LINGUIST List 24.499
Mon Jan 28 2013
Diss: Historical Ling/ Creole English, Jamaican: Farquharson: 'The African Lexis in Jamaican...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxialinguistlist.org>
Date: 28-Jan-2013
From: Joseph Farquharson <jtfarquharson
gmail.com>
Subject: The African Lexis in Jamaican: Its linguistic and sociohistorical significance
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Institution: University of the West Indies at Mona
Program: Department of Language, Linguistics & Philosophy
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Joseph T. Farquharson
Dissertation Title: The African Lexis in Jamaican: Its linguistic and sociohistorical significance
Dissertation URL:
http://works.bepress.com/joseph_farquharson/1/
Linguistic Field(s):
Historical Linguistics
Subject Language(s):
Creole English, Jamaican (jam)
Dissertation Director:
Silvia Kouwenberg
Hubert Devonish
Jeff Good
Susanne Michaelis
Dissertation Abstract:
This thesis presents a fresh and comprehensive treatment of the putative lexicalAfricanisms in Jamaican with a view to assessing the volume and nature of thisaspect of the grammar of Jamaican.
The work draws on a set of best practices in the field of etymology and outlines aset of transparent guidelines for assigning etyma. These guidelines are put towork by conducting careful etymological analyses of the over 500 putativeAfricanisms that have been identified for Jamaican. The analyses produce a listof 289 words whose African etymologies have been fairly well established. Anentire chapter is devoted to surveying the distribution of these 289 secureAfricanisms based on their source languages, time of attestation, the Africanregion they come from, and the semantic domains to which they belong. Thethesis also discusses some of the regularities observed among secureAfricanisms such as the fate of noun-class prefixes, the shape of iterative words,the number of taboo words, and pejoration. A reconstruction of Àkán day-namesshows that the Jamaican system shares more in common with thereconstructed system than it does with any modern version of the system usedin Africa. The final substantive chapter attempts to trace substrate patterns incompounding, an exercise which turns up two potential cases of substrateinfluence.
The thesis assigns fewer Àkán etymologies than most previous works, andproposes that many of the Àkán words in Jamaican appear to be post-formative.On the converse, the number of Koongo etymologies has increased. This isaccompanied by the fact that there is more evidence for Koongo lexicalcontribution to Jamaican up to the end of the eighteenth century than for Àkán.
Page Updated: 28-Jan-2013