New Guinea Pidgin'

Knots in an 'Untangled New Guinea Pidgin'

In his book Untangled New Guinea Pidgin Dr Wesley Sadler guarantees that anyone following the teaching procedures outlined “will happily obtain a speaking and writing mastery of New Guinea pidgin.” I seriously doubt whether the book’s promise will be fulfilled. This is because it has a number of short comings.

New Guinea pidgin is a tangled language. So far we have neither any thing approaching a complete gram mar nor a good knowledge of all its variations along geographical and social dimensions. Tne author is aware of this fact, and his choice of the rural conservative variety of pidgin as spoken in the Madang area is to be welcomed. Unfortunately, he relies heavily on two informants who are both speakers of Bel, and 1 suspect that at least some of his rules for pidgin exhibit features carried over from the informants’ first lan guage. (Pidgin languages do not have native speakers but are used as a medium of communication across language boundaries).

As the book is written for an audience with little or no knowledge of linguistics, the author is justified in using simple non-technical language for his grammatical description. This, however, does not increase the clarity of the presentation. For instance, in the discussion of the sound system the distinction between synchronic and diachronic criteria, as well as that between spelling and pronunciation is blurred. A statement such as “/n/ sometimes serves as pre-nasal con sonant” is an example of confused terminology.

The shortcomings of grammatical treatment all stem from the same source. The author appears to have serious misconceptions about the nature of rules of language. There are many rules in pidgin; some being very general whilst others are minor and restricted in their application. It would be of great value for the student to have a good idea of the general rules before he is confronted with irregularities. This principle, however, has not been adopted in Untangled New Guinea Pidgin. I see no need to treat pronouns in 11 dif ferent chapters as if each pronoun behaved differently, since in fact there are a number of very general rules that apply to all pronouns.

It is true that some exhibit certain

idiosyncracies in their use but these should be dealt with after a general treatment. In addition, emphasisers and pluralisers, which are only historically related to pronouns, are treated by Sadler as pronouns.

The rules for the use of the predicate marker are similarly un satisfactory. A rule specifying that the predicate marker is omitted before nouns which can also function as verbs is mentioned in five places (pp 56, 68, 71, 117, 153). This rule in itself is of dubious status. Without a full statement of the nouns to which it applies it is useless.

The important and involved topic of pidgin word formation is glossed over as “charming and easy to master”. In at least one case a rule results from the misinterpretation of the linguistic facts. This is un fortunately not the place to give con crete examples but I am prepared to substantiate my objections.

I am not familiar with the teaching method employed in this book but I understand that the learner may achieve the desired result with the

help of a good informant. However, I fail to see the value of the awkward English employed in an attempt to re flect more closely the structure of pidgin. First of all, these translation aids won’t be available when it comes to actually using pidgin, and secondly, they suggest a dangerous parallelism between English and pidgin in some places.

The book does contain a number of valuable insights into the structure of pidgin and one must certainly acknowledge the need for a book which can be used in conjunction with informants. However, I do not believe that Untangled New Guinea Pidgin in its present form is a satisfactory solution to the problem of teaching pidgin to expatriates and non-pidgin speaking New Guineans. Peter Muhlhausler.

(Untangled New Guinea Pidgin.

By Dr Wesley Sadler. Kristen Press, Madang, PNG.)