The Possibilities Of Pidgin

Some Aspects of Pacific’s Number One Problem

By Harry Dawkins

The most fascinating, as well as the most important, problem in the Pacific Islands to-day is the problem of language.

Governors and Administrators and Commissioners innumer able have hundreds of plans for the instruction of the natives, and the improvement of their standards of life. Much has been done, and will be done in the small, one-language coun tries; but as soon as bigger movements and quicker results are contemplated, the planners meet the Pacific’s greatest social obstacle, the multiplicity of languages. No real progress can be made until some sort of Lingua Franca is found.

Half a century ago commerce met this obstacle, and got over it by creating Pidgin English, that weird mixture of tongues which can be learned by anyone —and especially young children and primitive natives—with such fatal ease.

We repeatedly have asked whether there is anything in Pidgin to point the way to the solution of the language prob lem in the Pacific. No one seems able to give an answer Meanwhile, here is Mr. Harry Dawkins (a former resident of the New Hebrides, who believes that Pidgin has real possibili ties) with an article written at our invitation on Pidgin languages.—Ed. PIM.

IT has been said by a high authority, that as an educa tional medium. South Pacific Pidgm is: “Inadequate, unworthy and degrading.” 3 There was a time when I thought much the same myself. But, with y £ ar L of resi dence in the i Pac i£ c ’ came tolerance— came also the memory of my old schoolmaster, one of whose slogans hinnis” L ° ok , well to your deriva ;J9 ns - . He drove us continually to An® St o dy of Latin, Greek and n A nT°:g? XOn r ° ots ’ Prefixes, suffixes and affixes. Remembrance came <<lr R !5 ert . Burns whossa d, in that North of the Border” Pidgin wifh has imm °rtalised along with his poems: O, wad some power the giftie gie To see oursels as ithers see us. * became aware, too that Pidgin of «,i 6l S g -P oken over a wide area °f the Pacific, not only by nativp«?

tec^buf B hv? languages and dia

lects, but by Europeans of different nationalities, as a lingua franca.

GOING back, now, to white man Pidgins, and bearing in mind— as I indicated previously in these columns—that English is it self a Greeko-Latin-Teutonic Pid gin, I now give a few details of some others.

In a glossary to Burns’ poems that I have by me there are over 3,000 un-English words of various origins. Bonnie = good, nice.

Fash = anger. Ashet = plate, dish.

These are of near-modern French origin.

Three thousand words is almost a language In itself. Burns could nearly have written his poems in this un-English idiom—that is a melange of mutilated French, English, German and Gaelic. How ever, he chose his mixture nicely, and the result is a delightful Pid gin that has lived on for: “a hunner years and mair,” and no Scot wants to forget it. A “Tam O’Shanter” without: “ Chapman billies"

“droughty neibors,” and “cutty sarks,” would be unthinkable.

George Borrow—hiker, boxer horsebreaker, seller of Bibles, con noisseur of good ales, rabid anti teetotaller, philologist and earnest seeker after the pre-Babel lingua umversal; who was familiar with more languages and dialects than

he could count on his fingers and toes twice, questioned his Welsh guide as to the name of an enor mous figure of a man said to be of great antiquity, carved from the native rock, on a hillside in North Wales.

The guide said that the Welsh spell it ercwl and pronounced it something like “ercool”—the letter w used medially being a veritable double-w, and a vowel in Welsh, which is as it should be.

The French also pronounce the name of this famous giant just about the same the Welsh do; but spell the name Hercule. The English spell it Hercules and pro nounce it in three syllables. The Greeks, whose particular darling he was, call him something like Heracles” and the way they spell It in the Greek alphabet looks something like a schoolboy picture of St. Patrick with a big whip, driv ing the snakes from Ireland.

Borrow tells us that the original home of the Welsh was the Cape Comorin area, on the southmost tip of India. Hence, the name Cumro that they still claim as their national name, with Cumraeg as the name of their language. Varia tions are Cymric, Camirc and Cam brian.

In their long prehistoric drift westward they split up and became the Gauls of Southern and Western France, the Gaels of Northern Britain, the Irish Kelts of Ireland

and the Cymric race, or Ancient Britons of Southern Britain and Wales.

The Ffench still call the Welsh: Galles. No doubt they became mixed by marriage with other peoples on the way. It is also only reasonable to suppose that they added words of other languages to their own and other peoples adop ted words of theirs.

Borrow also traces a similarity between present day Welsh and Sanscrit. In one of his books he gives about a hundred examples of this. I select one that is a fair ex ample and will show how much languages can be interwoven:— Welsh: Dawn, a gift. The Sanscrit is Dana. French is Don. The Eng lish word Donation comes from Latin, Donare, Donum : to give.

In spite of there being no P&O, Matson Liners and Airliners, people in those prehistoric days seem to have got about quite a lot, even when it came to crossing great oceans. They took their languages with them and mixed them with other languages on the way.

I am told that there are many similarities of words and mean ings in the African Tangynika dia lects and those of Fiji, half a world away.

IT has been said of the South Pacific Pidgin that it is a poor medium in which to express abstract ideas. Our words: hal

lowed, temptation, forgiveness, de liverance, belief, are all abstract expressions. And these seem to have been clearly rendered in books printed in Pidgin by a religious or ganisation some years ago. I have recently heard that another re ligious body, the Seventh Day Adventists, have produced a Pidgin

dictionary and grammar. Here are the opening lines of The Lord’s Prayer as rendered by the first mentioned mission.

Papa blong mifeller E stap Ontap navn blong im e algidder tabu. (Our father which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name.) Here the Polynesian word tabu, as a translation of hallowed ap parently changes its meaning from something forbidden to something set aside as holy—which very pos sibly is one of its original mean ings.

Tabu is in my English dictionary.

It is also in my French dictionary, spelt: tabou. It is quite likely in every European dictionary. It has become an international word. The “pidginising” process still goes on, as it has all through the ages.

English! I once heard a French man exclaim: “It is only French very badly pronounced.” In no spirit of retaliation I say that French is a bobtailed (i.e., inflection lopped) Latin. German is a Nordic Pidgin with Greeko-Latin influen ces on the academical and techni cal sides.

In short, all European languages are Pidgins mainly of each other, but all more or less influenced oh the finer side by Ancient Greek and Latin, It is inevitable that one day they will all develop into one great International Pidgin.

LET us then not be deeply con cerned if great reformers spend heaps of public money on ex pensive highbrows to sit on the sidelines and order the teaching of Basic English, or Basic Urdu, or Pushtic as a lingua franca for natives of the South Pacific. In 20 years of varied Government em ployment I have known money to

be spent in worse ways. The Basic English, Urdu and what-not will in the end probably merge itself into the despised Pidgin; and thus a brighter and richer Pidgin have been taught, even though in the hardest of hard ways from the taxpayer’s point of view (if tax payers have a point of view).

Planters, traders and recruiters

will most certainly curse, in lingua foulest of the foul, whatever powers there be, for teaching natives any thing at all. This is inevitable.

Well, it isn’t so long since white man industrialists and landlords were screaming red-ruin at the thought of the education of what they chose to call their own "‘lower orders.”

A REVIEW of history reveals that whenever and wherever two peoples of different language come into contact, whether for pur poses of trade or by invasion; while a few of the more scholarly learned the other’s language thoroughly, the great majority most certainly held intercourse by means of a scrappy home-made jargon or “Pidgin.”

Such jargons grew up almost overnight, to my own knowledge, during the last two great wars.

History also reveals that almost never has the language of the stronger and more cultured wholly imposed itself on the weaker and more primitive—not even when the local tongue was forcibly forbidden.

Almost invariably, the fused Pid gin of the common people became the final written language of the country.

When the story of the making of a lingua franca for natives of the South Pacific is at last written into history, it will delight me to read it in a language that was once called “Pidgin.”