Back in 2009 I posted about Martian Spoken Here, a blog by LH’s favorite Mauricien/Martian commenter Siganus Sutor (and I’m happy to see it’s still going strong); now I bring to your attention Mo Koz Kreol Morisien, “a comprehensive, step by step, guide to speaking the Mauritian Creole language…. Includes fun quizes to check your developing knowledge, language and pronunciation tips to perfect your understanding, and a word list of over 2000 of the most commonly used words.” You can download PDF, ePub, iBooks, and Kindle versions, all absolutely free. (Paul Choy, who runs the site, says “If I sell stuff, I have to spend vast amounts of my time protecting that stuff. […] Not everything in this world needs to be rewarded in terms of money. I enjoy creating things. That is my reward. And if other people can use or enjoy the things I create, then that is enough.”) Thanks for the heads-up, Martin!
And he’d have to file taxes for the income. (Says the man who has an excessively complicated tax situation.)
Hat, if you got the final -e out of “Mo Koz Kreole Morisien” that could make some people happier.
In the PDFed version of the book there is quite an amazing statement: “As a language that exists predominantly in its spoken form, there really are no hard and fast rules about how it is spoken. There are no shades of right or wrong. If I speak to you, and you understand, we are both speaking perfectly good Creole.”
How can someone writing on language say something like that? I could make myself understood by speaking a very bad form of English, which is probably the case, but it seems ludicrous to say that, therefore, there is no shade of right and wrong in English.
Paul Choy may have the misleading feeling that, since Creole has been a spoken language much more than a written one, there was no fixed rule. This is of course wrong. There are non-Mauritian people who have been speaking Creole for years and who, every now and then, say something that is obviously not acceptable Creole. People do feel that something can be wrong in a sentence in Creole, even if they understood the meaning.
But where I totally agree with Paul Choy is on the necessity of having accentuated letters. Accents make things much easier for the reader!
Hat, if you got the final -e out of “Mo Koz Kreole Morisien” that could make some people happier.
Done, and I’m glad you showed up!
Thanks for the mention of my book “Mo Koz Kreol Morisien”. Although writing the book was challenging, I really enjoyed the opportunity to develop my knowledge of the language and hope it can help others who want to learn.
I just wanted to pick up on Siganus Sutor’s comment. I completely agree that, for accomplished Creole speakers, there are agreed norms of the language. In other words, there clearly is a right and a wrong way of saying something. In fact, the very next section of the book, called “Official Kreol”, makes that exact point.
However, the passage Siganus quoted from was not referring to accomplished speakers. It was addressed at people just setting out to learn, and alludes to the fact that Creole is much more forgiving, as a language.
In Creole, as a beginner, it is possible to say something in a roundabout sort of way and still be understood (although you may raise a smile in the process), whereas the same roundabout way in another language would be result in the sentence becoming nonsensical.
I think it was probably just poor writing, on my part, that doesn’t make it clear that although there is a right and a wrong way to say something in Creole, the beauty of the language is that even the wrong way will still usually be understood.
I will look to tidy that up in the next update of the book, so would welcome any further comments.
The site is gone, and the Wayback Machine has no record of it, but Choy now has Korek!, “a comprehensive, step by step, guide to speaking the Mauritian Creole language”:
I just learned that in Guineenese (Guinea-Bissau Creole) the word for ‘person’ is pekadur. Perversely, I find that charming.
One wonders what the word for ‘sinner’ is.
Good one. It’s pekaduris (which is also the plural of pekadur).
I sin, therefore, I am.
It’s presumably the same principle as the formerly widespread European use of forms of “Christian” to mean, simply, “person.”
It also reminds me of Haitian nèg “person.”
And then “simple person”. Also note our ten Kings Christian (eleven soon, as these things are reckoned).
The trolls of the folktales famously could smell kristenmanns blod “the blood of a Christian”. This of course means “human blood” or just “the scent of a human”. But there’s also an implication, maybe a lingering fear, that it’s just a thin layer of civilization and observation of rites that set us apart from the trolls.
But there’s also an implication, maybe a lingering fear, that it’s just a thin layer of civilization and observation of rites that set us apart from the trolls
Going off on a tangent, but that reminds me of Peer Gynt, where the difference between trolls and men is mostly one of the moral choices one makes.
Yes. Ibsen knew his folktales, and the character of Peer and some of his adventures are from a folktale collected by Peder Chr. Asbjørnsen, but Ibsen’s interpretation of the theme was of course modern.
And of course Russian крестьянин ‘farmer, peasant’:
And cretin.
(Lars, is that what you meant by “simple person”?)
“O, tis a precious apothegmatical Pedant, who will find matter enough to dilate a whole day of the first invention of Fy, fa, fum, I smell the blood of an English-man.” — Thos. Nashe, 1596. Whether “Englishman” is or isn’t a better exemplary stand-in for “human being” than “Christian” is left as an exercise for the reader.
@Hans: In the rarely heard lyrics of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the court-trolls are furious with Peer Gynt for psychically impregnating the Mountain King’s daughter. In his liminal state, on the verge of becoming a troll noble, Peer is referred to only as a Christian’s son, not a Christian himself.
@Y, indeed. It may not be central to the current sense of the word in English, but I thought it was a nice segue.
What is the plural of singular pekaduris ‘person’?
Singular pekaduris is ‘sinner’.
I’ve wondered about this too. I imagine it would be pekadurisis, cf. rapas/rapasis ‘boy/boys’. Kihm’s Kriyol Syntax (available at the excellent Guiné-Bissau Kriol Docs site) says,
(P.S. I earlier misspelled Guineense as Guineenese. I am a sinner.)
Kabuverdianu has also kept the Portuguese plural. The Portuguese-based creoles of Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau and Senegal are sometimes grouped under the “Upper Guinea” label so I would replace “Kriyol” with “the Upper Guinea creoles” above.