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By Professor Walter Edwards |
Georgetown, Guyana, April 1, 2005: LAST month, visiting Guyanese-born Professor Walter Edwards delighted audiences with his theory of reduplication in Guyanese speech. At the same time, the scholar of linguistics sent older citizens into throes of nostalgia as he regaled them with half-forgotten expressions of Guyanese Creolese such as: Eh-eh; bam-bam, bun-bun, lef-lef, pim-pim,
dan-dan, putta-putta and din-din. Professor Edwards, who is Director of the Humanities Center, Wayne State University, United States of America, posited during one of his presentations that "reduplicated words such as back-back (back-up) and one-one (one at a time) are consistent with morphological trends among African languages, and thus reveal part of the linguistic heritage of Guyanese speech".
Upon reading newspaper reports of the presentations given by the visiting academic, several persons made comments to the effect that it was strange to find such a learned gentleman making a study of the humble language spoken by Guyanese. But those who are older and perhaps wiser have long understood that Guyanese Creolese or the version of English language used by Guyanese in various social, cultural and rural situations is a language in its own right. While points of emphases in diction and pronunciation may vary from community to community, the housewife in Crabwood Creek, Berbice, would have no difficulty in conversing with her counterpart in Anna Regina on the Essequibo Coast.
But Guyanese Creolese is not only the subject of linguists and cultural anthropologists. It happens to be a vibrant, living vehicle with the capacity to encode complex human emotions in a spectrum of circumstances and then translate them with a power and significance that would challenge the efforts of a writer of Standard English. In the fledging years of the University of Guyana, respected academic Mr George Cave completed a groundbreaking research of Guyanese speech patterns. In one celebrated sample of the work, Mr Cave recorded schoolgirls describing their experience of being caught in the rain and then sheltering under a tree. However, they still managed to get wet because the leaves on the tree were "spacey spacey". It is doubtful whether anyone employing Standard English would be able to convey meaning in so few words.
There are some Guyanese words and phrases that are not easily translatable into formal English, yet they can be employed to powerful effect on the right occasions. How could anyone miss the import of expressions such as: "He just want to pampazet" (show off); "She could proper titivate" (waste time); "He is a real briga Bobby" (attention-seeker); "Look moutha-preh-preh" (talkative person); "This is eye-pass" (disrespect); and a favourite of John Agard, Guyanese author and poet based in the United Kingdom, "Me and she eye make four!"
Over the last three decades, academics from Guyana and the wider Caribbean have completed projects documenting speech patterns and interpreting their effects on the lives of persons in the region. There was even one theory that teachers from the Caribbean should be employed to help educate those children of Caribbean immigrants encountering difficulties in the American learning establishment. In the 1990s, Guyanese language scholar Richard Allsopp and his wife Jean completed 'The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage', a massive tome, which chronicles hundreds of words and phrases that comprise the vernaculars of natives from Guyana to Belize. So awe-inspiring was the scope of the proposal in the 1970s, that fellow academics at the Barbados and Jamaica campuses of the University of the West Indies used to express doubts that the dictionary would be completed in Allsopp's lifetime.
In the words of one web site: "The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage records a rich variety of words spoken by people living on land scattered over one million square miles of sea. While many of the words in this dictionary might sound strange (spranksious means
bold or good-looking; a do-flicky is a gadget or tool), others such as suck (to experience hardship) and kill (to make ache with laughter) have become part of our everyday language in Britain."
Guyanese-born Professor Walter Edwards, is Director of the Humanities Center, Wayne State University, United States of America.