PIDGIN ENGLISH BEACH-LA-MAR.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17471, 3 June 1922, Page 7

PIDGIN ENGLISH BEACH-LA-MAR.

AND SOME OTHER MATTERS. (SPECIALLY Wmi'l'KK FOB "THB FBESS.") (By W. Douglass Avobews.) Verba enim, partim inscita et pntidia, partim mendosa et perperam prolata. It is a notable fact that Dickens is in process of being rediscovered by the young lions of contemporary criticism. It is more than notable. It is comforting, for it shows how even in questions of taste the wheel sooner or later comes full circle, and the old are justified of their lifelong, if unintelligent, attachments by the wisdom of the young. Now as it happens there is a book by Dickens which contains an episode chiefly concerning two characters that may well serve as a prelude to tha main and austerer theme to which our headline commits us. The book is "Little Dorrit." and the two characters, "John Baptist Cavalletto," most lovable of Italian contrabandists, and that excellent woman. "Mrs Piornish," wife of "T. Plornish, plasterer," of Bleeding Heart Lane. How and why "Mr Baptist" found himself domiciled in "Happy Cottage" is another story, and an excellent story too, but the main point for the business in hand is that he did so find himself, and that as he didn't happen to know a word of English, he was for a time, to put it mildly, somewhat isolated. the Bleeding Hearts were kind hearts, and when they saw the little fellow cheerily limping about with a good-humoured face, doing no harm, drawing no knives, committing no outrageous immoralities, living chiefly on farinaceous and milk diet, and playing with Mrs Plornish's children of an evening they began to think that, although he could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him f Mr Baptist,' but treating him liko a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English. They spoke to him in very loud voices, as if he were stone deaf. - They... constructed sentences, by way of teaching, him the language in its purity, such as were addressed bv the savages to Captain Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Plornish was particularly ingenious in this art, and attained so much celebrity bysaying, 'Me 'ope your legwell soon,' that it was considered in the Yard but a very short remove from speaking Italian." Here we have, at once in a nutshell and a parable, the origin of what Professor Otto Jespersen so happily calls "Makeshift" or "Minimum Languages." And I hasten to add that this parable is. not a discotvery of my own. I wish it were. But it comes from a pamphlet on "Beach-la-Mar'" bv William Churchill, "sometime Consul-General of the United- States in Sampa and Tonga," on which I shall draw more largely in due course. These minimum languages, or it might be better to sav, _ "lingos," which by the way have their affinities with the childish' talk of the nurserv and the "little language" of the "Journal to Stella," spring up like mushrooms wherever adventurers, hunters, seafarers, beach-combers, traders, whalen or what not, come into close prolonged contact with primitive peoples. Some medium of communication is evidently essential, if only for the purposes of buying and selling, and the enlightened, if illiterate, white man finds it far easier to cbnimunicate to the native a'smattering of a broken down and simplified form of his own speech than to acquire the, possibly, difficult idiom of the country. Then, too, he has a trick, by "blackbirding" and such pursuits, of bringing into more or less constant contacts | natives from different territories, and various tribes whose dialects, may be mu-

toally unintelligible. And the gibber- j ish he has passed off upon them, and which they in their simplicity have accepted, as his own language serves them all alike as a vehicle of intercourse. The Portuguese had in their day a knack of improvising these makeshift tongues, but the great masters of the | art are the English and the French. The Germans, strangely enough, in spite of their efficiency, failed here and that even though, or, it may be, because, they called in after their superintelligent fashion, the aid of learned professors. Mr Churchill tells us that the onlv German vocable evident in the ! South Seas is "rauss," an abbreviated form of "heraus,"' used in such phrases as "Bis fellow nwrster, he rauss me, i.e. "boots me out," And he» cit*s Georg Friederici, very unsympatnetu--allv be it noted in passing, as f oquent by" deplorine this fact in his PidginEndish in Peutsch-Xeusnnnea Polished at Berlin as recently as 1911, tne vear in which Mr Churchill s own pamphlet saw the light. Quite unwittinelv Herr Friederici assumed tne mantle of the prophet, asserting thai"one would onlv have to hoist the English flag over our beautiful colonial possesions to create the impression that one was livinc in a British Colony I But enough of Herr Friederici. A week or two ago there appeared m these column* "The Times" jwiw* Jespersen's rem^ cent volume oh "Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. In l.napter XI. of that engaging book there is a most attractive de<cnption or Mauritius Creole, an artificial language of great clarity, which, "in spite ot i« inevitable naivete and of the childliko simplicity of its construction is, so the professor avers, by no raMsdwra of felicity and force. It certainly contains some agreeable words, if one c..n iud«e from the examples given, among them the "napa," "narien, and "nek" which do duty for the more orthodox "ne . . • poe," ."ne-nen, and "ne .que." But even m its very name Petit Negro is much more endearing. And Petit Negre is happily described m a very charming book which though it. appeared some quarter of a cent' .ry ago is still well worth the pains of rending. "Peoples and Politics of the F»r East . is its name, and the writer, Mr Henry Norman, spent almost as many yearsiin acquiring firet-haud information on the spot, as did J. Resell Wallace before he wrote that unforgettable book Lne Malay Archipelago," It was down at Tonekmg that Mr Norman first encoun- j tered Petit Nesre, and it impressed him, so much, and is so vividly described in ■ i his pages, that I quote the passage at full length. "The most curious of the surface impressions of Tongking is lhe language you must learn to talk with tlhe natives. Your ear becomes familiar with pidgin English' before you have spent a day in the East, and, pace Mr/Leland, a horrid jargon it is, convenient, no -domic, but growing positively repulsive after a while "But 'pidgin I'rench,' or Petit Negre, as it is called-, conies «s a complete surprise. . And it is all tliq funnier because of the excellent native pronunciation of French. Petit Negre is characterised, compared with *rencn proper, by four features—omission ot the auxiliary verbs, ignoring of gender, employment of the infinitive for all moods and tenses, and absence ot words taken bodily from the native, like manman' and 'chop-chop in Pidgin. The one expression which recurs again and again with an infinity of meanings is 'y-a-moven,' or 'y-a-pas moyen. And after this comes 'fili,' for 'fini' nearly as often. The 'You. savvy? ot Pidgin is 'toi connaitre?' The 'my wantchee' is 'moi voulour.' The native, servant is everywhere called by the English word 'boy,' pronounced 'boi-ee' in.two syllables. And the language is further enriched by a number of words recalling the nursery, like 'poussepousee' for 'jinriksha,' for'a big knife, and so on. 'Beaucoup does duty for 'tres' and 'bien,' so one is constantly hearing sentences like these: 'Moi beaucoup rouloir avoir sampan,' 'soupe beaucoup mauvais; moi doirher vous beaucoup bambou,' l and 'toi beacbup imbecile.' Petit' Negre is, of course, much younger than "Pidgin, and it is not capable of the flights of oratory to which the accomplished speaker of Pidgin • can soar. Nor will it ever become what Pidgin has long been—the 'lingua franca' of communication between vast numbers .of people otherwise acquainted - with only, a score of different dialects and tongues"—but it has, and seems to deserve, its place in the sun for all that.

And so by a circuitous route we come to Pidgin English, and may hope eventually to reach what touches us.South Sea dweLers much more closely—Baach-la-ALar. For Chinook, the trade language of Oregon, based strangely on simplified Indian, with the incorporation of a mere sprinkling of. English; and French terms— "kmcnoteh'; (King George), in the sense of Englishmen,; may serve as a sample—interesting as it undoubtedly is, is too remote from' common knowledge to make any geneial appeal. With "pidgin," or "business'' English the case is different. We have all heard of that. And it is discussed at large in the quaint pages of "The Real Chinaman," a book written many years ago by a Mr Chester Holcombe, who had 6erved the united States at Peking in the various capacities of interpreter, Secretary of Legation, and Acting-Ambassador. He gives a piea anti example of its use. "A young man who called upon tu*b young ladies was gravely informed by the Chinese servant, who opened the door: 'That two piecy girls no can see. Number one piecy topside makee washee washee. Number two piecy go outside, makes wa.kee, walkee.' " Used extensively in China, Japan, and California, Pidgin, says Jespersen, is only English lwirnt imperfectly, and neither in grammar nor in vocabulary does it draw, except by accident, on Chinese. "Chow-dhow," meaning food, and "cumshaw," meaning present, sire no doubt, Chinese, but "Joss" has filtered in from the Portuguese, "chit" from Hindustani, and "tiffin" for lunch, so at least Jespersen alleges, is merely a variant of •un obsolete English slang word "to tiff," meaning to drink. Ingenious compounds are made free use of. "Joss," God; "Joss-house," church; "Joss-pidgin," religion: "Joss-pidgin man," parson; "topside Joss-pidgin-man," bishop—archbishops, lying beyond the limits of native experience, are apparently unprovided with a special name. The substitution of "1" for l 'r," the free use of "side" for locality, and "pieoee" after a numeral, are among the more obvious features of this "grotesque gibberish," as Mr Holcombe unkindly calls it. Yet grotesque as it is, and unsuited, let us say, for the higher nights of poetry, it is adequate for the work it- undertakes. "Thlee piecee bamboo, two pieoee • puff-puff, walk •along inside, no can see," is no bad description of a three-masted ship with two funnels and an invisible engine which makes it "walk along." "Damuraisu H'to," the Japanese popular appellative for English and American sailors is hardly Pidgin, yet one would be Eorrv to pass it by unnoted. "H'to, ' it mav'be said, means "people," and as for "Damuraisii," it should not be too difficult to hazard at least a wide solution of its meaning.

So passing Congo Pidgin on the other sido, though "Massa catch plenty mammybook" for "Master has many home letters," and "Plenty breeze live for inside" for "The bicycle is piunped up," are not without a subtle charm, we come at last to "Beadli-la-ATar." I The etymology of this name is rather curious: Portuguese "bicho demar," I from" "bich" worm, the name of 'the sea slug or trepapg, was in French modified into "beche de mer" ; and this, by a second popular etymology was made into English ' "beach-la-mar" as if a compound of beach. This is the characteristic language of the Western Pacifio and the Queensland sugar plantations, and it is sometimes called Sandalwood English; i (Continued at foot of next column.)

It appears to have been much under the puiiuiugical Xiao given. rise to a uunsiueraoie mans of more or less critical literature. For its grammar, wnicn is mastered even more easily tnan tiiat of i^speranto —if the idoiSts nave leit any surviving Jisperautists —the reader may be reierred to rioiessor jespersau's new book, trom ! which 1 shall convey without further auUnowleagnient some of the more striking woras ana phrases he has iiuiiseir ''conveyed" from Mr Churchill. Tne vocabulary, it appears, is iree irom any native element, vnough some of the English words it contains assume queer shapes on native tongues. "PulomoKau," meaning tinned beef, does not readily suggest its origin in the "words "bull'' and "cow," and the missionary, G. Brown, who mistook "tobi," Buke of York Island version of "soap," lor a native word meaning "wash," was not altogether without excuse. Much play is made with the words, "fellow" and "belong." It is a mean, squalid, and vulgar language, and Churchill is swift to point out that to the "low, cant, vulgar English" it is largely made of, Austral-English added the. dregs and refuse of its own vocabulary. But when all is said it is amusing, and in its pwn queer wav remarkably effective. "Grass belong head belong him, all he die finish,'' lor "he has lost all his hair," takes some beating; "big fellow bokus (box) you fight him he cry" is not without its touch of humorous irony as a name for a piano"; and will anyone deny that the synonym for "seasickness," "belly belong me, walk about too much," is, if a trifle frank, at least touchingly true to fact? As for the 'Eden Sermon," with which Mr Churchill closes his entertaining study of this eccentric tongue, it is too long, and possibly, too strong, to quote in extenso here. But the singular combination of ingenuity and meanness characteristic of Beach-la-mar is sufficiently brought into relief in th« closing sections. "And God big fella marster he cross along Adam Eve two fella too much, and he speak: 'You two fella finish along me altogether. You go catch 'm bokkis (boxes) belong you, and get to hell along scrub.' "So Adam Eve these two fella go along, scrub. And God he make 'm one big fennis all around garden and he put one fella marster belong God (i.e. angel) along fennis. And he give this fella marster belong God one big fella musket and he speak 'S'pose you look 'm (see) these two fella Adam Eve you shoot 'm plenty too much.'" There is no disguising the fact that the benefits civilisation offers to the primitive worlds take rvery varied forms.