Possibility and necessity modals in Gbe and Surinamese creoles

Essegbey, James; Berg, M.C. van den; Vate, Marleen van de

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.03.009

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Of the 673 plant names with an (partial) African origin listed in Dataset S1, 43% suggest an origin from Gabon, Congo, and Angola; 24% from Benin; 24% from Ghana; 14% from Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone; and 9% from Nigeria and Cameroon. These percentages confirm linguistic findings that Central African languages have made the greatest mark on Surinamese Creole languages, followed by those languages from the Slave Coast and Gold Coast, whereas the influence of the Windward Coast and Nigerian Yoruba has been much smaller (17,19,24). Only one of the 19 ritual names (an Apuku name for tobacco; Table S1) could be linked to an African plant name for the same species.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…By investigating the linguistic ties to Old World plant knowledge that has survived in the New World, we can trace back how enslaved Africans familiarized themselves with the New World flora. Our data will contribute to the ongoing scientific discussion on the relation between linguistic and biological diversity (33,34,45), the formation of Creole languages (17,18), and the cultural and botanical contributions of Africans to the Americas (2).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…To surmount the linguistic barriers among themselves and Europeans, they created a pidgin language to facilitate communication (17)(18)(19). This language, formerly called Negro English but currently known as Sranantongo, is an English-based Creole with Dutch, Portuguese, and multiple African linguistic influences.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropologists have meticulously reconstructed the escape and settlement of Maroons by means of archival documents and oral histories (23,26). Linguists have compiled dictionaries and grammars of Sranantongo and the Surinamese Maroon languages (20,(37)(38)(39), unraveled their evolution (18,22,40), and highlighted their African origins (17,(41)(42)(43)(44). Several vernacular plant names figure in their publications, but mostly without scientific names.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora

Andel

Klooster

Quiroz

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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How did the forced migration of nearly 11 million enslaved Africans to the Americas influence their knowledge of plants? Vernacular plant names give insight into the process of species recognition, acquisition of new knowledge, and replacement of African species with American ones. This study traces the origin of 2,350 Afro-Surinamese (Sranantongo and Maroon) plant names to those plant names used by local Amerindians, Europeans, and related groups in West and Central Africa. We compared vernacular names from herbarium collections, literature, and recent ethnobotanical fieldwork in Suriname, Ghana, Benin, and Gabon. A strong correspondence in sound, structure, and meaning among Afro-Surinamese vernaculars and their equivalents in other languages for botanically related taxa was considered as evidence for a shared origin. Although 65% of the Afro-Surinamese plant names contained European lexical items, enslaved Africans have recognized a substantial part of the neotropical flora. Twenty percent of the Sranantongo and 43% of the Maroon plant names strongly resemble names currently used in diverse African languages for related taxa, represent translations of African ones, or directly refer to an Old World origin. The acquisition of new ethnobotanical knowledge is captured in vernaculars derived from Amerindian languages and the invention of new names for neotropical plants from African lexical terms. Plant names that combine African, Amerindian, and European words reflect a creolization process that merged ethnobotanical skills from diverse geographical and cultural sources into new Afro-American knowledge systems. Our study confirms the role of Africans as significant agents of environmental knowledge in the New World.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora

Andel

Klooster

Quiroz

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…As it is the country's lingua franca, nearly all Surinamese have at least a passive knowledge of Sranan, and many a good command of it (Adamson & Smith 1994). This situation is similar to "leaky diglossia" (Fasold 1984) and multidirectional layering of transferred linguistic features between two languages ( de Bies 1994;de Klein 1999;Blanker & Dubbledam 2005;Essegbey et al 2013;Borges 2013Borges , 2014van den Berg 2013;Yakpo et al, to appear, etc. This contrast suggests that Sranan is regarded as a covertly prestigious language.…”

Section: The Linguistic Landscape Of Surinamementioning

confidence: 80%

Particle Verbs in the Surinamese Creoles

Borges

2014

J Ger Ling

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This paper shows that Dutch verb-particle constructions have been transferred into the Surinamese creole languages as a result of pervasive multilingualism and intensive contact. Particle-verb structures are, at most, marginal in the native grammar of Surinamese creoles. However, recent data show that verb-particle constructions of the Dutch sort are becoming productive and are used with some homogeneity in the creole language context.

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Genome-wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname

Fortes-Lima

Gessain

Ruiz-Linares

et al. 2017

The American Journal of Human Genetics

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The transatlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in world history. However, the origins of the enslaved Africans and their admixture dynamics remain unclear. To investigate the demographic history of African-descendant Marron populations, we generated genome-wide data (4.3 million markers) from 107 individuals from three African-descendant populations in South America, as well as 124 individuals from six west African populations. Throughout the Americas, thousands of enslaved Africans managed to escape captivity and establish lasting communities, such as the Noir Marron. We find that this population has the highest proportion of African ancestry (∼98%) of any African-descendant population analyzed to date, presumably because of centuries of genetic isolation. By contrast, African-descendant populations in Brazil and Colombia harbor substantially more European and Native American ancestry as a result of their complex admixture histories. Using ancestry tract-length analysis, we detect different dates for the European admixture events in the African-Colombian (1749 CE; confidence interval [CI]: 1737-1764) and African-Brazilian (1796 CE; CI: 1789-1804) populations in our dataset, consistent with the historically attested earlier influx of Africans into Colombia. Furthermore, we find evidence for sex-specific admixture patterns, resulting from predominantly European paternal gene flow. Finally, we detect strong genetic links between the African-descendant populations and specific source populations in Africa on the basis of haplotype sharing patterns. Although the Noir Marron and African-Colombians show stronger affinities with African populations from the Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast, the African-Brazilian population from Rio de Janeiro has greater genetic affinity with Bantu-speaking populations from the Bight of Biafra and west central Africa.

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Possibility and necessity modals in Gbe and Surinamese creoles

Cited by 8 publications

References 13 publications

Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora

Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora

Particle Verbs in the Surinamese Creoles

Genome-wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname

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