Jamaican Creole vs Standard English Essay

As we can see, this is non the situation in Jamaican Creole. Case is always demonstrated by position. Any pronoun before the verb is the subject, and after the verb it is any the direct or indirect object. Other features to note are the lack of gender and absence of nominative and accusative case underframes. Also lacking in Jamaican Creole are possessive pronouns deal my, your, his, her, its, our, their. To demonstrate possession, Jamaican Creole either has the simple pronoun directly in front of a noun, (for shell my book would be mi buk), or adds the prefix fi-, (as in fi-mi buk also meaning my book). Plural Marking Plural tell oning in standard English is a hodgepodge of unlike forms borrowed and assimilated from many languages. The pilot burner Old English way of making plurals was either the addition of -n or -en or the ever-changing of the vowel sound, as it is for Modern German. Those jobal Old English plural markers survive in a few Modern English words.For example youngster/children, man/men, ox/oxen, foot/feet. The Norman French way of making plurals was to add an -s, -es or an -x. Only the first two forms were borrowed into English at first, producing forms like hand/hands, eye/eyes, bus/buses. Recently the -x ending had been borrowed for words like bureau/bureaux, adieu/adieux, chateau/chateaux, but it is pronounced as if the x were an s. During the renaissance, Classical Latin and Classical Greek became fashionable, and although being extinct languages, they added a great deal both to the grammar and vocabulary of the English language, particularly in the fields of science and invention. Plurals produced at this period of time include datum/data, octopus/octopi, medium/media, index/indices, helix/helices, matrix/matrices.These plural forms cause themost confusion not unless to foreign speakers but also to a lot of people who speak English as their first language. Plural marking in Jamaican Creole is much more logical and easier to learn . In fact Jamaican Creole be fork outs like Japanese for the most part in that it does not generally mark the plural of nouns. To indicate plurality, animate nouns (and sometimes other nouns to be stressed) are followed by the suffix -dem. This produces structures such as di uman-dem or di pikni-dem meaning the women and the children respectively. Tracing root of Jamaican CreoleThe unique vocabulary and grammar of Jamaican Creole did not just simply spring up as an easy way for plantation slaves from different tribes to talk to one another. Many words, phrases, and structures have an interesting etymology. (Etymology is a linguistic term for the history of the development of a word). In Middle English, there was a distinction between singular thou, and plural you.This distinction has been almost all told erased apart from in some North Yorkshire dialects where the singular form tha is salvage used. E.g. thas nice means you are nice. In some English dialects an attempt has even bee n made to replace the missing pronoun. In Confederate States of America yall is used in Scouser (a dialect imbed in Liverpool) youse or is used and a common form in capital of the United Kingdom is you-lot. In Jamaican Creole, the pronoun oonu is found and this is similar to the form it has in modern Igbo (spoken in Nigeria) which was the most likely donor language. Forms of the pronoun (such as uno, unu, unoo) can be found in widely scattered parts of Africa in the Nubian and Nilotic language families and even as far as the Negrito languages of Malaysia. The word seh as in im tel mi seh (he told me that) has similar origins. Wow Another interesting word commonly used is pikni, meaning child.The word was borrowed originally form Portuguese picaninni. Prior to British dominance, it was used by Portuguese masters to refer to black slaves, who picked up the word and began using it to refer to their own children. In Jamaica today, despite its innocent original meaning (child), it has acquired a pejorative connotation because of its history in Jamaica. Two more interesting words that have spread across the English communicate world, but have their origins in Jamaica, are buddy and cuss. These was a mispronunciations of brother and curse respectively. The first recorded use of buddy was in 17 whereas the word cuss is a word that has entered our vocabulary only since thelate 1940s.The difference in age of these terms shows how much influence Jamaican Creole has on the English speaking world, The word buddy is even found in the Oxford English Dictionary and cuss is used so much among the young generation in particular, that it is only a matter of time before it too is added to the OED. in view of the popularity of fashionable culture and music forms that have their origin in Jamaica Jamaican Creole is likely to continue to have considerable influence of English as a global language, but should it be classed as a dialect of English or should it have official recogn ition as a language in its own right? Language Standardisation. at that place are more salient differences between Jamaican Creole and English than there are between Swedish and Norwegian, yet the latter are classed as two separate distinct languages. Swedish and Norwegian people have almost no difficulty understanding one another, whereas some Englishmen will not have a clue what a Jamaican is saying. Similar cases are Czech and Slovakian, and Punjabi and Urdu, of which the spoken form is the same but only the written form is different. Many people who have stated that saying mi de a di paak as opposed to I am in the park, sounds childish, are completely ignorant of the fact that mi/me is a common indigenous Niger-Kongo form of the first person pronoun. I would have been easy for early Jamaicans learning this contradictory alian language, to continue using mi in that position rather than switching to I. Also the English at that time didnt exactly have schools and colleges to teach blacks the proper way of forming the first person singular nominative pronoun.