This morning I had the great pleasure of reading this article published in the BBC News Magazine online about the translation of the bible into Jamaican patois. I felt the need to share my thoughts on Twitter and it spiraled into a need to make a blog post.
My tweets read (abbreviations were made due to the 140-character limit on Twitter):
“Wow. The bible being translated into patois. All those linguists n they spell "wey" as we. No one sees the problem here?” Perfecting the spelling of patois is a very important issue to me. Spelling is key in the written word as I’m sure we can all agree
“Are we unaware how difficult it would be on this side of the world for a country to have creole as its first language?”
“The parents and children have a hard time reading and writing English. Do we really think they'll be that much better doin it w patois?”
“Unless the Bible is an audio version, I don't see how it's useful to anyone except the linguists who want to find purpose for their degrees”
"Also, if you are trying to make a language standardized, one would think you would keep the spelling of words constant”. The reason for my gripe here was based on the fact that happy was spelt two different ways in the article based on excerpts from the same book. eg: ‘appi vs api
“Ok, so you want to cater to the potential esteem problems of a child who only knows patois. Teach him English”. The esteem issue was brought up in the article in relation to children who enter school with only a proficiency in Jamaican patois who are then mocked by peers or whoever else. Seemingly, teaching them patois would be a step towards solving this esteem issue.
“Is it not clear that we will be limiting our children? Are they only to be able to function in Jamaica? I need to speak to someone abt this”
“Who worries about the esteem issues of the child whose parents are strict about them speaking only English?”
“The White English man? WHUCK?! So the black English man speaks patois? That's what you're telling me? Look here nuh!”. This was in reference to a sentiment shared at the end of the article about the patois-speaker feeling inferior due to the fact "…the model is the white English man, his language and educational standards… and we have not been able to attain it…”
Whuck is a word that is the hybrid of two other words which I will not elaborate on.You may seek clarification here though- it’s the post from the blog from whence I borrowed the term. Note my use of both English and patois in one tweet. But maybe I didn’t exaggerate my patois enough because it seems that that is necessary for our language to be differentiated. I’d just like to point out that some words are the same in English as they are in other languages eg: cul-de-sac (same in French as it is in English though literal translation may be slightly off). But I digress…
“Changing the spelling of Mary to Mieri? Well, we're just going all out, aren't we?”. Ok, this tweet does correspond with the point I made above but it was not intentional.
At the end of the article, I was left with these thoughts:
