PARENTAGE OF THE JARGON. 3 
French source, for if the Astoria trappers were users of English the 
rangers of the Hudson’s Bay Company were preponderantly French 
or Breeds. As showing that the importance of jargon study was early 
recognized, we may note in passing that among the earliest of the 
publications of the Smithsonian Institution in its youth was the 
Gibbs dictionary of Chinook. 
Our next example in chronological order is the Beach-la-mar 
jargon of the southern and western Pacific islands with a certain 
extension to the nearest littoral of Australia. It is this which is to 
engage our attention in this study and may therefore be postponed 
in this summary schedule. 
In the Guianas the Negro English, a magma of an already jar- 
goned mass from various African sources, now mingled with English 
and other European material, has been in such use that it has 
advanced toward respectability: the Scriptures have been printed 
in the language. 
Within thirty years a wonderful expansion has taken place in a 
jargon on the west coast of Africa, the Krooboy. The base of this is 
English, but fragments have been caught up from many sources, 
African and European, along a thousand leagues of Gold Coast, 
Ivory Coast, Palm Coast. The spread of this new and rapidly grow- 
ing jargon is due to the fact that merchant vessels find it econom1- 
cally advantageous to supplement their crews with drafts of Kroomen 
for the heavy work of handling cargo on unwholesome beaches. 
It would not be pertinent to the present topic to essay the making 
of a complete list of these languages, lustyin spite of the bend sinister. 
We might readily add the Gombo and the Cajun of Louisiana, the 
batard French of Haiti, the Papimiento and other mixed tongues of 
the West Indies, much of the Spanish of Mexico and of the Latin 
republics. The few which have been presented with a brief note in 
the foregoing paragraphs have been introduced solely for the purpose 
of showing that jargons have a respectable history and that in the 
present time the actuating causes are still potent to create new 
jargons when the conditions are meet. | 
Our present study shall be directed upon the Beach-la-mar, a 
jargon of wide extent but of scanty record; for it has come to its 
growth in a plane far below that in which interest in speech for itself 
becomes active. Thus it has lacked its historian, its records are 
scattered through a few books of travel in the South Sea whensoever 
the crudities of its diction have seemed to the recorder sufficiently 
droll to add a comic touch to descriptive pages. Even of record of 
such sort we find but a brief collection, as will be shown in the notes 
and bibliography following the vocabulary of this treatise. 
There seems no limit to the life of the spoken word; anything 
which pretends to be speech lives on and on and may appear long 
UNIVERSITY OF 
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CHAMPAIGN 
