The Adventure of English (34 page)

It seems to be agreed that the creole spoken in Jamaica is the deepest in the Caribbean, partly because of the sheer numbers of Africans transported there and partly because a good number of them escaped to the hills and established language groups of their own early on. And although English is very prominent, there are still traces of Spanish. The escaped slaves, for instance, were known as “maroons,” a corruption of the Spanish word “cimmarón,” meaning wild or untamed.

Jamaican English vocabulary followed the by now traditional English pattern and took from everyone and everywhere. From sailors it took “berth” — later a position of employment — and “cot” — a portable bed. From Spanish, for instance, it took “parasol”; “savvy” from Spanish in St. Kitts becomes “sabi” in Jamaica; “sabi-so” is “wisdom.” “Yard” was used for the Negro yard, the area on the plantation where the slaves lived. By extension it became a house, especially in Kingston. Jamaicans informally refer to the whole island as Yard, hence “Yardie.”

Sometimes a word seems to be a straight translation of an African tongue. “Big-eye” for “greedy” corresponds to words in Ibo and Twi. And also as in Africa you get “boy-child,” “girl-child.” “Big-big” for “huge” is the sort of repetition found in Yoruba. It's catching: “potopoto” — very slimy; “fluky-fluky” — very fussy; “batta-batta” — to hit repeatedly.

Carnabel Day for Carnival Day (Ash Wednesday); “catspraddle” in Trinidad is a very undignified fall; “dumb-bread” is a heavy, flat bread. These are what are called “loan translations” from West African languages, as is “sweet mouth” — to flatter; from Yoruba, “eye-water” and “cry-water” for “tears”; “door-mouth” for “the entrance to a building.”

Rasta is derived from Jamaican creole with elements of the Old Testament and the influence of the black consciousness movement. Rasta uses “I” to replace the creole “mi”: “me” is taken as a mark of black subservience. “I” is respect and solidarity and has extended its domain widely: “I-lect” is Rasta “di-alect”; “I-cient” is “ancient”; “I-men” is “A-men”; “I-nointed” is “anointed”; “I-quality” is “equality.” The vocabulary has a life of its own, some of which has leaped across the youth culture — “dreadlocks,” “dub,” “queen” (girlfriend), “Rasta man,” “sufferer” (ghettodweller), “weed of wisdom” (marijuana). There's also some good word-play: “Jah-mek-ya” (God made here — Jamaica); “blindjaret” or “see-garet” for “cigarette”; “higherstand” — understand.

Creole grows. One of the newer words is “chi-chi man,” meaning a male homosexual. The old words still strike deeply, as in the use of “trouble,” meaning disturb — as in “don't trouble the woman's children”; “don't trouble my car” — bringing to mind Elizabethan language as in “the wind troubled the waters” and old dialects such as the Cumbrian: the presence of English dialects in West Indian and black American is strong. I would assume that even more work will be done with creole languages, showing as they do that new lamps can be made from old and borrowed lamps.

Sugar was the most active stimulant in the trade in human beings which led to the pidgins and the creoles, and sugar can provide an ending to a chapter which has sidestepped the suffering, looking only for the best that came of it, the sweetest, perhaps.

“Molasses” came from the Portuguese. “Syrup” was already in use as a word for sugar solutions but also started to be used for the raw liquid in the manufacturing process. “Treacle” had been a medieval term for a medicinal compound. It too was commandeered.

In the West Indies, sugar yielded alcohol, which went through various intoxicating names — “kill-devil,” “rumbullion,” “rumbustion” — before hitting the buffers of “rum.” Rum became the naval drink. Admiral Vernon in 1740 ordered that it should be mixed with water before being given to the crew. The admiral used to wear a cloak made of a coarse fabric called “grogram”: his nickname was Old Grog. “Grog” became rum and water. “Groggy” began as drunk and moved on to generally shaky.

And still there, but buried deep, are archaic English expressions such as the English seventeenth-century “from” for “since,” as in “from I was a child I could do that,” and “aks” for “ask” (“ax” in Old English), “cripsy” for “crispy” — all stewed in with Yoruba, Ibo, Spanish, French, Portuguese and mixed to a language as plaited as any on the planet.

I can think of no better way to end this chapter than to print at some length a poem by Miss Lou called “Bans a Killin.” Miss Lou, famous as a poet and an inspiration to women and writers in Jamaica, wrote this protest poem to defend Jamaican dialect from the usual charge of that time that it was not proper or correct English and therefore had to be put down. Miss Lou knew her English literature well and used English dialects as her ammunition. Here, she plants her own dialect in the heartland of the English language.

Robert Burns, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and dialect speakers the length of Britain would surely have approved.

F
or centuries it was called Terra Australis Incognita. In 1770, James Cook set out on a scientific expedition in search of what might have been a legendary continent. Cook's ship, the
Endeavour,
found its first mooring; Joseph Banks, the botanist, began the collecting of plants and animals. Cook wanted to call his anchor point Stingray Harbour but in honour of Joseph Banks he dubbed it Botany Bay. The naming and claiming of this new land had begun.

It was not until 1788 that English really planted itself on the continent with the arrival of seven hundred twenty-three convicts who were to found a penal colony: without question the most significant, fertile and successful penal colony the world has ever known. The convict ship made for Botany Bay but a parching summer had turned Cook's primal lush landscape inhospitable. It sailed north and landed at Port Jackson, now Sydney Harbour.

The contact with the local language can be illustrated most directly in two ways. First the naming of the kangaroo. At Port Jackson it appears that the strange creature which beguiled the Brits was called “patagorong.” Or was it? For, seemingly, there were about two hundred fifty native languages, many of which were not mutually understandable. It is possible that there were two hundred fifty words for kangaroo. It is also possible that there never was the word “kangaroo” at all: that kangaroo was the reply given when one of Cook's crew pointed to this peculiar creature and enquired what it was: “I don't understand what you're asking,” said his Aboriginal informant and that sentence roughly translates as “kangaroo.” Wherever it came from, it stuck. These settlers were there under duress and they needed to get their bearings fast. They plundered whatever in the native language helped their furious purpose.

The first cluster of English borrowings came from the Dharuk language spoken around Port Jackson. Words such as “boomerang,” “dingo,” “koala,” “wallaby,” “wallaroo” and “wombat.” One exceptionally happy borrowing was “cooee,” a call word used by the Aborigines to summon one another from a distance. For decades to come “cooee,” the call of the harsh Australian bush, would be the chaste mating call of the English-speaking world, the affectionate signal used in childhood games, the call across the garden fence, the word from the wild that summoned the faithful in domesticated suburbia. There was also an owl known as a “boobook”; a tree, the “waratah,” which has become the emblem of New South Wales; “warrigal,” another name for “dingo”; and “woomera,” a throwing stick. From other languages came “budgerigar”; “barramundi,” a great perch; and “kylie,” another word for boomerang. The experience parallels that of America quite closely. The English held tight to their language — were very resistant to native tongues — but under pressure from the new and the strange they would steal. Not unlike the fifth-century Frisians and the native Celts.

Again, as in America, words from English were grimly applied to local species: “magpie” and “apples” are examples here. And the English took their place names with them. North of Sydney, to take just one example, is Newcastle and near Newcastle there are a number of place names from the district around Newcastle-on-Tyne in Northumbria.

It was not until about a century after the first British had settled that the word “Aboriginal” came into use. At first those found living in the new continent were called Native Australians. “Australian” derives from the Latin adjective for “southern.” “Aboriginal” is a Latin term meaning “from the beginning”: the Romans used it to name the peoples they displaced. As the word “Aboriginal” came into use for the natives, so the word “Australian” was appropriated by the settlers.

Language borrowing worked both ways. The Aboriginals had never seen horses: in some of their languages they called them “yarraman,” which most likely comes from teeth.

The Aboriginals also developed pidgins of English, some of which were sucked back into the new tongue. “Jumbuck,” for that curious newcomer the sheep, is widely used in Australia. It could be a corruption of “jump up” or, less likely, I think, it could come from “jombok,” which means a big white fluffy cloud. “Walkabout” has gone from the outback to every city street and city square in the English-speaking world.

Dr. Kate Burridge of La Trobe University in Melbourne has pointed out the diversity and subtleties in Australian creole. It is, she says, strikingly different from Standard English, and again perhaps surprisingly for those who equate creole with simple it can be much more complex than Standard Australian English or English English. She gives a telling example:

About a hundred fifty thousand prisoners were taken halfway around the world in the eighty years of transportation — interestingly about the same number as is estimated for the Frisian settlers and invaders in fifth-century England. There is evidence that in many cases the offences of these convicts were light — sometimes scarcely enough to warrant even an appearance in court today. Many would now be dealt with by a few days' community work. There are claims that those transported were given adequate medical attention because they would need to be fit at the other end. There were formidable individuals there, as Robert Hughes tells us in
The Fatal Shore.

But sympathy was very short two hundred years ago. Punishment was the vengeance of the Lord and pity had no place. In his book, Hughes serves up a ballad from 1790 which celebrates the departure of “thieves, robbers and villains” to Botany Bay. The verses include:

Little wonder the Australians still love beating the Brits in sporting battles.

As elsewhere, some English dialect words travelled well. Those who came to Australia, just as those who went west, were largely from classes to whom a dialect was standard. Sometimes dialect words which have since withered on the English tongue struck deep abroad. “Dinkum,” for instance, is a word for “work” from Midlands dialects and “fair dinkum” meant a fair day's work — hence “fair play.” “Cobber,” meaning friend or mate, seems to come from the English dialect word “cob,” meaning to take a liking to. The comradely use of “digger” travelled to Australia's goldfields from England's farmlands.

And the criminals brought their own slang: “flash,” it was known as, or “kiddy talk”; “kiddy” coming from “to kid” — to steal, to fool.

Criminal words slotted in with remarkable ease, and time has laundered them impeccably. “Chum” began life in an Oxford college, someone sharing an apartment, and was taken over as a fellow prisoner; “swag,” the bag of loot, developed into “swagman,” a tramp carrying all his worldly goods in a bundle. There's “bash,” “cadge” and “croak” (meaning to die), “dollop,” “grub” (food), “job” (robbery), “judy” (woman), “mug” (face), “pigs” (police), “to queer” (to spoil), “seedy,” “snooze,” “stink” (trouble), “swell” (gent), “whack” (share) and “yoke.” There's “beak” (magistrate), “lark” (prank), “split” (betray), “stow it” (keep quiet) — all these are as common in Australian as in
Oliver Twist
and some of them in Shakespeare's Southwark.

There are less familiar words. If you were “unthimbled” your watch had been stolen, police runners were called “traps,” a thief was a “prig,” to be “lagged for your wind” meant being transported for life, and if that sentence knocked the wind out of you, you were a “bellowser.” The voyage itself was being “marinated” or “piked across the pond.” To be shackled to another prisoner was to be “married.” Convict speech such as this was recorded by James Hardy Vaux in 1812. He is said to have written it down in the breaks in his hard labour.

It would have been miraculous had the British not transported their class system to Australia, but the circumstances both streamlined and hardened it. There were the prisoners and their descendants, those born in Australia, known as “currency,” and the British who were “pure sterling.” The former developed a local dialect, the latter held hard to the standard of London English. If you wanted to climb the ladder of society then it was no different from England at that time, though the gap might have seemed wider — you had to adopt Establishment English. And to say “caning,” meaning a hundred lashes, “smiggins” for a prison soup thickened with barley, “scrubby brushes” for bad bread, or “sandstone” for a man who flaked from a flogging would be a certain giveaway.

There was also the word “bloody.” It has a long and interesting history in the literature of war, of words, of violence, of blasphemy and of outright cursing. It was a favourite word among the convicts, unsurprisingly, and it became widely used in Australia. One traveller noted that he heard an Australian use “the disgusting word” twenty-seven times in a quarter of an hour, and this enterprising observer went on to calculate that it would add up to about eighteen million two hundred thousand uses in fifty years. He added that he thought the said Australian was quite capable of reaching the target. The first verse of John O'Grady's poem “The Integrated Adjective” illustrates this.

As with many dialects, creoles, and non-standard versions of English, what is condemned by the establishment is often held on to with pride and affection in part because it is one in the eye for Proper Speakers. It is a language of Outsiders who are confident enough to set themselves up against the Insiders. It has the comfort of a clan, the edge of being subversive and the freedom of something apparently made up by and for the clannish group that uses it.

The word “convict” was far more inflammatory than “bloody.” “Emancipist,” “government men,” “legitimate,” “exile,” “empire builder” — that is what they wanted to be called.

As the nineteenth century marched on, Australia began a love affair with its new accent and with its ability to invent vivid slang. In 1880, the
Bulletin
or the
Bushman's Bible
began weekly publication in Sydney and it delighted in “fair dinkum,” “larrikin,” “bonzer,” “bloody,” “offsider,” “fair cow,” “battler” and “bludger.” Phrase-making was a speciality: “better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick” or “as miserable as a bandicoot on a burnt ridge.” This was a people finding its identity in the most essential and enjoyable way — through words which started with them and belonged first to them. The
Bushman's Bible
also went in for poetry, and one poem became Australia's national anthem, a treasure chest of Australianisms: “Waltzing Matilda.”

It was written out on a sheep station. (It is said that “station” was used because the city-bred convicts had little idea of the countryside so they adopted the military words “station” for “farm,” and “muster” or “mob” for “a flock of sheep.”) Banjo Patterson was the author of this song, in 1895, a song which, I can testify, was sung as lustily in the primary schoolrooms of northern England in the 1940s as ever it was down under — which had by then drawn so many northern British to its shores.

In case you did not enjoy such primary school benefits, it begins: