Early Saramaccan Syllable Structure

Abstract

This paper presents a diachronic analysis of Saramaccan syllable structure. It examines data from Schumann's 1778 manuscript, and demonstrates that early Saramaccan syllable structure included complex onsets. A case is also made that in the last two centuries, these complex onsets in Saramaccan have been simplified from CCV to CVCV. This example of language change has important implications for creole studies because most views of change (for two exceptions, see Muhlhäusler, 1986; Mufwene, 1993), especially those that rely on models of decreolization, often suggest that CV templates precede a change to complex onsets. A change from CCV to CVCV, though representing a common and less marked shift in terms of general syllable typology, appears to be considerably less documented among the Atlantic creole languages.

A twice-mixed creole?

“…4 Early stages of Saramaccan are comparatively well-documented, with records going as far back as 1762 (Arends 2002b: 201-205). While these records do not seem to be able to tell us anything about the prosody of the language outside of aspects of syllable phonotactics (Aceto 1996), they do indicate that it has changed significantly over the last several hundred years. The changes are substantial enough that Kramer (2002: 622) goes so far as to state that modern Saramaccan much more closely resembles Fon Gbe than the eighteenth-century variety of the language did.…”

“…Like the similar work of Aceto (1996), which discusses the development of Saramaccan syllable structure, this paper can be partially understood as a cautionary tale regarding the danger of assuming that a grammatical feature found in a given creole is, in fact, a "creole" feature -that is, that its presence in the language is connected, in some way, to the process of creolization. 1 In principle, of course, no one would deny that a creole, once formed, would be subject to the same historical forces that shape non-creole languages.…”

CREOLE /L → /R IN AFRICAN AMERICAN English/Gullah: HISTORICAL FACT AND FICTION

“…the most detailed and thorough published comparative analysis of historical changes in the Suriname creoles is by Smith (1977). A summary of changes in Sranan is given in Aceto (1996), Smith (2002), and van den Berg and Smith (2013, 6). Johnson (1974) formulated generative rules describing changes in the liquid/resonant consonants /l/ and /r/, and Avram (2004) has traced the history of consonant + liquid clusters.…”

“…Modern forms are taken from Sil (2003b). 41 As reconstructed by Smith (1977) and Aceto (1996), initial Cl/r-clusters were broken up by epenthesis of a harmonizing echo-vowel, producing sequences of CV 1 l/rV 1 . historical and internal evidence suggests that /r/ was shifted to /l/ and then the /l/ was vocalized to match the preceding and following vowel, creating an extralong trimoraic vowel: CV 1 V 1 V 1 , often reduced to CV 1 V 1 .…”

Tone loss in Sranan Creole: re-thinking contact driven change

“…Previous analyses have proposed that tone loss in Sranan is inextricably tied with a process of innovating onset clusters in emulation of Dutch syllable structure. But Aceto (1996) argues convincingly that clusters were not a recent innovation of Sranan, but an original feature of the early common Surinamese Creole. If so, then Sranan is the conservative one, at least with respect to syllable structure, if not tone.…”