Language lapses and Guyanese English

Nov 15, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
English is a fascinating and beautifully-complex language. But Guyanese ‘Creolese’ (along with what’s commonly referred to as Broken English) is something else.

A young Guyanese boy, having emigrated to the United States with his family many years ago, and enrolled at an elementary school, was asked at registration time if he spoke English and if it was his mother tongue. Baffled, the child answered, “Yes, mi does taak Inglish but me na andastaan wha yuh ah aaks mi.” He spoke rapidly. The registration secretary wrote under the sub-head of Language Spoken – Bilingual.
This may have been a joke, but it got me thinking about the way we Guyanese speak. When Creolese is spoken, especially by rural Berbicians and Essequibians, it has an enthralling effect on me. The lilt and inflection, the struggle at times to make sense of what is actually being said and the grasping of grassroots wisdom are all part of the captivation.
I remember during my journalism training days how tickled I and my colleagues were when one of the presenters (I think it was Rovin Deodat) affected a rural Broken-English dialect to ‘read’ the daily news on radio. It was hilarious. He was making the point that Creolese has its place and time, but reading or writing news articles for public reception isn’t it.
Now it’s obvious that local broadcasters and newspaper writers don’t use such dialect in their reporting unless for effect or through eye witness inserts for example. But what some of them do is to so mangle the English language, that it presents a real problem for listeners and readers to follow a particular story. Everyone makes mistakes, and an occasional slip of the tongue, pen, or keyboard is understandable. But repeated mispronunciations, misplaced tone and stress, misspellings, and errors in basic grammar are not only jarring to the ear and eye, but may lead to misinterpretation, including in legal and juridical matters.
A prominent Guyanese lawyer is said to have helped free a murder accused simply by revising the tone and stress of a single statement reportedly admitted by the accused. The supposed assertion was, “Ah me son. Me mek am, me mine am, me kill am!” with repeated emphasis on the word ‘Me’. By changing the tone and making a declarative statement into an interrogative one, he convinced the jury that the accused was in fact asking a rhetorical question about the capacity of a loving father to kill his offspring.
A funnier example is about a poor British man whose daughter had done exceedingly well in graduating top of her class in college, and was rewarded with a trip across the channel to Paris. She was given a sum of money by her frugal dad and advised to spend wisely. She came across a beautiful but costly dress and sent him a telegram asking if it was okay to buy it. Her father replied with one of his own – a four-word response ‘No. Price too high.’ He forgot to indicate the full stop after ‘No’ so the message came over as ‘No price too high’. Father and daughter must have had a very interesting, if not testy, reunion upon her return, including a discourse on the great value of reading and comprehension.
But all joking aside, to listen to or read some of the words used by news broadcasters and writers is an exercise in frustration (or frawstration) and head-shaking disbelief. Former Permanent Secretary in the Public Service Ministry and educator, Joyce Sinclair, in a recent letter to the editor of Kaieteur News, lamented the mispronunciation of words, on radio and at public functions, and emphasized the need to help those announcers, without embarrassment. She listed more than two dozen commonly-mangled words and gave the correct pronunciation for each. There are probably another dozen or so that I can add in addition to the grammatical boo-boos I mentioned earlier, which can run into scores. I’ll give a few shortly.
Granted, a speaker may have a speech impediment like a lisp or a stutter, or may suffer from ‘H’ dropping, or have Rhotacism – difficulty or inability in pronouncing the sound of the letter ‘R’. (Respected American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters comes to mind. Former US President George W. Bush pronounces ‘nuclear’ as nu-cu-lar, Winston Churchill was a stutterer and – have you ever listened to a Bob Marley interview?)
So I sympathize with the local announcer who says Demewara instead of Demerara, but some mispronunciations, distortions, and grammatical errors are just absurd, and can be easily corrected. A national broadcaster should know the difference between prostrate and prostate, be able to say specific instead of ‘pecific, and pronounce Ruimveldt without suggesting an intoxicating beverage. (Incidentally I wonder how Mr. Odinga Lumumba feels about hearing his name pronounced ‘Lubumba’ especially as the last two syllables have such crass connotations)
I often wonder why most of us have a distinct reluctance to enunciate in Standard English, words with the ‘ow-n’ sound like brown, town and ground instead of the ugly ‘ung’ we have grown so fond of. It may sound a bit affected, (you’re putting on airs?) but it is Standard English. And what’s so wrong about pronouncing the ‘ing’ sound in words like playing and singing as opposed to playin’ and singin’. There’s also ‘strimps’ for shrimps ‘co-lay-tion’ for coalition, ‘cyu-myu-nity’ for community ‘co-orporation’ for corporation, ‘re-cyute’ for recruit, and (such a list would be woefully incomplete without it) the ubiquitous ‘aaks’ for ask. There are probably hundreds more.
A tricky one is the use of the rare ‘incidences’ (rates of occurrence) instead of incidents (events). Tricky because you could mean almost the same thing for example by the phrases ‘Incidents of child abuse’ and ‘incidence/s of child abuse’.
Oh the confusion! As a child I was taught how to correctly pronounce those pesky ‘th’ words, with tongue firmly wedged between teeth. I was in my thirties before I figured out that Thomas, Thailand and thyme vulgarly broke that ‘rule’. And why, pray, does the letter cluster ‘ough’ have at least six distinct pronunciations – as in through, though, bough, bought, rough, and cough. More ‘frawstration’! Imagine a little one, well-tutored and phonetically-trained, having to figure out how and why ‘colonel’ is pronounced kernel.
Since English is such a weird language, we shouldn’t feel too badly about some of the linguistic lapses we experience. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. And some of the guttural emanations or nasal twangs I’ve heard, from Europe to Australia, can sound more offensive and jarring than our often melodious mis-utterances. For example, hearing some Germans pronounce the word eight in their Deutsch tongue sounds  very much like that ugly ‘hawking’ sound we make before we spit out a particularly irritating bit of mucous.
In my childhood and young adulthood I was caught up with the way our radio broadcasters and commentators spoke, in pronunciation, enunciation (there is a slight difference) and fluency. Those were the days of Pat Cameron, Hugh Cholmondeley, Matthew Allen, Rafiq Khan, Ron Robinson, Vic Insanally, and later, Rovin Deodat, James Sydney, Phyllis Jackson, Maggie Lawrence, Alwyn Alleyne and Bibi Narine among others. It may be a good thing, if it isn’t already being done, for some of our younger broadcasters (and public figures) to listen to tapes of these elocution masters.
Children, I think, should be taught by their parents to speak/learn straightforward, grammatically-correct English from about age two. I taught for over 30 years, and I can tell you it makes a world of difference in their later school life, and career. Reading and comprehension are keys to the mastery of every subject in every sphere of activity, anywhere in the world.
In a country like Guyana, faced as we are with a host of seemingly intractable educational and social problems among our youths, it will go a long way toward creating more well-rounded, self-confident, and articulate speakers. And of course, better broadcasters.

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