PAPIAMENTU It is often forgotten that strictly speaking, Papiamentu is not a plantation creole at all. The soil in Curaçao was too dry for large-scale agriculture (Holm 1989: 313); thus this island was primarily used as a holding camp and entrepôt for slaves shipped from West Africa and destined for other Caribbean colonies. Therefore, Papiamentu emerged amidst Africans working within the slave trade itself and in domestic service, not as a plantation communication vehicle. However, for many, it will perhaps seem ad hoc to dismiss Papiamentu on these grounds, since it was, after all, the product of interactions between African laborers and Europeans.1 In this light, all evidence points to Papiamentu as the result of a gradual hispanicization of what began as a Portuguese-based pidgin. This has been most conclusively demonstrated by Goodman (1987), who shows that it would have been simply impossible for Papiamentu to have begun as a Spanish-based pidgin. By the time slaves were brought to Curaçao in any significant numbers (the mid-1650s), there were no Spaniards on the island and only a few Spanish-speaking Indians (367-70). In the meantime, the first slaves were brought into the context by Jews from Brazil, who spoke Portuguese. In addition, for a period, Jews were the only people in Curaçao allowed to purchase slaves (369). Finally, many people running the slave depot in Curaçao had worked previously in Brazil. Thus the setting was ripe for the spread of a Portuguese-based contact language, and the motivation for the spread of a Spanish-based one was nonexistent. The Spanish reentered the Curaçao context only later, when Spanishspeaking Jews from Holland emigrated there and became the majority among whites. The hispanicization of Papiamentu presumably began at this point, supplemented by the extensive business contacts between Curaçao and the Venezuelan coast. It is important to note that Spanish and Portuguese are so similar that no significant linguistic readjustment was necessary on the part of Papiamentu speakers during the relexification process: as Goodman points out, slaves were probably barely aware of Span- Where Are the Spanish Creoles? / 15 ish as a distinct language (375). Even today, Spanish and Portuguese are partially mutually intelligible, and they were even closer four hundred years ago. Therefore, there was no need for a new Spanish-based creole to emerge at this point: the Jews from Holland could have adjusted easily to Portuguese-based early Papiamentu, especially since they spoke Portuguese as well (363). The original status of Papiamentu as a Portuguese-based creole is strongly supported by the undeniably Portuguese items in its core lexicon. Table 2.1 is based on Grant 1996, the most exhaustive assessment and identification of Portuguese-derived items in Papiamentu. Grant's version of this list includes even items whose Portuguese derivation, proposed by other authors, he doubts; I have pared it down to what Grant believes to be the most plausible cases. I have further excised cases where the Papiamentu and Portuguese forms have /e/ where Spanish has /je/ (Papiamentu téra, Portuguese terra, Spanish tierra), as the monophthongization of /je/ would have been a plausible simplification of Spanish in a creole language. On the other hand, I have retained cases where Papiamentu and Portuguese have /o/ and Spanish /we/, as /we/-to-/o/ would be a possible, but much less natural, change. Kabá could technically come from Spanish, but its presence in other creoles with no Spanish influence (such as Saramaccan and Negerhollands) suggests that Portuguese was the source as well, especially in light of its use in West African Portuguese creoles possibly ancestral to Papiamentu. Similarly, Grant, citing Munteanu (1991: 65- 85), notes that vai occurred in pre-1650 Spanish; however, its presence in Portuguese creoles like São Tomense tips the scale to Portuguese again. On the other hand, antó, kaí, and lánda are possibly attributable to nonstandard Spanish varieties, and thus I have omitted them (Armin Schwegler, p.c.). Papiamentu also has some grammatical features linking it to Portuguese creoles still spoken on the West African coast, which emerged amidst the slave trade starting in the 1500s. For example, the plural morpheme nan is also found in Fa d'Ambu (Birmingham 1976: 22). Similarly, the parallel between the Cape Verdean Portuguese el taba ta kanta "he was singing" and Papiamentu e tabata kanta is striking (20), since this usage is impossible to derive from any Iberian construction and is only one of many possible reconceptualizations of the lexifier material. Some might argue that Papiamentu could still have arisen from the pidginization of Spanish spoken by the Jews, and that this Portuguese element simply represents residual borrowings from some form of Portuguese now no longer spoken. However, as Megenney (1984) notes, these items are core lexical items. If they were tokens of a dead Portuguese variety largely 16 / Where Are the Spanish Creoles? Table 2.1. Derivation of Papiamentu etyma with Spanish for comparison Papiamentu English Portuguese Spanish afó outside fora fuera bai go vai va batí to hit bater golpear bing come vim viene bong good bom bueno bien brínga to fight bringar pelear dúna to give donar dar donate donar fórsa, orce strength força fuerza fóya leaf folha hoja kachó dog cachorro perro kétu quiet queto quieto kobá to dig cova "hole" cueva "hole" lémbe to lick lamber lamber lo (irrealis marker) logo "soon" luego "soon" mai mother mãe madre mai mes self mesmo mismo mesté to need menester necesitar na at,on,in na en nóbo new novo nuevo pai father pãe padre pai pápya to speak papear hablar pertá to grip apertar apretar prétu black preto negro prieto negro pushá to push puxar empujar te until até hasta trese carry,wear trazer traer tur all tudo todo external to the development of Papiamentu itself, we would expect only concepts unique to Portuguese or African culture, in accordance with the lexical contributions typical of a displaced language. The origin of Papiamentu as a Portuguese pidgin is strikingly supported by a little-known article by Martinus (1989), documenting a moribund secret language in Curaçao called Guene (_Guinea, i.e., the Guinea Coast of Africa). Guene has features tracing it to Portuguese-based contact lan- Where Are the Spanish Creoles? / 17 languages of West Africa even beyond those in modern Papiamentu, most strikingly the third-person pronoun ine, a substrate borrowing also found in the Gulf of Guinea Portuguese creoles. Crucially, its speakers consider Guene to have been the language spoken by their slave ancestors, and it is particularly indicative that "Guiné" is still what some native speakers of Guinea-Bissau Creole Portuguese call their language (Birmingham 1976: 19). If Papiamentu truly emerged as a Spanish-based contact language, then we would expect any preserved "slave" language to be Spanish-based, like the bozal Spanish similarly preserved as a ritual language among Afro- Cubans (Cabrera 1954). In previous presentations of this argument, I have occasionally been misinterpreted as stating that Papiamentu is not Spanish-based today. It must be clear that I mean no such thing: my point is strictly historical. While no one could possibly argue that Papiamentu is not Spanish-based today, synchronic, comparative, and historical evidence show that it did not emerge via an initial encounter with Spanish. Its initial lexifier was Portuguese; its subsequent re-lexifier was Spanish. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8709/8709.ch2.pdf