year for Pidgin

It was a peculiarly great year for Pidgin

Four books came out on Pidgin English during 1969 and one academic Dr. Don Laycock, a senior fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University here looks back at them. He’s not very impressed. He has written and spoken extensively on Pidgin and on other indigenous languages of Papua-New Guinea. His advice to Europeans purporting to know their Pidgin onions is: “Go back to school and re-learn from those whose language it has truly become”.

By Dr. Don Laycock

Perhaps the word Pidgin doesn’t come from a Chinese corrup tion of the word for “business”, though I for one see no difficulty in believing that it does. Perhaps it comes from Pidian, a seven teenth-century word for a group of otherwise obscure South American Indians, as one linguist has plausibly claimed.

But, whatever the origin of the word, New Guinea Pidgin English has started to become a big business indeed, if one is to judge by the spate of publications on Pidgin that have appeared during 1969.

True, books and articles on Pidgin have been with us a long time. In the scientific journals one can find numerous articles by Profes sors Hall, Wurm and others; and, on a popular level, John Murphy’s little book has been with us since 1943, though even it has recently (1966) gone into a new printing (the Bth).

The somewhat more scholarly, and certainly indispensable, Pidgin dictionary of the Rev. Francis Mihalic has been around since 1957 —and it too is currently undergoing revision.

But this is nothing to the Pidgin boom of 1969, when no less than four new books on Pidgin have made their appearance. Two of these are from the same publisher, Jacaranda.

The first is Introduction to New Guinea Pidgin , by the Rev. Mihalic, and is in fact nothing more than a mini-version of the English-Pidgin section of his longer dictionary, shrunk to 62 pages and a pocket-size duodecimo. The advantages over the larger edition are far from obvious, but it may have a ready sale to tourists in search of a quickie Pidgin course.

The other Jacaranda publication is designed for quite a different class of reader. It is Robert Litteral’s Programmed Course in New Guinea Pidgin, and, like all programmed

courses, it teaches a fair amount of quite respectable Pidgin with the mechanical efficiency, and the drear iness, of a computer.

In fact, the vocabulary taught in this book was selected from a com puter concordance of Pidgin texts, and a check of the total vocabulary listed at the back shows that com

(Continued on p. 47)

Woefully ignorant of human needs

puters are woefully ignorant of basic human needs.

The user of this book will not be able to ask his way to even the most primitive village toilet; and the entire vocabulary of sex and its organs is also lamentably absent. (Both books reviewed, PIM, Sept., p. 95).

Far less professional is the third Pidgin booklet of the year’s crop.

It is Learning Pidgin, put out by the ABC for its broadcast Pidgin courses. On the back cover there is a potted biography of the author.

Superintendent Howard Swinford Michael Thomas, which makes him sound like a Spike Milligan version of a British officer; and his Pidgin booklet is of the same no-nonsense stand-to-attention order.

Unfortunately, it is also un attractively printed, and full of nonsensical or half-true statements about Afrikaans and Bahasa Indo nesia being Pidgin languages, about words being pronounced phonetically (as if they could be anything else), and about the origins of Pidgin.

And even when one eliminates the misprints—not all of which have been picked up in the second print ing—there still remains a certain amount of pseudo-Pidgin, such as the time-honoured description of a piano as kes bilong singaut sapos yu paitim em long han.

It is worth digressing a moment to track down this particular legend, which has been current for at least half a century. The earliest occur rence I have found is the definition of a piano, by a German scholar, Georg Friederici, as big fellow bokkes, suppose misses he fight him, he cry too much.

Only a description

This in 1911; and, in one form or another, this designation for a piano has been reproduced by writers ever since, entirely ignoring the fact' that though some of these locutions are possible (but unlikely) descrip tions of a piano, they are in no sense the name for a piano—which, in cidentally, in current Pidgin is piano.

Nevertheless, in the fourth book to be considered we find piano defined in one place as bikpela bokis bilong krai taim yu paitim na kikim em; this in the English Pidgin and French Dictionary of Sports and Phrase Book, by Dr. Andras Balint, a lecturer in the English department at the University of Papua-New

Put together in haste

Guinea, and a man who should have known better.

But the book is in fact nothing but a pot-boiler, put together in haste for the South Pacific Games, and full of non-Pidgin, pseudo- Pidgin, and the best collection of Pidgin howlers to come to the hands of this writer for a long time. The author has simply taken his earlier phrase-book of English for Hungar ians, and added Pidgin equivalents.

There are sentences like Mi bai kisim snek we? (‘Where can I get a snake?’) for ‘Where can I get a snack?’, or Mi laikim kainkain bilas bilong ol tubuna (‘I like the kind of decorations worn by the ancestors’) for ‘I prefer a conservative style [of suit]’.

The translation of, ‘My wife prefers romantic stories’ ( Meri bilong mi i laikim ol stori bilong man meri pren wantaim ) translates back into English as, ‘My wife likes stories about men and women sleeping together’, a sentence that would have the bookseller reaching under the counter for the pornography.

There are dozens of supposed Pidgin equivalents for things that do not occur in New Guinea —Seven- Up, dark beer, rabbis, synagogues, gas meters, and skating. The tourist who innocently uses this book to ask for a pound of cooking apples or a clove of garlic will ask, ungram matically, for half a pound of cook ing apples, and eight pounds of garlic.

"Monumental ignorance"

And a monumental ignorance of New Guinea conditions is shown in giving the Pidgin for a conversation with a doctor, with sentences like ‘What is your fee for a house call’

The dictionary of sporting phrases at the end is no better. It is filled with Pidgin definitions for technical sporting terms such as ‘anti-dazzle rule’, ‘cross court pass’, ‘eastern cut off’, ‘fog formation’, and ‘slalom’; some of the definitions make sense, but most have no currency outside this book, and some rest on a misunderstanding of the English word, as when ‘quiver’ (in archery) is translated in Pidgin as sek, guria, words which mean ‘shake’, ‘shiver’, or ‘quiver’!

It is something of a pity that books of this nature should be pub lished at a time when Pidgin English is being taken more seriously as a language, when courses in it are being offered in Australian univer sities, and when it is being con

sidered by some as a possible national language for Papua-New Guinea.

There is enough pseudo-Pidgin around, without adding to it; one has only to think of that favourite canard of the women’s magazines, that the Pidgin for ‘helicopter’ is mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ a locution that ignores the fact that a helicopter is a far more common object to a native of New Guinea than a mixmaster, and that a plau sible description of a mixmaster might be helikopta bilong misis.

Or the Pidgin New Testament that says ‘You must get Jesus pregnant’ {Yupela mas gipim bel long Jisas).

Or the hotel in Port Moresby, that put signs on its doors purporting to say in Pidgin ‘Do not disturb’—but the Pidgin version ( Yu no ken kirapim man i slip ) is so obscene that it cannot even be translated here.

On the positive side in the Pidgin business, a new indigenous literature is slowly growing up in Pidgin, mainly stemming from students at the University of Papua-New Guinea; and a handful of Europeans are realising that they have to go back to school, to re-learn their Pidgin from those whose language it has truly become.

When enough of them do this, all the pseudo-Pidgin extant will gradually be consigned to the rubbish-heap of twentieth-century curiosa.