MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

In order to continue to explore the intricate relationship between writing and orality which in the case of Bible Translation and actually the sociolinguistic reality of heteroglossia in the Caribbean one can turn to the concept of genre as explained in De Vries' article which I am attaching here below (Lourens de Vries. Bible Translation and Orality. TBT Vol. 51, No.1, January 2000, 101-114)

.I <<Oral genres and Bible translation

The complex relationship between oral genres and the genres which we find in

Bible translations can be clarified in terms of Foley's (1997) notion of genre.

Building on the work of Bakhtin (1986), Foley stresses that genre is not an abstract,

closed linguistic object like the grammatical notion of sentence, but rather a

historically given way to produce and interpret texts in culture-specific settings and

institutional frameworks.>> (107)

II. <<Let us first discuss the new Sit: im Leben, the cultural function of translated

Bible texts and its concomitant pragmatic innovations. The translation functions

first of all as a religious base text in the young Christian community, in the liturgy

but also on other occasions such as marriage ceremonies and burials, in a way

entirely different from the functions and roles of oral genres which have their own

cultural meanings following from their historically given Sitz im Leben. Compare

the differences between a reading of Genesis 1 during a church service and a

narration of a Korowai lamolaup story of origin to adult males during a crisis

situation in order to overcome that situation.>> (108)

In the Creole situation there are often stable churches and a tradition has been formed by through the challenge is a bit different. It is the challenge of not allowing the text to conform to the patterns of the written tradition of the originally European colonial language but to regards both as valid within the heteroglossic language continuum.

III. <<The third factor distinguishing Bible translations as a new genre in oral

societies is the new medium of writing. The new medium has drastic effects on

patterns of language use, but not all pragmatic innovations should be ascribed to

the new medium. One of the most striking effects of the new medium is the sharp

decrease in the use of topic markers in written genres; in oral genres topic markers

tend to be used frequently. The change in the use of topic markers is not just a

quantitative change.>> (110)

In communities where different language competencies co-exist and where the Creole has been relegated to the more orally situational sphere of jokes, stories, informal conversation, it is often a shock both positively as negatively to hear "Sacred Scripture" in the vernacular. The more literary material has been accumulated in writing the less of a cultural alienation as felt. This alienation comes purely from "genre expectations" as to Scripture. People are suprised when they hear Jesus speak deep creole and at times this results in the laughter of recognition and with others in a certain anger and feeling of "desecration" even though the person is a mothertongue speaker of the Creole.

Writing itself creates than a genre specifically with biblical texts which have their own genre and which in sense can seem to be alien to the hearer and reader because the full oral/aural gamma of strategies are not used even when the written text is rendered as audio text. There is a tendency to not to allow the "deep creole" to manifest but to use a more acrolectal (closer to the lexifier language) variant because the medium of communication is writing. The challenge here is how to make writing more a medium than a genre on its own. Or depending on the language strategy to allow time so that the "raw orality" of the Creole becomes the standardized written language for the Biblical genre.

As Nicolas Faraclas says in his article on the Afro-Caribbean Creoles the genius of Creolité (my words) has been exactly the mixture of cultures, languages, the creation of new identities.

7. Conclusion: Anansi wants it all, and eventually gets it all

Anansi, the prototypical Afro-Atlantic anti-hero and trickster [in the form of spider] is often depicted as having two mouths. Speakers of the Atlantic Creole languages have refused to make the forced, zero-sum, binary choice between Euro-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic identities that too many creolists have assumed has been the only choice available to them. For these creative and resourceful linguistic and cultural agents it’s never been about one or the other language, one or the other culture, or one or the other voice. Instead it’s been about both at the same time, along with a number of other identities and voices. (Faraclas, p. 195)

In Bible translation, the language does not cease to be an oral language or starts being a written language like the European counterpart, rather it finds a way of being where writing is at the service of orality and performance and not the way around. But translators need to steer away from the imposed creation of a "written language style or genre that alienates the mother tong speakers". We should aim for the writing prestige and the creation of ways of expressing orality in writing and in this age of modern internet media combine writing, orality and visual performance in a way that allows the languages to be what they truly are, in a way that does not sterilize them. In this case too, in the case of Bible translation, the Creole creative mixture and creation of new reality from two distinct ones should prevail, just like in other aspects of identity and life. In that sense written and audio texts then become part of an intersemiotic reality that is encougaged from the part of the Bible users but also a perspective of working from the very base of the metier of the translator. The translator is than not somebody who writes and types and correct words and sentences (we always say that a translator translates at least paragraphs at a time) but is somebody who uses writing, orality, performance, new media, illustrations and different platforms of communication to indeed communicate the message. In this sense new developments on the the Paratext front and projects like MARBLE really are enhancing the task, role of the translator. making this approach to translation more and more possible. But do I fear that the prestige of writing shall once again win? Maybe, but we should at least aspire! In a sense we are not pretending to say something new, rather saying maybe the same that many has been saying but we are saying with our own voice from own reality and when the same is said with a different voice from a different socio-cultural reality,from the historical pain of that different reality, even though it sounds familiar it actually expresses a new thing in its sameness.

Extracted text from Bible_translation_and_primary_orality.pdf:

TECHNICAL PAPERS FOR THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR Published twice yearly (January and July) by the United Bible Societies Vol. 51, No.1, January 2000 EDITOR: Paul Ellingworth EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Rosario U. Yu REVIEWS EDITOR: Harold P. Scanlin LOURENS DE VRIES BIBLE TRANSLATION AND PRIMARY ORALITY The author is a translation advisor with the United Bible Societies for projects in Indonesia, holds the Chair of Bible translation at the Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is a senior researcher in the Leiden University Irian Jaya Studies project. Introduction In New Guinea but also in other parts of the world many Bible translation projects were and are carried out in speech communities that did not know writing prior to the commencement of Bible translation projects in their languages. The term primary orality for societies that do not know writing was introduced by Ong (1982) and the addition of "primary" was meant to clarify that we are not talking about orality in societies that have a tradition of writing. Most Bible translators working in such primary oral contexts want to incorporate in some way or other the oral perspective of their readers and listeners in their translations (Noss 1981). The central question of my articleI is what a primary oral context means for Bible translations. First, I will describe Ong's (1982) influential view of primary orality against the background of the academic debates which informed Ong's views. Then I will relate the findings ofOng to the study ofcorpora of primary oral texts from New Guinea. Finally, I will describe the relationship between the (macro)genre of Bible translations and primary oral genres such as myths, tales, songs or informal conversations. Although the present consensus in discourse studies is that there is no proof of absolute differences between literate and oral societies (in terms of mode of thinking or type ofdiscourse), there are good reasons to start our discussion ofBible translation and primary orality with Ong (1982) since Ong's picture of primary orality is still influential in the world of Bible translators. Primary orality according to Ong (1982) Since Ong's views are crucially informed by three other academic debates, we need to consider those first2 The first debate is the debate about oral and written styles I This article is based on my inaugural address held at the Free University. April 2. 1998. 2 In representing those debates I follow Foley (1997:417-434), 101 by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 102 THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR (VOL 51, NO. I in English. For Chafe and Danielewicz (1987:103; Chafe 1988) processing constraints are the critical factors distinguishing the styles of written and oral texts: "...there is a strong tendency for casual speakers to produce simple sequences of coordinated clauses, avoiding the more elaborate interclausal relations found in writing. Elaborate syntax evidently requires more processing effort than speakers ordinarily devote to it." Chafe emphasizes the syntactic fragmentation of spontaneous, casual talk as opposed to the syntactic integration of written texts. In addition to the integration factor, Chafe mentions the involvement factor: speech is more involved whereas writing tends to be more detached. Whereas we still find two parameters in the work of Chafe, in the important study of Biber (1988) we find twenty parameters, such as situation vs abstract content and interactive vs edited text. Biber investigated around twenty genres of English texts but found no absolute differences between written and oral texts. Whether agiven text,sayan interview or ascientific article, scored high for a certain parameter could not be predicted on the basis of whether that text was oral or written. In other words, Biber's work undermined the whole idea of a style continuum with "typically oral style" and "typically written style" asextreme poles; that notion was replaced by genre-determined configurations of stylistic characteristics. Besnier (1995) did a similar investigation in a non-western context, in the Polynesian society of Nukalaelae. Stylistically, personal letters group with conversations on Nukalaelae whereas written sermons group with political speeches and radio broadcasts. The genre of personal letters is determined by the cultural context of Nukalaelae in which kinship and exchange relations are crucial. In Besnier's work it becomes very clear to what extent genre, the decisive factor of Biber's work, is a culturally and historically determined notion. The second debate relevant to Ong's view of orality is the anthropological debate about universal cognitive dichotomies, such as prelogical vs logical cultures (Levy-Bruhl 1926) or cultures with thought processes tied to the concrete vs those that can abstract from concrete circumstances (Levi-Strauss 1966). In the work of Olson (1994), such cognitive dichotomies are reformulated in terms of oral vs literate societies. Olson (1994) emphasizes that written language is "decontextualized" when compared to speech. Speakers rely strongly on the context and situation of their utterances and they expect their listeners to infer information by combining utterance and context. Writers have to be much more explicit and cannot rely on implicatures to a great extent. Olson (1994) links this explicitness and autonomy of writing to cognitive changes in the direction of analytical and critical thinking of a type not possible in the contextualized, more implicit communication of primary oral cultures. The second element in Olson's view is the fact that a written text is available to the reader as a fixed object which can be compared to other texts, interpreted, summarized and so on. Such operations would stimulate the distinction between text and interpretation, and create a different meta-language consciousness, leading to grammars, lexicons and, ultimately, to the development of logic. This anthropological debate on universal cognitive dichotomies of cultures is a thing of the past now, partly because of relativistic theoretical developments leaving no room for universal, ahistorical dichotomies, and partly because of the results of empirical research on the cognitive effects ofthe introduction of writing. by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from JANUARY2(00) BIBLE TRANSLATION AND PRIMARYORALITY 103 Scribner and Cole (1981) for example studied the effects of writing among the Vai of Liberia. Three writing systems are used by that community: the Arabic script for religious instruction, the English script for school, government and the workplace, and the syllabic Vai script for informal use at home, such as personal letters and shopping lists. The Vai script is informally transmitted in the home. There are Vai people without formal training who write just in the syllabic Vai. Those persons, although literate, tum out to score low for tests involving abstract categorizations but high for tests in which words have to be formed from syllables. In other words, there are cognitive effects of writing but those effects are not universal but local, determined by the local cultural and institutional contexts in which writing systems function. The thirddebate is the philological debate on the oral nature and origin oftexts from Antiquity, as wefind in the work ofParry (1928) on Homer, and Kelber (1983) on the Gospel of Mark. Parry emphasized the high density of epithets, formulas, standard themes and other formulaic elements in the metrical epics ofHomer. That formulaic nature of the Homeric texts was attributed to the oral performance of such texts in which performing artists produced their text by drawing from a rich store of fixed formulas, standard themes and epithets, stitching such elements together in various ways depending on the occasion and circumstances of the performance. Kelber (1983) also observes formulaic elements and other oral narrative style features in Mark, such as triads (three times Jesus wakes up the sleeping disciples, three times the prediction of Jesus' death), the use of the narrative present tense and the use of the 3rd person plural instead of the passive. Kelber (1983) sees those oral features as concessions of a writer to an orally oriented audience. Many elements from the three debates mentioned playa role in Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982). Ong (1982:49) describes the oral mode of thinking as situational rather than abstract, aggregative rather than analytic, conservative or traditionalist, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. These cognitive characteristics stem from the anthropological debate on universal dichotomies as represented in the writings of Levi-Strauss (1966) and others. The textual and stylistic features mentioned by Ong include additive rather than subordinative, redundant, formulaic and no sequential parallellism. Ong's explication ofthe feature additive style makes it clear that the debate on speech and writing in English is crucially linked to Dng's portrayal of primary oral discourse. Referring to Chafe, Ong (1982:37-38) writes that he misses in primary oral discourse "the analytic, reasoned subordination that characterizes writing"; he continues with the observation that "written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependent simply upon linguistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential contexts which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar." The characteristics formulaic and no sequential parallellism in Ong's portrayal of primary orality have their origin in the philological debate on the so-called Homeric question, as Ong himselfpoints out. That debate, in which Milman Parry was the central figure, is regarded by Ong as fundamental to the modem discovery of primary orality. Below I will return to the presumed formulaicity and absence of sequential parallellism in primary oral discourse. by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 104 THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR (VOL 51, NO.1 Summarizing we can say that in Ong's picture of primary orality, the additive parataxis from the linguistic debate about speech and writing in English, the context-bound concreteness from the anthropological debate on universal cognitive dichotomies, and the formulaicity from the philological Homer debate come together. Primary orality in transcribed texts from New Guinea Let us relate the findings of Ong to the study of corpora of primary oral texts from New Guinea. As far as thecognitivecharacteristics from the anthropological debate go, such as "situational rather than abstract", there is little left to verify since cognitive anthropologists themselves have rejected universal dichotomies in which literate societies were contrasted with illiterate societies in oppositions such as rational vs traditional and abstract vs concrete thinking. As we saw above, such universal hypotheses were rejected on both theoretical and empirical grounds and were replaced by more limited hypotheses about local, culture-specific cognitive effects of writing systems (see for example Scribner and Cole [1981D. Concerning the characteristics from the linguistic debate, the central feature here is additive parataxis, a characteristic from the area of clause combining, the way speakers and writers combine clauses into larger syntactic and textual units. Ong (1982) uses the term additive parataxis to refer to simple juxtapositions of clauses, with coordinating conjunctions providing the links. As an example of additive parataxis, Ong (1982) quotes Gen 1.1-5 in the Douay translation of 1610. That translation, according to Ong, reflects the additive parataxis of the Hebrew original: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters... According to Ong, the meaning relations between the clauses in such additive paratactic style are not coded in the utterances themselves but have to be inferred by the receptor on the basis ofthe context, a typical oral style which contrasts with the complex, interclausal relations found in written style, explicitly coded in the utterances by forms of subordination. Notice that Ong (1982) takes a written text, from a literary tradition in ancient Israel, to illustrate primary orality. Ong (1982) sees a massive oral residue in ancient Israel enabling him to take such texts as examples. However, to study primary orality there is a much directer way: we can study the texts and the languages of really primary oral cultures such as are still to be found in isolated parts of New Guinea. There are well-documented oral languages that have subordination as the most frequent, unmarked way ofclause combining, for example Yimas of Papua New Guinea. Foley (1991:497) writes that Yimas "contrasts with many other Papuan languages in making lessextensive use of clause chaining. The most common type of clause linkage in Yirnas involves nominalization, both finite and non-finite". It is indeed true that clause chaining is by far the most widespread type of clause combining in the oral languages of New Guinea. In clause chaining languages, single verb clauses of usually simple internal structure are chained together to form long chains ofclauses. The last clause of the chain has independent or final verb forms whereas the preceding clauses have medial or dependent verb by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from JANUARY2000) BIBLE TRANSLATION AND PRIMARY ORALITY 105 forms. The medial verb forms express interclausal relations ofswitch-reference and temporality. Switch-reference distinctions pertain to the question whether the next clause in the chain has a different or the same agent as the preceding clause whereas temporality relations pertain to relations of sequence or simultaneity of the events denoted by the verbs in the chain.' These medial morphological oppositions often playa major role in indicating textual coherence relations. The functions of syntactic processes of subordination and coordination in Indo-European languages, to express interclausal and textual relations, are carried out to a significantextent in language groups such as Semitic and Papuan languages by morphological processes. For Hebrew I refer to recent work by Baayen (1997) about the textual role of morphological oppositions in biblical Hebrew verbs. If one looks at Semitic or Papuan languages from the perspective of Indo-European languages, one easily overlooks the morphological expression of interclausal coherence, since the morphological categories involved (such as switch-reference in Papuan languages and the opposition between prefix and suffix verb conjugations in Semitic languages) are unknown in Indo-European grammars. "Literal" translations of Papuan or Semitic clause chains often give an impression of a loose, additive "and...and...and" style, falsely suggesting a low level of interclausal integration in the Semitic or Papuan source texts because the translations do not capture the morphological processes of interclausal integration. The obligatory indication of switch-reference of Papuan utterances, for example, is hard to translate explicitly and naturally into Indo-European languages. The philological debate on Homer is the source for the following three characteristics ascribed by Ong to oral cultures: a formulaic style, a highly redundant style, and the absence ofsequential parallellism. By the last feature Ong (1982:147) means that oral narrators would have the tendency to start a story in medias res: "Oral narrative is not greatly concerned with exact sequential parallelism between the sequence in the narrative and the sequence in extra-narrative referents. Such a parallelism becomes a major objective only when the mind interiorizes literacy." The Homeric bards may have had a tendency to use an in medias res narrative style, but practically all Bible translators in New Guinea and elsewhere (Callow 1974:43) struggle with the opposite problem, namely that the target cultures tell stories in strict chronological order. By a formulaic style Ong means the frequent use of epithets, proverbs, fixed sayings, standard themes and so on. Indeed, anyone reading Homer will be struck by the formulaic style. This style has been linked to the demands of the meter: to get metrically smooth lines the oral performers of texts from the Homeric tradition could choose from a large stock ofepithets so that they could pick the epithet which best suited the metric scheme of the line. But Ong goes further than this metric motivation: for him there is a mnemonic motivation. Oral cultures cannot fix their insights and knowledge in writing and in order to be able to fix knowledge in the memory, knowledge is stored in easily storable rhythmic, formulaic form. According to Ong (1982), oral cultures think in rhythmic, formulaic fashion. l The importance of switch-reference and temporality distinctions in clause chaining languages of New Guinea does not imply the absence of overt grammatical marking of other semantic (interclausal) relations like Cause or Reason (see for example De Vries and Wiersma 1992:63-64). by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 106 THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR (VOL 51, No.1 However, in primary oral cultures formulaic elements do not appear to be significantly more prominent than in societies with writing. Rather, at least in some oral societies, such as the Awyu societies in southeast Irian Jaya, one has to look hard to find evidence for formulaic elements. It is quite possible that the idea that primary oral societies think in formulaic fashion has its roots in the fact that literate observers cannot imagine other ways of preserving and transmitting complex knowledge than through language, in the form of easy to memorize verbal forms. But it is easy to find other forms ofpreserving and transmitting knowledge in most oral societies. The complex cosmology of the Marind and Asmat of Irian laya is represented in very elaborate ritual actions, masks and wood carvings. The totemic ancestors of Korowai clans are remembered by food taboos concerning the totem animal. Of course, there are myths which relate the same notions in verbal form, but these myths have no fixed linguistic form: it is the content, the intention of the mythology, which counts. The symbolic and dramatic representation of those contents in rituals and carvings, together with the telling of the myths, ensures the transmission and continuation of knowledge. It is not that the myths form the basis for the rituals, rather rituals and myths express the same basic cosmological themes, in a mutually reinforcing way. In the Awyu cultures which I studied, even the magic "formulas" had no fixed linguistic form. In such magic expressions, the only fixed elements are proper names ofancestors and spirits. These names are the fixed heart of the magic expressions, since the names evoke the powerful entities they are associated with. Apart from additive parataxis, formulaism and the absence of sequential parallellism, redundancy is stressed by Ong (1982) as a characteristic of primary oral discourse: recapitulation, repetition and a low information rate. When reading the reader can go back to what he has just read; the listener gets only one chance. When writing, the writer can endlessly rephrase what he wants to write; the speaker has to process his new utterance while performing the present utterance. Repeating information and other strategies of reducing the amount of information per utterance all help the speaker to win time to process his next utterance and the listener to process the present utterance. The verification of the claim that primary oral discourse has a high degree of redundancy, by studying corpora of transcribed texts oforal societies, is not so easy since the notion of redundancy is hard to define. What is redundant at the propositional level may be informative at the interactional or rhetorical levels. Ong (1982) seems to refer to redundancy at the propositional level. If we study text corpora from New Guinea, such as the Korowai texts edited by Van Enk and De Vries (1997), from the perspective of propositional redundancy, two, at first sight conflicting, things strike the observer. In the first place, tail-head linkage and generic verb linkage of clause chains, two conventional recapitulative devices, occur very widely in New Guinea. Especially in narrative texts these repetitive linking devices occur very frequently. The other striking thing is the complaint by almost all scientific editors of such oral texts that so much information is left implicit and is supposed to be known to the addressees that it is often impossible to know who is doing what and where the events of the story are taking place. These two at first sight contradictory aspects of New Guinea oral narratives, on the one hand, the redundance ofthe frequent recapitulative linkage devices, and on the other hand, the avoidance of redundance by leaving out known or inferrable by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from JANUARY2000) BIBLE TRANSLAnON AND PRIMARY ORALITY 107 information, both have to do with the distribution of information in clause chains. The medial clauses in the chains have a high information load: wherever possible, the identification of participants with nominal phrases or pronouns is avoided. The addressees have to combine switch-reference and agent cross-referencing morphology on the verb with context and situation to identify participants ofmedial clauses. Not only participants but also the time and place framework are left implicit wherever possible in medial clauses. The clause chains are connected by tail-head linkage and generic verb linkage (Van Enk and De Vries 1997). In tail-head linkage the last clause of the chain (the tail clause) is repeated as the first clause (head) of the next chain. During tail-head linkage the speaker talks much more slowly and repeats information, Thus the tail-head linkages provide conventional resting points between two chains for the speaker to process his new chain and for the addressee to process the information from the previous one. The highly redundant recapitulative linkages are badly needed to compensate for the high rate of information in the medial parts of the chain. Summarizing this section, we can say that very few universal claims about primary orality can stand the New Guinea test. The characteristics of primary orality as additive-paratactic, redundant, formulaic, bound to concrete contexts and so on did not emerge from empirical study ofspecific primary oral societies in their historical unicity but seem to result from universalistic projections on these societies of pictures from various academic debates such as the Homeric debate, the debate of written vs oral style in English and the anthropological debate on cognitive dichotomies in terms of literate vs illiterate societies. Oral genres and Bible translation The complex relationship between oral genres and the genres which we find in Bible translations can be clarified in terms of Foley's (1997) notion of genre. Building on the work ofBakhtin (1986), Foley stresses that genre is not an abstract, closed linguistic object like the grammatical notion of sentence, but rather a historically given way to produce and interpret texts in culture-specific settings and institutional frameworks. Genres change when society changes, and people use genre patterns creatively for their own purposes. The ability to produce texts according to a specific genre pattern is in many societies an important element in defining social roles, for example the pastor and the sermon, the scholar and the scientific article. This notion of genre moves away from an ahistorical, autonomistic and structuralistic notion of genre and comes close, in several regards, to the notion of genre of scholars such as Gunkel, Bultmann and Dibelius, for example in the link between genres and the social and institutional frameworks in which genres function, the so-called Sitz im Leben. The Sit: im Leben, the place of a text type in the life of a society, for example a wedding ceremony or a harvest feast, was very much a diachronic notion for scholars such as Gunkel, embedded in 19th century thinking; it was the place where oral Vorlagen of the biblical texts functioned. Modem notions of genre are both historical and synchronic, focussing on the way a text synchronically reflects the social and institutional setting in which it functions. The historical and cultural dimensions of genres can be illustrated by the lamolaup genre ofthe Korowai ofIrian Jaya. The name ofthe genre means "history of the world". Only adult Korowai males may listen to and transmit these sacred by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 108 THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR (VOL 51, NO.1 origin stories. They are taboo for women, children and outsiders. They are told only in times of crisis such as severe droughts, solar eclipses, and famines. The lamolaup stories relate how the cosmic order came into being, and in crisis situations, when Korowai people feel that their world is falling apart, the narration of these stories is thought to help restore the cosmic order of things. In primary oral societies Bible translations are a new genre, or rather a new macro-genre with sub-genres such as psalms and apostolic letters. The newness of the genre of Bible translations does not only reside in the new medium, writing, but also in the new social and cultural setting, the new Sit: im Leben, in which translated Bible texts function, and in the secondary character of translations, secondary texts in the sense that they represent texts written in the first place for other people, in another world and in another language. These three factors are constitutive for the new macro-genre of Bible translations and all three, the new medium (writing), the new social and cultural functions (e.g. in church, with marriage and burial ceremonies), and the new, secondary nature have tremendous impact on the way language is used in translations, causing pragmatic innovations which set apart (Bible) translations as a new genre of texts in oral societies. Let us first discuss the new Sit: im Leben, the cultural function of translated Bible texts and its concomitant pragmatic innovations. The translation functions first of all as a religious base text in the young Christian community, in the liturgy but also on other occasions such as marriage ceremonies and burials, in a way entirely different from the functions and roles of oral genres which have their own cultural meanings following from their historically given Sitz im Leben. Compare the differences between a reading of Genesis 1 during a church service and a narration of a Korowai lamolaup story of origin to adult males during a crisis situation in order to overcome that situation. The liturgical and ecclesiastical functions of Bible translations find their pragmatic expression in the new genres found in these translations. Take for example the pericopes with their headings found in translations.Whereas oral texts from narrative genres such as the Korowai lamolaup are narrated in their entirety in long sessions of many hours, the biblical stories, such as the Genesis narrative, are cut up into small pericope units which are read to the congregation in readings of usually not more than ten minutes. There is no place in the liturgy for the reading of whole books. The pericope divisions tend to lead to repeated, strong identifications (by full nominal phrases, pronouns) of participants at the beginning of pericopes. This strong identification of (given) participants at pericope breaks contrasts strongly with the weak (usually verbal) identification of given participants in traditional oral narrative genres. In addition to this, the headings form a new way to topicalize: oral genres do not require headings or titles to guide the addressees thematically and to identify short story fragments. In most oral societies of New Guinea, most people remain functionally illiterate after literacy programs have been carried out, simply because writing and reading remain largely irrelevant for their daily lives. Bible translations tend to function as follows: a small class of literati reads the translation on formal occasions to the illiterate majority. In these circumstances it is of course essential that the translation iseasy to read aloud. Visual structuring signs, such as pericopes, headings, and clearly visible paragraph breaks, usually help those who have the task of reading the translation to other people. But the addressees in these by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from JANUARY2(00) BIBLETRANSLATION ANDPRIMARY ORALITY 109 circumstances need audible structuring signals. IfAchtemeier (1990) is right, many source texts in the Bible contain such "acoustic clues", audible signals structuring the text, because those texts functioned in very similar fashion and were written to be read aloud to audiences. The apostolic letters for example correspond in a certain sense to formal, public letters from Hellenistic officials to the ekklesiai of the cities under their authority (Berger 1987:212). The ekklesia in the case of the apostolic letters is the Christian community and the authority is apostolic and prophetic. Public reading of such letters to the Christian community would fit that Sitz im Leben. Repetitions such as the threefold paredoken autous ho theos (NIV "God gave them over") in Rom 1.24, 26, 28 are examples of acoustic echoes in the sense of Achtemeier (1990). Translations in oral settings should not translate away such audible cohesion signals. The secondary nature of translated texts, described by Hatim and Mason (1996: I) as "an act of communication which attempts to relay, across cultural and linguistic boundaries, another act of communication", is the second factor behind the new pragmatics of Bible translations. The world behind the translated text is a strange world, the world of the ancient near east. The participants in the translation move in that strange world. This makes the participants harder to trace and distinguish. The stylistic result is again a tendency to maintain given participants with relatively strong, nominal means in addition to verbal means. This is in contrast with the weak, verbal means commonly found in oral genres of New Guinea where participants, after a single strong initial introduction, tend to be maintained by verbal agreements and verbal switch-reference affixation. Biblical referents unknown to the receptor culture, such as the Sanhedrin or phylacteries, are often described in complex nominal phrases. Both the pericope divisions (connected to the liturgical function) and the secondary nature of translations have a nominalising effect on the style. Another factor favouring participant identification by nominal means ill Bible translations may be the influence of English, Indonesian and Tok Pisin base texts. This stylistic shift in the nominal direction leads in its turn to heavier, more elaborate clause structures. These heavier clauses, the building blocks of clause chains, lead to shorter clause chains. The genres that develop in translations of the Bible, such as apostolic letters or psalms, could be called secondary genres. Secondary genres mediate between the primary genres of source and receptor cultures. They will always contain elements from both source and receptor genres but never coincide with them. For example, a translation of the Song of Songs will always have genre continuities with Israelitic love songs and with love songs of the receptor culture, but at the same time the translated text, as a secondary text, will be essentially different from both. A well-known secondary genre in Dutch are the psalms. They have genre continuity with the Hebrew genre, for example in parallelismus membrorum and in chiastic forms, but the rhythm and sound patterns are distinctly Dutch. At the same time the translated psalms have been given a crucial and special role in the liturgy of the various Dutch church traditions. There are no general rules for the way in which secondary genres mediate between the primary genres of source and target cultures. Important factors are the function which a translation has in speech and church communities, the cultural place of receptor genres and the degree of formal and functional overlap between by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from 110 THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR (VOL 51, NO. I source and target culture genres. The unique, historically given cultural place of a genre does not mean that there are no continuities ofgenres across cultures. When both source and target cultures have similar institutions (such as marriage or monarchy), there may be similarities between the text types that developed in those institutional frameworks. There are also formal similarities. Parallelism has been found in various forms in poetic genres in all parts of the world (Foley 1997:366). Such genre continuties support the mediating role of secondary genres. But in the end it is the creativity of the translator who creates, from elements of source and target genres, new secondary genres. The third factor distinguishing Bible translations as a new genre in oral societies is the new medium of writing. The new medium has drastic effects on patterns of language use, but not all pragmatic innovations should be ascribed to the new medium. One of the most striking effects of the new medium is the sharp decrease in the use of topic markers in written genres; in oral genres topic markers tend to be used frequently. The change in the use of topic markers is not just a quantitative change. Bromley (1981) notices a new constraint on the use oftopic markers emerging in written genres of Dani: one topic marker per clause. I have observed that Papuan Bible translators, in the process of re-editing their translations, not only edited out topic markers in many places, but also sometimes inserted them in places where they had been absent in the first drafts. The drastic decrease of topic markers in translations follows from the double functionality of topic markers in oral genres of New Guinea languages: they indicate thematic coherence but they also have a processing function, namely to mark pause, in order to give the speaker the chance to formulate what he wants to say and the addressees to process what they just heard (Bromley 1981; Van Enk and De Vries 1997). The thematic function remains in translations: it is realized in a different fashion in translations than in oral genres, but the pause and hesitation function oftopic markers becomes irrelevant. Another effect ofthe written medium is the decrease of the use of tail-head linkages in Bible translations; just like topic markers, tail-head linkages have both thematic and processing functions and it is the processing function which becomes irrelevant in written genres. The combined stylistic effects of the three genre distinguishing factors of new medium (writing), new cultural functions (church, burials, marriages), and the secondary nature are pervasive and drastic: decrease and different distribution of topic markers and tail-head linkages, increase of nominal participant identi- fications, heavier clauses, shorter clause chains, to mention only a few. The fact that specific new pragmatic patterns develop in the new (macro)genre of Bible translations makes it problematic to apply stylistic patterns from other genres, such as traditional oral genres, in Bible translations. An example would be the use ofcohesive elements such as topic markers. The way these are used in oral genres is not automatically right for a genre such as Bible translations. Renck (1990:96-97) gives interesting data from the Yagaria area of Papua New Guinea. The New Testament has been translated into two dialects of Yagaria, in the Move dialect and in the Kami-Kuluka dialect. Renck (1990) gives Mk 15.21 in both translations: by Lourens de Vries on March 31, 2016 tbt.sagepub.com Downloaded from JANUARY2(00) BIBLE TRANSLAnON AND PRIMARYORALITY 111 hida name-his de Alesategi Alexander-and agaea hoyaviti' garden-from lebelebe urge they-and (l) Yagaria (Move dialect): Gitogane'vagani ve bogo agi'a path-on while they go-and he man one Simo', Gilene yo' igopaloti' Simon Cyrenevillage land-from man Lufugiteti' avoti'ama' Rufus-and both father-their dl.he no'egapi fotu hida while he comes-and they meet they-and tagani Yesu malipuyava'a do him they-and he Jesus cross tree-his govilegapi idae. he carries-and they they went While they went on the street, a man by the name of Simon, a man from the settlement of Cyrene, the father of both Alexander and Rufus, as he came from the field, they met him and urged him, and (as) he carried the cross of Jesus, they went on. hida hagana speak they-and he gavaileda him lead they-and debogobo man-one (2) Yagaria (Kami-Kuluka dialect): Zisasibo bagesamahebo Jesus kill-they were going to /ida baledane'vaganahebo take-and put-end while they go-and he no'egana fotu hae. while he comes-and meet they Fotu hama demo Sai/ini gaiga/i meet they-that man Cyreneplace demo Alekesadagiti'a Lufasigiti'a man Alexander-and both Rufus-and both avo'ina'amabo gi'amoSa

Extracted text from 2206-4694-1-PB.pdf:

PAPIA, So Paulo, 24(1), p. 173-198, Jan/Jun 2014. Creoles and acts of identity: convergence and multiple voicing in the Atlantic Creoles Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade: convergncia e vozes mltiplas nas lnguas crioulas atlnticas Nicholas Faraclas Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico nickfaraclas@yahoo.com Lourdes Gonzlez Cotto Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico scramblingschwa@gmail.com Micah Corum Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico micahcorum@gmail.com Marisol Joseph Haynes Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico maritica@yahoo.com Diana Ursulin Mopsus Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico dianaursulin@hotmail.com ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767174 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. Aida Vergne Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico avergne@mac.com Petra Avilln Len Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico petra.avillan@upr.edu Sonia Crescioni Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico s_corsica@yahoo.com Damarys Crespo Valedn Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico cadiema3@gmail.com Brenda Domnguez Rosado Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico bldr00693@yahoo.com Pier Angeli LeCompte Zambrana Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico pieranpr@hotmail.com Jean Ourdy Pierre Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico pejourdy@hotmail.com PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 175 Hannia Lao Melndez Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico hannia.lao@upr.edu Vanessa Austin Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico vanessa.austin@upr.edu Hazel Ann Gibbs DePeza University of Trinidad and Tobago, Trinidad and Tobago hazel.depeza@utt.edu.tt Ange Jessurun Universidat di Korsou, Curaao angejessurun@yahoo.com Abstract: In this work, we analyze aspects of the phonology, morpho-syntax and lexico-semantics of the Afro-Atlantic Creoles to show how, by taking advantage of formal, structural, and functional convergence between and among African languages, European languages, a Proto Atlantic Portuguese lexifier Creole, and universals of language use, speakers of the Atlantic Creoles have shaped and deployed their creolized languages as instruments of double and multiple voicing (Du Bois 1903; Bakhtin 1930). This pluri-voicing has allowed Atlantic Creole speakers to equip themselves with a linguistic repertoire that has enabled them to use what appear at first glance to be the exact same words and structures to simultaneously assert Afro-Atlantic identities, Euro-Atlantic identities, Atlantic Creole identities and other identities. Following one of the many immensely helpful and intellectually sound approaches adopted by Holm (2000), we demonstrate how, as research on the Atlantic Creoles progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify a single source for many Atlantic Creole words and constructions. We argue that linear, mono-causal and mono-dimensional accounts of creole genesis must therefore give way to multi-directional, multi-causal and multiplex scenarios of convergence among PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767176 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. forms and structures found in what have been traditionally classified as superstratal, substratal and adstratal input varieties as well as those found universally and in a Proto West African Portuguese Creole. We conclude that the Atlantic Creole words and constructions studied in this paper are best accounted for by a reconceptualization of Atlantic Creole speakers as creative and resourceful agents who have co-instantaneously used their creole languages to identify, counter-identify, and dis-identify with both African and European ways of understanding the world and acting in it. Keywords: Creole languages, double voicing, agency. Resumo: Este trabalho analisa aspetos da fonologia, mor- fossintaxe e lxico-semntica dos crioulos afro-atlnticos, para demonstrar que, atravs da convergncia formal, estrutural e funcional entre lnguas africanas, lnguas europeias, um crioulo lexificador portugus proto-atlntico, bem como universais lingusticos aplicados ao uso, os falantes dos crioulos atlnticos definem e usam as suas lnguas como veculos de vozes duplas e mltiplas (Du Bois 1903, Bakhtin 1930). Estas vrias vozes permitem aos falantes dos crioulos atlnticos equiparem-se com um repertrio lingustico, que lhes permite usar um conjunto idntico de palavras e estruturas para simultaneamente afirmarem identidades afro-atlnticas, euro- atlnticas, crioulas e outras. Seguindo uma das vrias propostas teis e intelectualmente ss de Holm (2000), mostramos que, medida que a investigao sobre crioulos atlnticos avana, cada vez mais difcil identificar uma origem nica para as palavras e construes destes crioulos. Defendemos que as abordagens lineares, mono-causais e mono-dimensionais sobre a gnese dos crioulos deve dar lugar a cenrios multi-direccionais e multi-causais de convergncia entre as formas e estruturas encontradas nas chamadas variedades de superstrato, substrato e adstrato, bem como nos universais e no referido crioulo portugus proto-africano. Por fim, conclumos que as palavras e construes dos crioulos atlnticos devem ser abordadas mediante a reconceptualizao dos falantes enquanto agentes criativos e engenhosos que, de forma instantnea, usaram as suas lnguas crioulas para se identificarem, contra-identificarem e des-identificarem com modos africanos e europeus de entender o mundo e de agir sobre ele. Palavras-chave: Lnguas crioulas, vozes multiplas, agentivi- dade. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 177 Meh Own Tongue Broken English? Wha you tellin me at all? I dont talk no broken English, boy/ To besides, When I talkin, dat ent no Englan language, What Ah have is meh own baggage. De two tings jus ent de same My tongue have identity and it have name What name? Creole, an dont get fool up Creole is not no English dat break up. It have roots from Europe, Africa, an England. But is in de Caribbean land dat it really born. Structure? It have dat! Sentence pattern? Dat too! Boy, wha do you? My language done in book, dou, dou. Dem linguist makin it a study. It have it own style an it own vocabulary. Dey even learnin bout it in university. An jus how English have standard, Creole have it too! So meh tongue is a language fuh true. Dont mind some people ent want to recognize meh speech, Leh meh tell yuh eh, Creole ent tryin to come, it reach. Hazel Ann Gibbs DePeza 1 Multiple voicing in the Atlantic Creoles and the multiplex identities of their speakers Although there is an increasing tendency among creolists to acknowledge the agency of creole speakers in the emergence of creole languages (Faraclas 2012), the full impact of Le Page and Tabouret Kellers (1985) paradigm shifting work Acts of Identity has yet to be felt in the area of creolistics. The pluri-lingual and pluri-cultural peoples of the Afro-Caribbean have always projected multiplex identities, and this pluri-identification is reflected in all of the Atlantic Creoles. In this work, we analyze aspects of the phonology, morpho-syntax and lexico-semantics of the Iberian, Dutch, French, and English lexifier Creoles of the Afro-Atlantic in such a way as to show how, by taking advantage of formal, structural, and functional convergence between and among African languages, European languages, a Proto Atlantic Portuguese lexifier Creole, and universals of language use, speakers of the Atlantic Creoles have shaped and deployed their creolized languages as instruments of double and multiple voicing (Du Bois 1903; Bakhtin 1930). This pluri-voicing has allowed Atlantic Creole speakers to equip themselves with a linguistic repertoire that has enabled them to use what appear at first glance to be the exact same words and structures to simultaneously assert Afro-Atlantic identities, Euro-Atlantic identities, Atlantic Creole identities and other identities to the extremely diverse and often very hostile and dangerous audiences and communities of PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767178 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. practice in dialog with whom they have managed to survive (and even thrive) through slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Following one of the many immensely helpful and intellectually sound approaches adopted by Holm (2000), we demonstrate how, as typological, descriptive, comparative, and socio-historical research on the Atlantic Creoles and their input languages progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify a single source for many Atlantic Creole words and constructions, because so many creole forms and structures are identical to those found in a number of different African languages as well as in a number of different European varieties spoken in the Afro-Atlantic during the colonial period and beyond. We argue that linear, mono-causal and mono-dimensional accounts of creole genesis must therefore give way to multi-directional, multi-causal and multiplex scenarios of convergence among forms and structures found in what have been traditionally classified as superstratal, substratal and adstratal input varieties as well as those found universally and in a Proto West African Portuguese Creole. We conclude that the Atlantic Creole words and constructions studied in this paper are best accounted for by a reconceptualization of Atlantic Creole speakers as creative and resourceful agents who have co-instantaneously used their creole languages to identify, counter-identify, and dis-identify with both African and European ways of understanding the world and acting in it. 2 Multiple voicing and multifunctionality in the English, Dutch, and Iberian lexifier Atlantic Creoles One of the few aspects of the grammars of the Atlantic Creoles about which there is near consensus is the tendency for lexical categories to be less specified in Creole languages than in their Western European lexifier languages. This means that a given lexical item is more likely to be pluri- functional in an Atlantic Creole than a similar lexical item in its European lexifier language. Pluri-functionality lends itself by its very nature to multiple voicing, because the same lexical item can be interpreted by listeners of different linguistic backgrounds to be playing different grammatical roles in what otherwise appears to be the exact same sentence. One case in point which is commonly encountered in the Atlantic (and Pacific) Creoles is that of the multifunctionality of words that refer to property concepts, which are normally interpreted by those familiar with European languages to be adjectives (A) and those familiar with West African languages to be stative verbs (V): PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 179 (1) Nigerian Pidgin fyar interpreted by one accustomed to European adjectives (Faraclas 1996: 140): D the man man

(zero copula) fyarA afraid The man is afraid. (2) Nigerian Pidgin fyar interpreted by one accustomed to Benue-Kwa property concept verbs: D the man man fyarV fear The man fears. Before its last speakers passed away, similar multiple interpretations were possible with property concept items in the Dutch lexifier Creole, Berbice Dutch: (3) Berbice Dutch (Kouwenberg 1994: 118): Idri every every gu thing thing bamA/V (zero copula) nice be.nice Everything is nice. In most Atlantic Creoles, items such as fyar in Nigerian Pidgin and bam in Berbice Dutch can be used to project more than one identity and more than one way of looking at the world. The adjectival interpretation that typifies European languages tends to regard properties as static, while the verbal interpretation favored in West African languages tends to see properties as dynamic, that is, the words which express property concepts can take objects, can be specified by tense-aspect-modality markers, etc. (4) Nigerian Pidgin swit interpreted by one accustomed to European adjectives (Faraclas 1996: 141): a. D the sup soup

(zero copula) switA tasty The soup is tasty. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767180 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. b. D the sup soup

(zero copula) switA tasty

(zero preposition) m me The soup is tasty to me. (5) Nigerian Pidgin swit interpreted by one accustomed to Benue-Kwa property concept verbs, many of which can take objects: a. D the sup soup switV appetize The soup appetizes. b. D the sup soup switV appetize m. me The soup appetizes me. It is often pointed out that this pluri-functionality or underspecification of lexical categories is commonly found in the languages spoken along the west coast of Africa, where the boundaries between lexical categories are normally less rigid, more pourous, and fuzzier than in West European languages, where similar examples of pluri-functionality are less abundant. This relative lack of pluri-functionality is especially typical of European languages with a long tradition of standardization, which has suppressed the heteroglossic power of individual speakers to creatively transgress the artificial boundaries of the prescriptive grammars of unitary languages (Bakhtin 1930). We therefore argue that standardized European languages have been artificially overspecified, so that the designation of West African and Afro-Atlantic creolized varieties as underspecified reflects an unconscious Eurocentric bias: (6) Nigerian Pidgin multifunctional nominal (N) and verbal (V) use of the item mne

j manage: a. N hl xN N w

comp yu S xV V where N=V b. N hl/cop/emph mane

jN manageN we that y you mane

jV manageV It is managing that you are managing. Youre making the best of it. Negerhollands multifunctional use of the item slaep sleep (Magens 1770 in van Rossem & van der Voort 1996: 19): PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 181 (7) Da emph slaepN sleepN mie comp ka I slaepV sleepV It is sleeping that I have slept. I have really slept. As shown in the above examples, for speakers of Nigerian Pidgin at present and for speakers of the now extinct Dutch lexifier Creole Negerhollands in the past, not only are the boundaries between the categories noun and verb regularly transgressed, but there are also patterns of multiple interpretation for the copula/emphasis/focus/highlighter forms na and da respectively. Such multifunctionality is dramatically illustrated in the typically Benue-Kwa series of constructions that constitute the following example from Nigerian Pidgin, where the item ko

t not only functions as a verb, but where ko

t and reduplicated ko

t can function as nominals in associative noun constructions and triplicated ko

t can function as an adverbial/ideophone: (8) Nigerian Pidgin multifunctional use of the item kot cut (Faraclas 1996: 142): A I si see d the [ko

tko

t [cut.cutN klot] cloth]assoc we

subor [ko

tko

t [cut.cutN man] man]assoc do

n [+completive] tek take [ko

t [cutN mashn] machine]assoc ko

tam cutN -it ko

tko

t. cut.cut.cutadv/ideo I saw the shredded cloth that the shredder shredded with the shredding machine, shredshredshred. When we as creolists ask whether the items fyar and swit are verbs or adjectives, or whether ko

tko

t is a noun or an adjective when it occurs before man or mashn, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. If we want to be as truly free of prescriptive biases as we profess to be, we may need to approach the Atlantic Creoles as languages where a typically West African heteroglossic, creative, and performance-oriented cultivation of ambiguity and multiple interpretations plays at least as important a role as a typically European standardized, analytical, information-oriented cultivation of technical precision and specificity. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767182 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. 3 Tense, aspect, multiple voicing, and multiplex worldviews in Papiamentu Andersen (1993) demonstrates that the preverbal tense-mood-aspect (tma) markers ta and a in Papiamentu, which have normally been considered to be [past] tense markers can just as easily be analyzed as [completive] aspect markers (Faraclas, Rivera Castillo & Walicek 2007). It is interesting to note that the tense interpretation of ta and a accommodates listeners who are accustomed to tense prominent languages such as most of those spoken by Europeans in the Afro-Atlantic contact zone, while the aspectual interpretation of ta and a accommodates listeners who are accustomed to aspect prominent languages such as most of those spoken by West Africans in the Afro-Atlantic contact zone. In his refreshing analysis of ta and a in Papiamentu, Andersen concludes by asserting that, on the basis of a number of factors such as co-occurrence restrictions, an aspectual interpretation of ta and a can be better justified than a tense interpretation. In this case, Andersen brings important new insights to much of the previous work done by creolists and others on tma markers in Papiamentu, which more often than not had been based on the erroneous assumption that the grammatical structures of European languages are those that predominate in the Atlantic Creoles and which had not taken into account the grammatical features which typify the languages of West and Central Africa. Researchers in Africa and the Caribbean continue to be shocked by the degree to which this Eurocentric bias still pervades the work of creolists. Particularly distressing is the tendency among creolists to elevate the features and structures that typify European languages to the status of universal categories and structures. While we wholeheartedly concur with this critique advanced by our colleagues in Africa and the Caribbean, we argue that it does not go far enough. We contend that not only is it very common for creolists to ignore typically African categories and structures in favor of typically European categories and structures in their grammatical analyses, we also argue that it is even more common for creolists to ignore how West and Central Africans approach language in general and language contact in particular, in favor of how Europeans approach language and language contact. Most creolists still automatically assume that the imposition of one dominant unitary language, culture, and identity which people of European descent have experienced over the past few centuries of hegemonic rule is the universal norm in terms of how humans everywhere have always related to language and negotiated situations of language contact (Bakhtin 1930). In our critical investigation of the validity of these assumptions, however, we find time and time again that for most of human history and in most human cultures, pluri-lingualism, pluri-culturalism, and pluri-identification have been the norm rather than the exception: PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 183 African and Afro-Caribbean peoples brought a decentered, he- teroglossic sense of personal authority over language and of personal power through language into the Creole Space. Rather than viewing language and power as located elsewhere, that is, among the cultural and political elites (an attitude that would come to typify European and Euro-Caribbean peoples), Africans and Afro-Caribbean peoples retained their traditional sense of personal and community control over their languages and their lives, effectively undermining and in some cases toppling, dominant regimes of truth. ... This type of heteroglossia has transformed the Creole Space and the Creole languages which emerged from it... Moreover, given that even an individual speaker exists as a site of differences, heteroglossia complicates the notion that a group or individual simply has or performs a specific identity. ... Ironically, when it [heteroglossia] is mentioned at all, most scholarly accounts of genesis have tended to describe... the alternative ways of speaking and belonging that it embodies as the result of nation-state formation or as a future problem which the nation-state should solve (e.g., through language standardization, development, or even empowerment). The reluctance to recognize cultural phenomena and social groupings that crosscut, undermine, hybridize, or exist outside dominant categories obscures the role that scholarship plays in creating, sustaining, and reproducing inequality based on race, language, gender, social class, and nationality. (Faraclas, Walicek, Alleyne, Geigel, and Ortiz 2007: 22) From well before the onset of European expansion in the 1400s until the present, not only have pluri-lingualism, pluri-culturalism, and pluri- identification predominated on the West Coast of Africa and in the Caribbean, but the peoples of the Afro-Caribbean have developed ingenious and creative ways of dealing with language contact that include double and multiple voicing. In the case of tma markers in Papiamentu, instead of taking sides in the debate as to whether ta and a are tense or aspect markers, we would argue that in fact, both the tense and aspectual interpretations ta and a are valid, and that Papiamentu speakers use these markers in such a way as to allow those who are more familiar with European languages to assign a tense interpretation to ta and a, while simultaneously allowing those who are more familiar with Afro- Atlantic languages (including other speakers of other Afro-Atlantic Creoles) to assign an aspectual interpretation to ta and a. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767184 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. (9) Papiamentu a as interpreted by one accustomed to European tense prominent tma: Ma I [+past] kana walk I walked (sometime in the past). (10) Papiamentu a as interpreted by one accustomed to Benue-Kwa aspect prominent tma: Ma I [+completive] kana walk I already walked. I walk finish. This multiply voiced interpretation of ta and a does not preclude the meaningful exploration of the role of African languages, European languages, a Proto-Creole spoken on the west coast of Africa and/or universals in the emergence of the Atlantic Creoles. Instead, it enriches and deepens our understanding of the complex interaction of speaker, audience, and communities of practice, without which any meaningful analysis of the emergence of the Atlantic Creoles is not only impossible, but extremely dangerous, because it more often than not erases the agency of African descended creole speakers in the emergence of the Atlantic Creoles. The multiple voiced interpretations of ta and a confirm Faraclas (1990) observation that in both Benue-Kwa languages and Afro-Atlantic Creoles: Unmarked [+active] verbs are by default interpreted as [+ completive] and [+past] Unmarked [-active] verbs are by default interpreted as [-completive] and [-past] Verbs that are overtly marked as [+ completive] are by default interpreted as [+past] Verbs that are overtly marked as [- completive] are by default interpreted as [-past] PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 185 Similar patterns of default interpretation could also be considered to be statistical universals of language use (Siegel 2008). Of course, in Spanish and Portuguese the verbs estar and haber/haver which are among the sources for the Papiamentu forms ta and a, respectively, are used as preverbal tma markers, not to mark tense per se, but aspect. Portuguese estar and haver would therefore be among the most promising candidates to mark tma preverbally in a Proto-West African Portuguese lexifier Creole as well. This rich web of convergent functions motivates the emergence of ta and a as multiply voiced tma markers in Papiamentu. But the power of a multiply voiced convergence analysis for the emergence of Atlantic Creole tma markers is not confined to function alone. Even a cursory review of Benue-Kwa languages will yield several tma systems where the preverbal marker for [+completive] aspect is none other than the form a. (11) Ashante Twi (Akosua Quarcoo, personal communication) M I [+completive] nnt walk I (have) already walked. I walk finish. So, alongside the (third person singular) forms of estar and haber/haver used preverbally in Spanish and Portuguese to mark progressive and perfective aspect, respectively, we have forms that are phonetically identical to ta and a and others that are nearly identical to ta and a used in Benue-Kwa languages to mark incompletive and completive aspect, respectively. So, multiple voicing in the Atlantic Creoles can involve the convergence of any and every possible combination of form, structure and/or function among African languages, European languages, a Proto-West African Creole and universals of language use. 4 Phonology and African agency in the French and English creole spaces The relative prominence of features, functions, and structures clearly traceable to African languages is immediately identifiable in those English lexified Afro- Caribbean varieties whose speakers have had minimal contact with English, such as Saramaccan and the West African English lexifier Creoles, which are seldom considered by most creolists to be dialects of English. At the same PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767186 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. time, most Spanish lexified Afro-Caribbean varieties are usually analyzed by creolists and others simply as dialects of Spanish. Faraclas, Walicek, Alleyne, Geigel, & Ortiz (2007) contend, however, that these different outputs of contact between Africans and Europeans in the Atlantic Creole Space are the product of a similar multiply-voiced set of creolization processes, which in the less completely racialized Spanish Americas have generally favored the emergence of forms, functions, and structures which are more amenable to Euro-Atlantic interpretations, but in the more pervasively racialized English Americas have generally favored the emergence of forms, functions, and structures which are more amenable to Afro-Atlantic interpretations. They further assert that the socio-historical matrix from which the Afro-Caribbean French lexified creoles emerged lay somewhere between that which typified the Creole Space under the English and that which typified the Creole Space under the Spanish. This has thrust the French lexifier Atlantic Creoles into the epicenter of the often bitter debates concerning the genesis of the Atlantic Creoles, with creolists such as Claire Lefebvre (2000) arguing that these varieties are made up essentially of West African (specifically Fongbe) forms, functions, and structures which have been relabeled with phonetic strings from French, and creolists such as Robert Chaudenson (2001) arguing that these varieties are basically dialects of French. A multiple-voicing perspective could play a particularly helpful role in explaining how such diametrically opposed analyses could be made, defended, sustained, and ultimately reconciled. In one of his very perceptive phonological studies of the French lexifier Atlantic Creoles, Emmanuel Nikiema (1999) demonstrates how speakers of these varieties use syllable structures that simultaneously incorporate elements of Euro-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic phonotactics, ranging from those of French, which include many consonant cluster onset and consonantal final syllables, to those of the languages of the Western sub-branches of Benue-Kwa, such as Akan-Twi, Gbe, Yoruba, Edo, and Igbo, where onset clusters and consonant codas are largely absent. Nikiema begins his analysis by summarizing a set of observations made by Bernab: Selon Bernab (1987), la forme du dterminant postpos varie dans les croles de la rgion des Carabes: le dterminant est invariablement realis [a] en guyanais (que ce soit aprs une consonne ou aprs une voyelle), et invariablement [la] en guadeloupen et en dominicain du nord. Cest seulement dans les varits parles Hati, Ste-Lucie, Martinique, Grenade, et la partie sud de la Dominique quon observe les variations allomorphiques en [la], [l], [n], [] et [a] . . . . [les] formes comme liv et papa PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 187 sont realiss respectivement [livaa] et [papaa] en guyanais, [livla] et [papaa] en hatien, sud dominicain, martiniquais, saint-lucien, trinidadais et grenadais, et enfin [livla] et [papala] en guadeloupen et nord dominicain. (83)1 Nikiema convincingly demonstrates how the different patterns of the realization of the postposed determiner /la/ as well as the problematic behavior of /cl/ (consonant plus lateral) onsets in different French lexifier Creoles can be explained by the existence of typically Western Benue-Kwa type underlying syllable structures which do not permit consonantal codas (85-86) and onset clusters (89), and the simultaneous existence of a French phonetic frame or template (trame phontique franaise) (87) to which these structures are subject that disallows the realization of certain underlying vowels, and thus yields surface syllables that begin with clusters and end in consonants. In other words, the same string of syllables can be interpreted by a Euro-Atlantic audience or community of practice as typically French, but by an Afro-Atlantic audience or community of practice as typically Western Benue-Kwa, and by other audiences or communities of practice as both. To further complicate this situation, in the non-standard southern dialects of French, there are many fewer consonantal codas than in standard French, so that multiple voicing can (and more often than not does) project identities beyond those typically associated with superstrates and substrates and therefore the set of converging forms, functions, and structures upon which multiple voicing so often depends must be extended beyond typically binary and oppositional superstratal and substratal inputs. Recent work by Sally Delgado (2013) based in part upon that of Sutcliffe (2003) and Faraclas and Ramirez (2007) suggests that while most of the intonation patterns found in the English lexifier Atlantic Creoles are similar to the typical tonal and intonational patterns found in the languages spoken 1According to Bernab (1987), the form of the postposed determiner /la/ varies in the Caribbean: the determiner is invariably realized as [a] in Guyanais (whether it comes after a consonant or after a vowel), and invariably as [la] in Guadeloupen and in northern Dominicain. It is only in the varieties spoken in Haiti, St. Lucia, Martinique, Grenada, and in the southern part of Dominica that one observes the allomorphs [la], [l], [n], [] and [a] . . . . forms like liv [book] and papa [father] are realized [livaa] et [papaa] respectively in Guyanais, [livla] and [papaa] in Haitian, southern Dominicain, Martiniquais, Saint-lucien, Trinidadais and Grenadais, and finally [livla] and [papala] in Guadeloupen and northern Dominicain. (Translation by the authors). PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767188 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. along the west coast of Africa, some commonly occurring English lexifier Atlantic Creole intonation patterns such as declarative final high rise are to be found instead in the Celtic languages and the Celtic influenced varieties of non-standard English spoken by a very significant number of the non propertied Europeans in the Atlantic Creole space, especially during the first few centuries of English colonialism. In our analysis, we therefore prefer to use the term multiple voicing instead of double voicing because in practice the speakers of the Atlantic Creoles have not just used these languages to project both dominant Euro-Atlantic and subaltern Afro-Atlantic identities, but instead to simultaneously project these and many other identities, including subaltern European identities, Indigenous Caribbean identities, Indo-Caribbean identities, etc. 5 Multiple voicing and the Lexicon, Grammar and Semantics of spatial reference in the Iberian, English and Dutch lexifier Atlantic Creoles In his ground breaking work on the semantics and morphosyntax of spatial relations in the Atlantic Creoles, Micah Corum (2012) demonstrates that many Atlantic Creole locative constructions contain items and structures that show formal and functional convergence between superstrate and substrate sources. He notes (159-63) that while the spatial gram/locative marker na, which is found in Iberian lexifier Atlantic Creoles, is normally considered to be derived from the Portuguese contracted form na (consisting of the preposition em in, on, at plus the feminine article a), many major West African languages also have identical or nearly identical forms with identical or nearly identical meanings: (12) Guinea-Bissau Portuguese lexifier Creole (Intumbo 2007: 83 in Corum 2012: 69): a. E the rapaz boy sta cop [na kasa] [loc house] The boy is in the house. b. E the rapaz boy sta cop [na kwartu] [loc room] The boy is in the room. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 189 (13) Papiamentu Iberian lexifier Creole: E the mucha child ta cop na loc kas house The child is in the house. (14) Igbo (Lord 1993: 14 in Corum 2012: 160): O he b live na loc O

k. Awka He lives at Awka. (15) Serer (Pichl 1980: ser 5 in Corum 2012: 34): TEn he/she na loc ndo

ke. house He is in the house. (16) Susu (Northcote 1916: 30 in Corum 2012: 47): Te-na fire-loc timo pot bu-ma. under-at The fire is under the pot. Thus, a speaker of an Iberian lexifier Atlantic Creole can project both Afro-Atlantic and Euro-Atlantic identities through the use of the general spatial marker na. This case of double voicing becomes multiple voicing in other parts of the Afro-Atlantic, where items similar in form and function to locative na in Iberian lexifier Atlantic Creoles are also found in Dutch lexifier and English lexifier Atlantic Creoles. In such cases, Atlantic Creole speakers can be said to be able to project not only Euro-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic identities, but also Creole-Atlantic identities that are associated with a Proto West African Portuguese lexifier Creole that played an important (but not determinant or preponderant) role in the emergence of all of the Atlantic Creoles: PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767190 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. (17) Negerhollands Dutch lexifier Creole (van Rosem & van der Voort 1996: 17): Twee Two slem smart no no kan can kook cook Boontje bean na(&a) loc een one Pot. pot Two intelligent people cannot cook beans in one pot. No reason to get in each others way. (18) Krio (Sierra Leonean) English lexifier Creole: Di the pikin boy de cop na loc os house The child is in the house. (19) Jamaican English lexifier Creole: Di the bway boy de cop ina(&a) loc di the haos house The child is in the house. Corum shows that in the case of the locative item fo

r found in other English lexifier Atlantic creoles, similar patterns emerge where items with identical or near identical function and form exist in both English (the preposition for) and widely spoken West African languages: (20) Nigerian Pidgin: D the pkn child de cop f

r loc haws house The child is at the house. (21) Akuapem Twi (Riis 1854: 183 in Corum 2012: 181): Mi-ko I-go fye. visit no him vo loc fiase prison I went to visit him in the prison. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 191 Corum also points out that the locative copula de which is found in the English lexifier Creoles on both sides of the Atlantic (see the examples from Jamaican, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean above) and which is often traced back to the English item there may also be traced back to a number of forms in major West African coastal languages such as Twi, Ewe, and Bini. These West African forms, which are just as similar to de in terms of form as is the English item there are in fact more similar in function to de than any corresponding item in English, including there: (22) Akuapem Twi (Christaller 1881: 56, in Corum 2012: 17): Ne his k uro town da lie bepo mountain so top His town is situated on a mountain. (23) Ewe (Lord 1993: 11 in Corum 2012: 58): agbal e-a book-the l loc.cop kplO-a table-the dzi top The book is on the table. (24) Bini (Amayo 1980: edo 5 in Corum 2012: 61): . he rr loc.cop w inside w house He is in the house. (25) Bini (Amayo 1980: edo 5 in Corum 2012: 61): rn they rr loc.cop .k market They are at the market. We will not allow ourselves to be seduced, however, into discounting superstratal motivation and multidirectional convergence for de because of the more exact fit between de and corresponding items in West African languages. Instead of seeing Creole genesis as a zero sum game, we prefer to acknowledge and explore multiple and convergent motivations for the multiply-voiceable forms, functions, and structures that that have emerged from the Atlantic Creole Space. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767192 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. In her work on Crucian (the English lexifier Creole spoken in St. Croix), Aida Vergne (2011) problematizes the common assumption that the pronominal form ayo used for the second person plural is derived solely from a non-standard English form such as all a [of] you. Although ayo is also found in other English lexifier Atlantic Creoles spoken in the northeastern Caribbean and beyond, the apparently related forms awi used for the second person plural pronoun and especially the plural question word ahu who (plural) seem to occur somewhat less commonly outside of St. Croix. She notes that in many Niger Congo languages, the nominal prefix a- is used on plural pronouns. For example, in Yoruba the emphatic first person plural form is -wa, while the non-emphatic form is wa and the emphatic third person plural form is -wo

n, while the non-emphatic form is wo

n. Furthermore, in the Western Benue-Kwa languages, where only traces remain of the Proto-Niger Congo prefixed-based nominal classifying system, a- tends to be the most robust relic prefix, as well as the default prefix which is assigned to new items, etc. In Papiamentu, a- is the prefix which is assigned to many pronominals in their emphatic forms (a-mi from first person singular non-emphatic mi, a-bo from second person singular non-emphatic bo, etc.). The emergence of the a- pronominal prefix in Crucian and other Atlantic Creoles can therefore be said to be motivated not only by the Euro-Atlantic form all a you but also by several different patterns found in the Niger-Congo languages spoken along the west coast of Africa. 6 Unitary language, heteroglossia, and identities in the French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean Thanks largely to community based initiatives and the tireless efforts of Antillean academics specializing in the study of creole languages, literatures and cultures, the status of the French lexifier Creoles of the Caribbean has improved significantly over the past decades. As a result, French lexifier Creoles are now being taught at many levels of formal education, including at the university level. These advances have entailed a process of standardization of the rules of orthography, grammar, etc. for these languages. Diana Ursulin Mopsuss work (2013) on attitudes toward French and English lexifier Atlantic Creoles has revealed some very contradictory feelings on the part of Creole speakers toward the standardization of Martinican French lexifier Creole: In the specific case of Martinique, some informants pointed out that learning Martinican [French-lexifier] Creole [mc] at school as an optional subject is not a bad idea. They stressed, however, that those hours dedicated to mc should be used to strengthen PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767Creoles and acts of identity. . . Lnguas crioulas e atos de identidade. . . 193 the learning of French because the students should concentrate on French. Learning mc at the university is appreciated by most of the informants as a strategy to preserve the language. But they found the way in which mc was being developed and taught at the university level was too academic, making it difficult to read and understand because of features such as lexical changes and the use of an orthographic spelling very different from that of French. . . . Even if the informants offer different definitions of what it is, they all affectionately say that mc is the language of friendship, feelings, jokes, and creativity. They add that it is an integral part of their life and it comes from their guts. Most of the informants considered mc as a marker of identity and they expressed their concerns regarding the loss of oral traditions in mc, such as storytelling and proverbs. They regret that academic mc has lost the spontaneity that used to characterize the language and some observe that young people are now reacting against this and are re-appropriating mc by converting it into a form of bad boy creole. (4-5) The contradictions in attitudes unearthed by Ursulin Mopsus are evident at several levels and across several dimensions: While there is general approval of the formal recognition and teaching of Martinican Creole, there are some reservations about attention being diverted from Standard French in the process. While there is general support for the standardization of the lexicon and grammar of mc, there are some reservations that this process has resulted in lexical and grammatical rules that make mc more academic and more appropriate for Euro-Atlantic audiences and communities of practice, and less appropriate for Afro-Atlantic and Creole-Atlantic audiences and communities of practice. While there is general support for the standardization of mc orthography, there are some reservations that this process has resulted in orthographic rules that make it more difficult to write mc using the spelling conventions of French. The concern here is that these orthographic conventions make mc less academic and more appropriate for Afro-Atlantic and Creole- Atlantic audiences and communities of practice, and less appropriate for Euro-Atlantic audiences and communities of practice. PAPIA, 24(1), ISSN 0103-9415, e-ISSN 2316-2767194 Nicholas Faraclas / et al. This appare

Ramblings on writing-orality, Creole language heteroglossia and Bible Translation

Attachments

0 comments