Bart Jacobs
This paper addresses the linguistic and historical relationships between Papiamentu (PA) and the Upper Guinea branch of Portuguese creole as spoken on the Santiago Island of Cape Verde (SCV) and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance (GBC).
The origins of PA’s mixed Spanish-Portuguese lexicon have been subject to intense debate. Lipski asserts that up to present “scholars are (...) evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamento” (2005). Typical of this division is that in 1996 Munteanu painted PA as an originally Spanish creole, while in that same year Martinus defended PA’s Afro-Portuguese origins.
More recently, Kouwenberg & Michel (2007) labeled those hypotheses that defend PA’s Spanish origins as “untenable”, while Munteanu (2008), regarding PA’s origins, maintains quite the opposite: “Algunos estudiosos ponen en tela de juicio su origen hispánico y defienden su afiliación portuguesa, pero en la actualidad esta posición ha perdido mucho terreno”.
Quint (2000) claimed that “Le papiamento et le badiais [SCV] ont une origine commune”. This claim, however, did not find any resonance in related publications. Parkvall (2000), regarding Papiamentu’s origins, declares: “Relexification from an African Portuguese Creole does not strike me as particularly likely”, and Lipski (2005) maintains that Papiamentu “is not clearly related to any West African creole”.
In line with Quint’s claim, the present paper argues that an early Upper Guinea Creole variety was introduced into the ABC-Islands in the second half of the 17th century, where it would subsequently be relexified by Spanish. To underpin this claim, we will highlight the linguistic correspondences between the creoles at all levels of the grammar and, with the aid of little known 19th century PA texts, demonstrate that early PA was even closer to SCV than it is nowadays.
The paper closes with the presentation of little known historical data that account for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the 17th century (cf. Jacobs, to appear & in press).
The origins of PA’s mixed Spanish-Portuguese lexicon have been subject to intense debate. Lipski asserts that up to present “scholars are (...) evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamento” (2005). Typical of this division is that in 1996 Munteanu painted PA as an originally Spanish creole, while in that same year Martinus defended PA’s Afro-Portuguese origins.
More recently, Kouwenberg & Michel (2007) labeled those hypotheses that defend PA’s Spanish origins as “untenable”, while Munteanu (2008), regarding PA’s origins, maintains quite the opposite: “Algunos estudiosos ponen en tela de juicio su origen hispánico y defienden su afiliación portuguesa, pero en la actualidad esta posición ha perdido mucho terreno”.
Quint (2000) claimed that “Le papiamento et le badiais [SCV] ont une origine commune”. This claim, however, did not find any resonance in related publications. Parkvall (2000), regarding Papiamentu’s origins, declares: “Relexification from an African Portuguese Creole does not strike me as particularly likely”, and Lipski (2005) maintains that Papiamentu “is not clearly related to any West African creole”.
In line with Quint’s claim, the present paper argues that an early Upper Guinea Creole variety was introduced into the ABC-Islands in the second half of the 17th century, where it would subsequently be relexified by Spanish. To underpin this claim, we will highlight the linguistic correspondences between the creoles at all levels of the grammar and, with the aid of little known 19th century PA texts, demonstrate that early PA was even closer to SCV than it is nowadays.
The paper closes with the presentation of little known historical data that account for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in the 17th century (cf. Jacobs, to appear & in press).
