Pidgin —“Illegitimate But Here

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WHEN the UN Trusteeship delegation returned to the US recently and said that Aus tralia should ban the use of Pidgin in New Guinea they started a rabbit running—and it has been pursued ever since by newspapers and in veterate writers of letters-to-the editors of newspapers all the way from Lake Success to Sydney.

Most of the people who have entered the lists for or against Pidgin have not the remotest idea of the problems involved in intro ducing plain English into New Guinea. One writer said that it should be “completely prohibited”— and one immediately has a vision of the thousands of Pidgin-speak ing natives of New Guinea —and their employers—suddenly being re duced to sign-language.

Others, including Mr. Colin Simp son, writer and ABC commentator, call Pidgin a “slave-language”—they fear that continued use of it will give the natives a perpetual in feriority complex.

On the other hand, Dr. lan Hogbin, lecturer in anthropology at Sydney University, whose views on native-European relationships are well-known and who could scarcely

be called pro-European, is all for Pidgin. He has gone on record as

saying that it is the white man’s most valuable gift to the natives of the South-West Pacific.

During this period of newspaper interest in Pidgin, one of the best balanced articles on the subject came from the pen of Sidney J.

Baker, and was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in mid- July. He said that it had earned

the right to be regarded as an in dependent language—an illegitimate offspring of English, maybe, but none the less an offspring—and that no amount of gushing and table pounding in UN will kill it.

This was not the first campaign against Pidgin, he said —the Ger mans tried to root it out over 50 years ago, without success—and if the Germans failed then Australia has small chance now.

MY own personal observation is that it is better to have some cut-and-dried language, even if it is illegitimate, than to have indecision. Even though I have not lived in New Guinea perman ently for years I can still, through the medium of Pidgin, make myself understood to the natives there, and understand them.

In Port Moresby, although I was told that most of the native in habitants understand straight Eng lish, that some understand Motu and some Pidgin, I had no such luck and simply drew blank looks.

Now, before the 6,000 enraged European residents of Papua spring to their typewriters or pens to tell me that I must be inordinately stupid or that I obviously spent my time in Papua in the wrong com pany, I repeat that that was my experience.

It may be, of course, that I tried my English on Pidgin or Motu speaking natives, and my Pidgin on the English-speaking ones—but there it is. (No one, incidentally, appears ever to have started a heresy-hunt about Motu, or Police Motu as it is officially called, although I am told by those who understand it that this lingua franca of official Papua bears about as much relation to pure Motu as Pidgin does to straight English).

Recently I visited a school where a very courtly Papuan was teaching his class in straight English. On the blackboard, in the most beautiful lettering, he had written: “A rolling stone don’t gather no moss.” It is a matter of opinion whether that sort of English is better than the Pidgin circum locution, which would say roughly the same thing.

Finally, it seems to me that Pidgin is just as easy on the ear as the so-called English spoken by the “lower-orders” in Australia where education, in English, has been compulsory for generations.

IN the meantime, Australian news papers are doing nothing for the cause of Pidgin by publish ing the most extraordinary gibberish which they fondly imagine is the Pacific (or Beche-de-Mer) variety of Pidgin. This gem appeared in the Sydney Daily Telegraph recently and was supposed to have been ut tered by two Solomon Islands sea men from the BP vessel Malaita : “Talk-talk men longa UNO bin bagarap yabba longa deewhy” (UNO spokesmen are barking up the wrong

tree.)-

Judy Tudor.