ also means ‘day.’ Spos (often pronounced pos), as in Beach-la-mar, is a common conjunction, ‘if, when.’

The grammar is extremely simple. Nouns are invariable; the plural generally is not distinguished from the singular; sometimes haiu (ayo) ‘much, many’ is added by way of emphasis. The genitive is shown by position only: kahta nem maika papa? (lit., what name thou father) what is the name of your father? The adjective precedes the noun, and comparison is indicated by periphrasis. ‘I am stronger than thou’ would be weke maika skukum kahkwa naika, lit. ‘not thou strong as I.’ The superlative is indicated by the adverb haiás ‘great, very’: haiás oliman okuk kanim, that canoe is the oldest, lit., very old that canoe, or (according to Gibbs) by elip ‘first, before’: elip klosh ‘best.’

The numerals and pronouns are from the Chinook, but the latter, at any rate, are very much simplified. Thus the pronoun for ‘we’ is nesaika, from Chinook ntshaika, which is the exclusive form, meaning ‘we here,’ not including the person or persons addressed.

Like the nouns, the verbs have only one form, the tense being left to be inferred from the context, or, if strictly necessary, being indicated by an adverb. The future, in the sense of ‘about to, ready to,’ may be expressed by tike, which means properly ‘wish,’ as naika papa tike mimalus (mimelust) my father is about to die. The verb ‘to be’ is not expressed: maika pelton, thou art foolish.

There is a much-used verb mámuk, which means ‘make, do, work’ and forms causatives, as mamuk chako ‘make to come, bring,’ mamuk mimalus ‘kill.’ With a noun: mamuk lalam (Fr. la rame) ‘make oar,’ i.e. ‘to row,’ mamuk pepe (make paper) ‘write,’ mamuk po (make blow) ‘fire a gun.’

There is only one true preposition, kopa, which is used in various senses—to, for, at, in, among, about, etc.; but even this may generally be omitted and the sentence remain intelligible. The two conjunctions spos and pi have already been mentioned.

XII.—§ 9. Chinook continued.

In this way something is formed that may be used as a language in spite of the scantiness of its vocabulary. But a good deal has to be expressed by the tone of the voice, the look and the gesture of the speaker. “The Indians in general,” says Hale (p. 18), “are very sparing of their gesticulations. No languages, probably, require less assistance from this source than theirs.... We frequently had occasion to observe the sudden change produced when a party of the natives, who had been conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner, with whom it was necessary to speak in the Jargon. The countenances, which had before been grave, stolid and inexpressive, were instantly lighted up with animation; the low, monotonous tone became lively and modulated; every feature was active; the head, the arms and the whole body were in motion, and every look and gesture became instinct with meaning.”

In British Columbia and in parts of Alaska this language is the prevailing medium of intercourse between the whites and the natives, and there Hale thinks that it is likely to live “for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years to come.” The language has already the beginning of a literature: songs, mostly composed by women, who sing them to plaintive native tunes. Hale gives some lyrics and a sermon preached by Mr. Eells, who has been accustomed for many years to preach to the Indians in the Jargon and who says that he sometimes even thinks in this idiom.

Hale counted the words in this sermon, and found that to express the whole of its “historic and descriptive details, its arguments and its appeals,” only 97 different words were required, and not a single grammatical inflexion. Of these words, 65 were from Amerindian languages (46 Chinook, 17 Nootka, 2 Salish), 23 English and 7 French.

It is very instructive to go through the texts given by Hale and to compare them with the real Chinook text analysed in Boas’s Handbook of American Indian Languages (Washington, 1911, p. 666 ff.): the contrast could not be stronger between simplicity carried to the extreme point, on the one hand, and an infinite complexity and intricacy on the other. But though it must be admitted that astonishingly much can be expressed in the Jargon by its very simple and few means, a European mind, while bewildered in the entangled jumble of the Chinook language, cannot help missing a great many nuances in the Jargon, where thoughts are reduced to their simplest formula and where everything is left out that is not strictly necessary to the least exacting minds.

XII.—§ 10. Makeshift Languages.

To sum up, this Oregon trade language is to be classed together with Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English, not perhaps as ‘bastard’ or ‘mongrel’ languages—such expressions taken from biology always convey the wrong impression that a language is an ‘organism’ and had therefore better be avoided—but rather as makeshift languages or minimum languages, means of expression which do not serve all the purposes of ordinary languages, but may be used as substitutes where fuller and better ones are not available.

The analogy between this Jargon and the makeshift languages of the East is closer than might perhaps appear at first blush, only we must make it clear to ourselves that English is in the two cases placed in exactly the inverse position. Pidgin and Beach-la-mar are essentially English learnt imperfectly by the Easterners, the Oregon Jargon is essentially Chinook learnt imperfectly by the English. Just as in the East the English not only suffered but also abetted the yellows in their corruption of the English language, so also the Amerindians met the English half-way through simplifying their own speech. If in Polynesia and China the makeshift language came to contain some Polynesian and Chinese words, they were those which the English themselves had borrowed into their own language and which the yellows therefore must think formed a legitimate part of the language they wanted to speak; and in the same way the American Jargon contains such words from the European languages as had been previously adopted by the reds. If the Jargon embraces so many French terms for the various parts of the body, one concomitant reason probably is that these names in the original Chinook language presented special difficulties through being specialized and determined by possessive affixes (my foot, for instance, is lekxeps, thy foot tāmēps, its foot lelaps, our (dual inclusive) feet tetxaps, your (dual) feet temtaps; I simplify the notation in Boas’s Handbook, p. 586), so that it was incomparably easier to take the French lepi and use it unchanged in all cases, no matter what the number, and no matter who the possessor was. The natives, who had learnt such words from the French, evidently used them to other whites under the impression that thereby they could make themselves more readily understood, and the British and American traders probably imagined them to be real Chinook; anyhow, their use meant a substantial economy of mental exertion.

The chief point I want to make, however, is with regard to grammar. In all these languages, both in the makeshift English and French of the East and in the makeshift Amerindian of the North-West, the grammatical structure has been simplified very much beyond what we find in any of the languages involved in their making, and simplified to such an extent that it may be expressed in very few words, and those nearly the same in all these languages, the chief rule being common to them all, that substantives, adjectives and verbs remain always unchanged. The vocabularies are as the poles asunder—in the East English and French, in America Chinook, etc.—but the morphology of all these languages is practically identical, because in all of them it has reached the vanishing-point. This shows conclusively that the reason of this simplicity is not the Chinese substratum or the influence of Chinese grammar, as is so often believed. Pidgin-English cannot be described, as is often done, as English with Chinese pronunciation and Chinese grammar, because in that case we should expect Beach-la-mar to be quite different from it, as the substratum there would be Melanesian, which in many ways differs from Chinese, and further we should expect the Mauritius Creole to be French with Malagasy pronunciation and Malagasy grammar, and on the other hand the Oregon trade language to be Chinook with English pronunciation and English grammar—but in none of these cases would this description tally with the obvious facts. We might just as well say that the speech of a two-year-old child in England is English with Chinese grammar, and that of the two-year-old French child is French modelled on Chinese grammar: the truth on the contrary, is that in all these seemingly so different cases the same mental factor is at work, namely, imperfect mastery of a language, which in its initial stage, in the child with its first language and in the grown-up with a second language learnt by imperfect methods, leads to a superficial knowledge of the most indispensable words, with total disregard of grammar. Often, here and there, this is combined with a wish to express more than is possible with the means at hand, and thus generates the attempts to express the inexpressible by means of those more or less ingenious and more or less comical devices, with paraphrases and figurative or circuitous designations, which we have seen first in the chapters on children’s language and now again in Beach-la-mar and its congeners.

Exactly the same characteristics are found again in the lingua geral Brazilica, which in large parts of Brazil serves as the means of communication between the whites and Indians or negroes and also between Indians of different tribes. It “possesses neither declension nor conjugation” and “places words after one another without grammatical flexion, with disregard of nuances in sentence structure, but in energetic brevity,” it is “easy of pronunciation,” with many vowels and no hard consonant groups—in all these respects it differs considerably from the original Tupí, from which it has been evolved by the Europeans.[52]

Finally, I would point the contrast between these makeshift languages and slang: the former are an outcome of linguistic poverty; they are born of the necessity and the desire to make oneself understood where the ordinary idiom of the individual is of no use, while slang expressions are due to a linguistic exuberance: the individual creating them knows perfectly well the ordinary words for the idea he wants to express, but in youthful playfulness he is not content with what is everybody’s property, and thus consciously steps outside the routine of everyday language to produce something that is calculated to excite merriment or even admiration on the part of his hearers. The results in both cases may sometimes show related features, for some of the figurative expressions of Beach-la-mar recall certain slang words by their bold metaphors, but the motive force in the two kinds is totally different, and where a comic effect is produced, in one case it is intentional and in the other unintentional.

XII.—§ 11. Romanic Languages.

When Schuchardt began his studies of the various Creole languages formed in many parts of the world where Europeans speaking various Romanic and other languages had come into contact with negroes, Polynesians and other races, it was with the avowed intention of throwing light on the origin of the Romanic languages from a contact between Latin and the languages previously spoken in the countries colonized by the Romans. We may now raise the question whether Beach-la-mar—to take that as a typical example of the kind of languages dealt with in this chapter—is likely to develop into a language which to the English of Great Britain will stand in the same relation as French or Portuguese to Latin. The answer cannot be doubtful if we adhere tenaciously to the points of view already advanced. Development into a separate language would be imaginable only on condition of a complete, or a nearly complete, isolation from the language of England (and America)—and how should that be effected nowadays, with our present means of transport and communication? If such isolation were indeed possible, it would also result in the breaking off of communication between the various islands in which Beach-la-mar is now spoken, and that would probably entail the speedy extinction of the language itself in favour of the Polynesian language of each separate island. On the contrary, what will probably happen is a development in the opposite direction, by which the English of the islanders will go on constantly improving so as to approach correct usage more and more in every respect: better pronunciation and syntax, more flexional forms and a less scanty vocabulary—in short, the same development that has already to a large extent taken place in the English of the coloured population in the United States. But this means a gradual extinction of Beach-la-mar as a separate idiom through its complete absorption in ordinary English (cf. above, p. 228, on conditions at Mauritius).

Do these ‘makeshift languages,’ then, throw any light on the development of the Romanic languages? They may be compared to the very first initial stage of the Latin language as spoken by the barbarians, many of whom may be supposed to have mutilated Latin in very much the same way as the Pacific islanders do English. But by and by they learnt Latin much better, and if now the Romanic languages have simplified the grammatical structure of Latin, this simplification is not to be placed on the same footing as the formlessness of Beach-la-mar, for that is complete and has been achieved at one blow: the islanders have never (i.e. have not yet) learnt the English form-system. But the inhabitants of France, Spain, etc., did learn the Latin form system as well as the syntactic use of the forms. This is seen by the fact that when French and the other languages began to be written down, there remained in them a large quantity of forms and syntactic applications that agree with Latin but have since then become extinct: in its oldest written form, therefore, French is very far from the amorphous condition of Beach-la-mar: in its nouns it had many survivals of the Latin case system (gen. pl. corresponding to -orum; an oblique case different from the nominative and formed in various ways according to the rules of Latin declensions), in the verbs we find an intricate system of tenses, moods and persons, based on the Latin flexions. It is true that these had been already to some degree simplified, but this must have happened in the same gradual way as the further simplification that goes on before our very eyes in the written documents of the following centuries: the distance from the first to the tenth century must have been bridged over in very much the same way as the distance between the tenth and the twentieth century. No cataclysm such as that through which English has become Beach-la-mar need on any account be invoked to explain the perfectly natural change from Latin to Old French and from Old French to Modern French.