IN
THIS ISSUE (No.3) |
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| ARTICLE |
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The
Beginning of Creole Writing and Teaching in the 18th Century on
the (formerly Danish) Virgin Islands by Peter
Stein Since
the early beginnings of their missionary work, they taught the members
of their community, i.e. the slaves, to read to enable them to read
the gospel, the catechism, prayers, hymns and other religious texts.
Consequently they published in 1765 the first Creole booklet ever
printed: Gebeden en Liederen voor die swart Broeder-Gemeenten
na S. Thomas, S. Croix en S. Jan (40pp.). Some of the slaves
also were taught to write, so that they would be able to communicate
with their Moravian “Brethren and Sisters” in other
parts of the world. This teaching had started in Dutch, because
only Dutch written texts did exist and Dutch was more similar to
Negerhollands, the so-called Creole of these islands, than
any other language spoken there. When
Count Zinzendorf visited the young community on St Thomas in January/
February 1739, he addressed to them a Farewell Letter,
which three years later was printed in Germany, among many other
texts and documents, in its original version in the so-called Büdingische
Sammlung. On his way back, Zinzendorf took with him two petition
letters addressed to the Danish King resp. the Danish Queen, both
letters written by the slaves themselves in their (Dutch) Creole
language. During the following years these letters were followed
by about 150 others, which the slaves wrote in Creole to the Moravian
Brethren in Germany or in the United States, where meanwhile existed
a few Moravian communities among the Indians, mainly in Pennsylvania.
An edition of these letters, which are preserved in the Archives
of the Moravian Brethren at Herrnhut (Germany), is in preparation.
The
School Ordinance of December 21, 1787 stipulated for the first time
in history the introduction of public education for slaves. Moreover,
Free Negroes were selected as schoolmasters, and better yet, Creole
was to be the language of instruction. Negerhollands
thus could have become the first standardized Creole language, if
it (as well as Dutch) had not been superseded by English for reasons
of slave migration and changing political influence since the beginning
of the 19th century. There already existed a grammatical description
of the language and a German-Creole Dictionary with more than 3,400
entries, both prepared by C.G.A. Oldendorp, as well as many translations.
Moreover, when the Danish missionaries noticed the success the Moravians
had by using Creole, they followed them in this way, preparing also
translations and a grammar. Their grammar, written by J.M. Magens
in the Danish language, appeared in Copenhagun in 1770 and was thus
the first grammar ever printed of a Creole language, whilst the
Moravian grammar and dictionary have remained unpublished up to
now; only a summary of the grammar was printed in 1777 as part of
Oldendorp’s Missionsgeschichte. Editions of these
documents are in preparation. The
first to publish a primer book were once more the Danish whose ABC-Boekje
appeared in 1770, whilst the Moravian counterpart appeared
only in 1800, followed by another one in 1825. These booklets of
a dozen pages contain lists of letters, numbers and words, as well
as short prayers, following the primers in use in Europe at that
time. Sometimes,
the translators or authors of these Creole works present their theoretical
reflections in the preface. They are conscious of the problems with
which they are confronted and make reflections on how best to arrive
at a standardized, normalized written Creole. They prefer an etymological,
‘dutchified’ orthography to a merely phono-logical one,
they discuss possibilities for the enrichment of the vocabulary,
they discuss the existence of different sociolects and so on. The
publication of all these documents thus will offer rich materials
for further research on the extremely well documented early history
of this now extinct Creole language.
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