Negro English. 105 
Would-be purists sometimes affect to be ashamed of Negro English. There 
are those who say that to talk “ Creolese ”’ is “ vulgar, ” to write it is “ an insult 
to the Negro Race.’ Hear Professor Max Miiller on Dialect :—“ It is a mistake 
to imagine that dialects are everywhere corruptions of the literary language. 
Even in England, the local patois have many forms which are more primitive 
than the language of Shakespeare.” 
It is hardly otherwise with Negro English. There has been phonetic decay. 
There has been even gross corruption. Some of that may be due—or may 
have been due originally—to inability to pronounce certain English words ; 
Max Miiller points out that the West African dialects are poor in labials and 
dentals, while rich in gutturals. Some of it may be due to laziness ; it is really 
easier to say “ De’ than “The.” Faulty imitation may account for it partly ; 
Ihave a cook who is happy if she gets the ‘ “hang”’ of a word, without attend- 
ing too minutely to details.t 
Nevertheless, whatever phonetic decay or corruption there may have been, 
Negro English yet preserves almost or quite in their entirety many fragrant old 
English words and word-senses. You hear them for the first time with a start 
of pleasant surprise. It is as though one found a spray of hawthorn in a field 
of kalulu ! 
The word “ Wullah ” or “ Wullay ” may be heard in Barbados. As “‘ Wullay ! 
I hear the man dead!” This is genuine old English. Cf. “* The Canterbury 
Tales”: Tale of the Man of Lawe, line 711.— 
* And whan that he this pitous lettre sey, 
Ful ofte he seyde ‘alas !° and ‘ weylawey ! *” 
The word occurs also in Ramsay’s beautiful lines :— 
“O waly, waly up the bank 
And waly, waly down the brae.” 
It must have been brought to Barbados by exiled Scots. 
A delightful employment for anyone who holidays for a month or two in 
Barbados is just to note the old words and word-senses which fall, naturally 
and unaffectedly, from the lips of old Negroes. 
I was walking one day below Hackleton’s Clifi—I had come down the cleft 
called “ The Ladders ’—and was hastening home before the rain should fall. 
We are very interested in each other in that part of the world, ina friendly, 
human way ; and strangers are rare. 
An old woman in an arrowroot field leant on her hoe, and said, “‘ Master, yo’ 
better make haste. We gwine get a set of rain.’’ Further down the path sata 
black boy on a huge boulder of volcanic rock. I hurried past him, but the boy 
was not perturbed. “‘Cap’n, ”’ said he, “ I beg a pension.” 
+ An amusing instance of ‘‘ phonetic decay ” may be found in Barbados. A white man is 
employed as a cattle herd. He is known locally as McFashion. McFashion? Yes, 
McFashion. Enquiry elicits the fact that McFashion’s great-grandfather was an exile from 
the ancient and honourable Clan McPherson! A strange and original ‘ Scote h ” patronymic 
may be heard in the West Indies, to wit, ‘‘ McCurious.” This is no other than ‘* Mercurius, 
a favourite slave-name with many of the old Planters—now ‘‘Scottified ” 
