Content uploaded by Marijke van der Wal
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Marijke van der Wal on Feb 18, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
e discovery, nature, and implications
of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783
Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
University of Konstanz / Leiden University
In this paper, we discuss the recent discovery of four letters written in 1783, one
of which is written fully in Papiamentu, the other three comprising Papiamentu
fragments. e data in these constitute one of the earliest written attestations
of Papiamentu. We rst provide a brief overview of the earliest attestations of
Papiamentu and then present the Letters as Loot research programme, to which
we owe the discovery of the 1783 letters. Following this, the article discusses the
contents of the letters and the socio-historical context in which they were writ-
ten. To close, we discuss the value of this new source for Papiamentu studies.
Keywords: early (late-18th-century) Papiamentu, Letters as Loot, Curaçao, Dutch
1. Early references to and written attestations of Papiamentu
Controversial as the place of birth of Papiamentu may be, discussing whether the
language developed in situ or was imported from elsewhere, scholars agree on par-
ticular historical-linguistic aspects, such as the view that the language established
itself as a communication vehicle on Curaçao in the second half of the 17th cen-
tury and had become the dominant speech and mother tongue among the slaves
and freed slaves by the turn of the 18th century (e.g. Kouwenberg & Muysken
1995: 205; Bartens 1996: 274). ese assumptions are supported by several testi-
monies. In 1704, for instance, the German Father Alexius Schabel mentioned in
his travelogue that the ‘slaves of Curaçao speak broken Spanish’ (cf. e.g. van Wijk
1958: 169; Bartens 1996: 248). A few decades later, in 1732, a Father Caysedo re-
ported that, in addition to Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, the people of Curaçao
spoke ‘el idioma del país’ [‘the language of the country]’ (in Hartog 1968: 157). A
legal deposition of 1737 mentions the use of the ‘creolse taal’ [‘creole language’] by
Afro-Curaçaoans (Rupert 2012: 214).
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30:1 (2015), 44–62. doi 10.1075/jpcl.30.1.02jac
issn 0920–9034 / e-issn 1569–9870 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
PROOF!
SEE JPCL 30 (2015), 44-62 for the final version.
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 45
e rst explicit mention of the glossonym Papiamentu (or variants there-
of) is found in a most interesting document dated 1747 and discussed in detail
in Kramer (2008). e document describes the court hearing that took place in
New Port (Rhode Island) in 1747, i.e. towards the end of the War of the Austrian
Succession (1739–1748).1 e court hearing was held in order to shed light on
the seizure in the same year of the Dutch ship the Jonge Johannes by an English
privateer (cf. §2). e English, exceptionally at peace with the Dutch at the time
(cf. Table 3), had erroneously assumed the ship to belong to Spain, a misunder-
standing that appears to have been created by the fact that members of the ship’s
crew spoke a language resembling Spanish. At the court hearing, a member of the
ship’s crew was able to convince the court that the ship was in fact sailing under
the Dutch ag and that the language spoken on board the ship was not Spanish but
Papiamentu. e relevant passage of the hearing is provided below (from Kramer
2008: 101):
Q(uestio)n: What Language did the People on board the Sloop Speak.
An(swer): Dutch, Spanish, and Poppemento, but chiey Poppemento.
Q(uestio)n: Whether they commonly talk Poppemento in Curaçao.
An(swer): Yes.
Q(uestio)n: Whether you have any knowledge of any Cocoa being sent home to
Curaçao in another Vessel.
An(swer): No.
Q(uestio)n: Can you speak Dutch.
An(swer): No.
Subsequent references to the use on Curaçao of ‘Papiamento’, ‘Papimento’,
‘Papiments’, and ‘Papiamentice’ are found in reports and letters by an anonymous
Venezuelan cleric (1768), the Venezuelan lieutenant Manuel Carrera (1795), the
British co-governor William Carlyon Hughes(1802), governor Pierre J. Changuion
(1805), and the Minorite priest Johannes Stöppel (1816) respectively (cf. Hartog
1968: 157; especially Rupert 2012: 217, 241 and references therein). Table 1 sum-
marizes the earliest references to Papiamentu that we know of.
1. is was principally a war between Austria and Prussia in which the English and the Dutch
allied with the former while France and Spain sided with the latter.
46 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
Table 1. e earliest references to Papiamentu2
Ye a r Context
1704 Father Alexius Schabel: ‘broken Spanish’
1732 Father Agustín Caysedo: ‘the language of the country’
1737 Legal deposition: ‘creolse taal’
1747 Curaçaoan Sailer Torinio Lopes: ‘Poppemento’
1768 Anonymous report to archbishop of Caracas: ‘Papiamento’
1795 Venezuelan lieutenant Manuel Carrera (1795): ‘Papiamento’
1802 British co-governor William Carlyon Hughes: ‘Papimento’
1805 Governor Pierre J. Changuion: ‘Papiments’
1816 Minorite priest Johannes Stöppel: ‘Papiamentice’
e rst written attestation of Papiamentu dates from 1775.3 It concerns a love let-
ter written in uent Papiamentu by a Curaçaoan Sephardic Jew to his mistress. e
letter has been the subject of articles such as Wood (1972) and Salomon (1982)
(see also Kramer 2004: 217–222). e second written attestation is a short (60-
word) conversation between two female slaves recorded in the court testimony of
Semuel Costa Andrade in 1776 and is transcribed in Maduro (1971) and Maurer
(1998). Up until very recently, an Aruban court procedural document from 1803
(transcribed e.g. in Martinus 1996) was considered the third earliest attestation,
but Van der Wal (2011) recently discovered four letters from an earlier date, i.e.
1783, one of which is written fully in Papiamentu, the other three comprising
Papiamentu fragments. Table 2 lists the earliest written attestations of Papiamentu.
e newly discovered letters are part of the Letters as Loot corpus, compiled at
the University of Leiden.
2. Rupert (2012: 215) furthermore found references to the use on Curaçao of ‘creole’, ‘black
speech’, and ‘language of the country’ in archival records from the 1770s through to the ear-
ly 19th century. In the course of the 19th century the glossonym Papiamentu (Papiamento in
Aruba), became well established.
3. Arguably, and at least according to Martinus (1996: 9), the very rst piece of data to be con-
sidered written Papiamentu is the name of a Sephardic Jewish ship, Awa pasa harina, registered
in 1767. e name closely resembles the modern-day Papiamentu idiomatic expression awa a
pasa hariña with the meaning of ‘bad times’ (lit. ‘water has surpassed the our’).
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 47
Table 2. e earliest written attestations of Papiamentu4
Ye a r Text type Word count Author
1775 private letter ca. 150 words Sephardic Jew
1776 dialogue ca. 60 words Sephardic Jew
1783 private letters ca. 80 words +
ca. 25 words
Anna Elisabeth Schermer-Charje
Dutch
1790 eyewitness report ca. 15 words unknown5
1803 legal petition ca. 300 words unknown
1833 Catholic catechism ca. 1500 words Father Niewindt
2. e Letters as Loot research programme
e Letters as Loot research programme, conducted at Leiden University, concen-
trates on a recently rediscovered collection of Dutch documents from the second
half of the 17th to the early 19th centuries, comprising over 38,000 letters, both
commercial and private ones (cf. Van Gelder 2006).6 ese documents were con-
scated during the frequent warfare of England and the Netherlands in the past,
when no fewer than four Anglo-Dutch Wars (cf. Table 4) were fought, apart from
the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic period in which both
countries stood on opposite sides.
4. Following Niewindt’s catechism (1833/2002), the output of evangelical texts (catechisms,
gospels) written in Papiamentu increased rapidly, culminating in a full Papiamentu Bible trans-
lation in the early 20th century (Eybers 1916). In addition, from the mid-19th century onwards,
grammatical sketches and word lists in and of Papiamentu began to appear, while some news-
papers were publishing articles in Papiamentu as early as in the late 19th century. It is also
pertinent to briey draw attention here to a handful of short Papiamentu folkloric songs that
could be heard in Coro, Venezuela, well into the 20th century. Although written down only in
the late-20th century, the songs actually trace back to the mid- to late-18th century, when sig-
nicant numbers of Curaçaoan runaway slaves settled in Coro (see Lipski 2005: 192 and refer-
ences therein).
5. is concerns a single sentence found in the eyewitness report of a street ght kindly brought
to our attention by Han Jordaan.
6. e research programme Letters as loot. Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch
was initiated by Marijke van der Wal (Leiden) and is funded by e Netherlands Organisation
for Scientic Research (NWO); cf. also http: //www.brievenalsbuit.nl (English version).
48 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
Table 3. Chronology of Anglo-Dutch Wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries7
1st Anglo-Dutch War 1652–1654
2nd Anglo-Dutch War 1665–1667
3rd Anglo-Dutch War 1672–1674
4th Anglo-Dutch War & American War of Independence 1776–1784
Napoleonic period 1793–18137
is warfare involved privateering, a longstanding legitimate activity, performed
by all seafaring European countries and regulated by strict rules. When private
ships (privateers) authorized by a country's government, attacked and seized cargo
from enemy ships, the conquered ship and all its cargo were considered as loot for
the privateer, if rules had been followed scrupulously (Van Gelder 2006: 10). In
England, it was the High Court of Admiralty (HCA) that had to establish whether
the current procedures had been properly followed. In order to be able to decide
whether the ship was a so-called lawful prize, all the papers on board, both com-
mercial and private, were conscated. Aer the legal procedure, the conscated
papers stayed in the High Court of Admiralty’s Archives, gathering dust for cen-
turies; nowadays, they are stocked in a thousand boxes in the British National
Archives (Kew, UK). To fully appreciate the huge number of letters in these boxes
it is important to note that in very many cases the ships’ cargo contained a lot
more mail than the crew’s own correspondence. Ships oen took mailbags on
board and thus functioned as mail carriers between the Netherlands and remote
regions such as the Caribbean and East India (Van Gelder 2006: 10–15). e larg-
est share (62%) of the more than 38,000 Dutch letters, sent from the Netherlands
all over the globe and vice versa, was found to be conscated on ships to and from
the Caribbean, many of them sailing in the period of the 4th Anglo-Dutch war
(Van Gelder 2006: 31). us we nd letters, for instance, to and from St Eustatius,
Curaçao, Surinam, Essequibo (present Guyana) and Demarara (present Guyana).
Among the whole collection it is the number of about 15,000 private letters
that are priceless material for scholars from various disciplines. ese private let-
ters report, for instance, on singular events such the Great Hurricane of 1780 in
the Caribbean and more generally on daily life, hardship, joy and sorrow at home
and abroad. For historical linguists in particular, interested in the scarcely docu-
mented daily language of the past, their value cannot easily be overestimated. As
the letters were written to and by spouses, children, relatives and friends, they
7. In 1807, Curaçao fell into English hands, but the WIC restored Dutch rule in 1815. is
English period of occupation enabled English borrowings to enter the Papiamentu language
including core vocabulary items such as the frequently used adverbs bèk and djis < Eng. back and
just. Wood (1971) is concerned with English linguistic inuences in Papiamentu.
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 49
represent the so-called language of proximity, characterized by informality and
a degree of orality (cf. Koch & Oesterreicher 1985). e relative proximity to au-
thentic speech or the ‘speech-like’ nature of such private letters has been stressed
by among others Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 29) and Elspass
(2012: 162). What makes the Dutch letters even more attractive and most suitable
for historical sociolinguistic research is that the writers were people from all so-
cial ranks, men and women alike. us the letters are a highly valuable linguistic
source that allows us to ll gaps in the history of Dutch (cf. Van der Wal, Rutten
& Simons 2012). Although in our Letters as Loot research programme we mainly
focus on phenomena and issues related to the history of Dutch, we regularly come
across surprising nds that are relevant for the history of other languages.8 Such
an intriguing nd is a late-eighteenth-century Papiamentu letter and three Dutch
letters with Papiamentu words and phrases, all dating from 1783. ey originate
from the network of the Charje family, living on the island of Curaçao in the last
decades of the 18th century.
3. Socio-historical context of the Papiamentu letters
e Letters as Loot corpus contains ten letters, dating from January and February
1781 and January 1783, that were written by members of the Dutch Charje fami-
ly.9 February 1781, from Curaçao, both Jacob Charje (married to Anna Sophie
Charje) and his eldest son Pieter Andries write to ‘sister’ and aunt Dorothea Boufet
in Amsterdam.10 At the beginning of 1783, Pieter Andries once more writes to his
aunt and Jacob Charje writes two letters to his son-in-law Dirk Cornelis Schermer
in Rotterdam. Dirk Cornelis, born 22 April 1759, started his career as a sailor
as constable’s assistent on the East India Company ship Diana at the age of six-
teen.11 From his letter of January 1781 written to his brother-in-law Jan Spruit in
8. One example is an 18th-century letter that includes a Frisian text. Cf. www.brievenalsbuit.nl
under ‘Monthly letters’ the letter of March/April 2012.
9. Dirk Schermer’s letter to his brother-in-law Jan Spruijt is located in box HCA 30–326 of the
National Archives (Kew, UK). e two letters to Dorothea Boufet, dating februari 1781, are to be
found in HCA 30–365 (the letter by Jacob Charje) and HCA 30–366 (the one by Pieter Andries
Charje). e other letters, all dating from January 1783, are located in HCA 30–370.
10. Dorothea Boufet most probably was Jacob Charje’s sister-in-law or a stepsister. According to
the marriage registers of the town of Amsterdam, her maiden name was Ho(o)genbos when she
married Jan Boufet on 15 July 1757.
11. is and other genealogical information is derived from the Letters as Loot database which
comprises the results of archival research and of searches in databases such as VOC opvarenden.
50 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
Rotterdam, we know that he by then had obtained the attractive job of mate on
the warship De Arend that lay in the roadstead of St Eustatius with destination
Curaçao. On Curaçao he must have met Jacob Charje’s daughter, Anna Elisabeth,
to whom he is married by January 1783, when she writes two letters (one of which
contains a short, annexed letter) to her husband Dirk and one to her mother-in-
law, widow Elisabeth Schermer-Pipardus, who both stay in Rotterdam. At the same
time mother Anna Sophie Charje sends a letter to her son-in-law Dirk which,
apart from the signature, is not an autograph, but was written by her daughter
Anna Elisabeth.12
Table 4. e Charje family
Jacob Charje x Anna Sophie Charje
↓ ↓ ↓
Pieter Andries Anna Elisabeth x Dirk
Cornelis Schermer
Benjamin
↓
Jan Boufet Schermer
e letters comprise some information about the social rank and the occupations
of the family members. As a mate, and later captain, Dirk Cornelis Schermer be-
longs to our category high middle class.13 Jacob Charje’s occupation is not quite
clear from the letters. We may assume that he was a merchant, as he apologizes
for not being able to sell goods for Dirk Cornelis due to his old age and illness.
His wife explains that he can neither help with nancing, because he spent much
money on a country-seat. As Dutch ‘colonizers’ we may assume that the family
belonged to the upper class of 18th-century Curaçao.
One may notice that Charje is not a Dutch family name and neither is Boufet.
In the 18th century, the name of Boufet regularly occurs in the DTB registers (bap-
tism, marriage and burial registers) of the town of Amsterdam, the name of Charje
(Charie, Charié) only occasionally. e families may have descended from French
Huguenots, many of which ed France in the 16th and 17th centuries not rarely
seeking refuge in the Netherlands. Moreover, although we lack concrete num-
bers, it is historically documented that some French Huguenot families who had
12. For the problem of determining whether a letter is autographic or not we refer to Nobels &
Van der Wal (2012) and Van der Wal, Rutten & Simons (2012: 143–146).
13. In our research we distinguish four social ranks, i.e. high — high middle — low middle —
low, mainly founded upon the writers’ occupation and/or the occupation of family members.
is division closely follows the one historians use (Frijho & Spies 1999: 190–191), the most
important exception being that the so-called patriciate is not represented in our corpus.
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 51
previously lived in the Netherlands resettled on Curaçao in the 18th century.14
Clearly, Dorothea Boufet and her husband, captain Jan Boufet lived in Amsterdam.
From the letters by Pieter Andries Charje, it also appears beyond any doubt that
the Charjes had Dutch roots and had lived in the Netherlands prior to moving to
Curaçao: Pieter Andries refers to an earlier stay in the Netherlands and expresses
his wish to return to Patria. In the remainder of this article we will therefore con-
sider the Charje family as representatives of the Dutch Curaçaoan upper class.
Comparing the letters sent by members of the Charje family, the three letters by
Anna Elisabeth stand out remarkably. Much to our surprise, one of them contains
as appendix another, brief letter fully in Papiamentu, addressed to Dirk Cornelis
Schermer and sent by his newly-born son Jan Boufet Schermer. Furthermore,
these three Dutch letters comprise Papiamentu words and phrases which do not
occur either in mother Anna Sophie’s letter (written by Anna Elisabeth, as noted
previously) or in any of the other letters.
We give a brief impression of the letter that Anna Elisabeth wrote to her
mother-in-law, Elisabeth-Schermer-Pipardus, widow with ve under-age children
when her husband Jan Schermer died (7 June 1775). Anna Elisabeth had not met
her yet, but she knew the art of tactful and cordial letter writing when address-
ing her mother-in-law who was surprised by the unexpected marriage of her son
Dirk. She explains that it was neither her own intention to marry so soon, but that
‘her beloved Dirk did not want to wait so long’. It clearly is a love marriage: Anna
Elisabeth is fond of her husband to whom she repeatedly refers as mijn lieve man
‘my dear husband’ (one instance) and mijn (lieve) doesje ‘my sweetheart’ (three
instances). Her mother-in-law may have guessed what the Papiamentu doesje
meant.15
Whereas there was only one Papiamentu hypocorism in the letter to her
mother-in-law, in her two letters to her husband Anna Elisabeth employs a more
elaborate repertoire of Papiamentu words and phrases. On 6 January her letter
begins with Mie Alma dousje & Mi Courasson ‘my soul, darling & my heart’ and
ends with Mi alma dousje die mi Courasson ‘my soul, darling of my heart’ and on
8 January her letter both begins and ends with Mi dousje, Mi bieda & Mi couras-
son ‘my darling, my life & my heart’. In the longest letter, dating from 6 January,
two other instances of (mij) bieda lief ‘my beloved life’ and four instances of doesje
14. A case in point is Jean Rodier, a French Huguenot who became the governor of the
Netherlands Antilles in 1758 (Kunst 1983).
15. e word doesje, nowadays dushi /"duʃ i/, is etymologically derived from either Spanish dulce
or Portuguese doce ‘sweet’. e use of dushi in Anna Elisabeth’s letter as well as in the written
Papiamentu fragments from 1775 and 1776 suggests this was a common term of endearment in
late-18th-century Papiamentu. It continues to be so in present-day Papiamentu.
52 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
occur alongside Dutch names of endearment such as mijn hartje lief (twice), mijn
lief, mijn zieltje lief (twice), mijn tweede ziel, mijn (lieve) ziel(tje) (eight instances).
Dirk must have understood them, whether they were Dutch or Papiamentu, just
as he must have grasped the meaning of the New Year’s greeting at the end of the
letter: boon anja nobo ‘happy new year’. ere is even a strong indication that he
was familiar with Papiamentu beyond a few words and phrases. Why would Anna
Elisabeth otherwise include a letter almost fully written in Papiamentu and ex-
press her aection towards Dirk in that same language?
e Papiamentu letter is presented as being written by Dirk’s son Jan Boufet
Schermer who was born during his absence and who must have been a few months
old at the time of writing. He undoubtedly was named aer uncle Jan Boufet at
mother’s side and grandfather Jan Schermer at father’s side. Dit hee uw Jantje ge-
schreven ‘Your Jantje has written this/ is has been written by your Jantje’ features
at the end of the Papiamentu letter in Anna Elisabeth’s handwriting. e child’s
letter oers us a new 80-words long Papiamentu text from the late eighteenth cen-
tury.
4. Jan Boufet’s Papiamentu letter
We present the letter as follows: the rst line contains the original Papiamentu
text; the second line provides the present-day Papiamentu equivalent (using the
Curaçao/Bonaire orthography), followed by the English translation in the third
line.
1 Mi papa bieda die mi Courasson
Mi papa bida di mi kurason
‘My father, life of my heart’
2 bieni prees toe seeka bo joego doesje
bini lihé seka bo yu dushi
‘come to your sweet son quickly’
3 mi mama ta warda boo, mie jora toer dieja pa mie papa
mi mama ta warda bo, mi [ta] yora tur dia pa mi papa
‘my mother awaits you, I cry all day for my father’
4 Coemda Mie groot mama pa mie ie mie tante nan toer
Kumindá mi wela pa mi i mi tanta nan tur
‘greet my grandmother and all my aunts for me’
5 papa doesje treese oen boenieta son breer pa boo jantje
papa dushi trese un bunita sombré pa bo Jantje
‘Dear father, bring a nice hat for your Jantje’
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 53
6 adjoos mie papa bieda die mi Courasson
ayó mi papa, bida di mi kurason
‘Goodbye my father, life of my heart’
7 djoos naa boo saloer pa mie i pa mie mama
dios (du)na bo salú pa mi i pa mi mama
‘may God give you health for me and for my mother’
8 mie groot mama ta manda koemenda boo moetje moetje
mi wela ta manda kumindá bo muchu muchu
‘my grandmother sends you lots of greetings’
9 mie ta bo joego Doe[s]je toena mortoo
mi ta bo yu dushi te na morto
‘I am your sweet son until death do us part’
10 Dit hee uw Jantje geschreeven, nogmals adjoos vart wel
‘Your Jantje has written this, goodbye once more [and] fare well.’
5. Value of the letter for Papiamentu studies
5.1 Socio-linguistic implications
e four letters, and particularly the Papiamentu fragments contained in them, al-
low us to draw some conclusions regarding the linguistic prole of the writer, Anna
Elisabeth, and her husband Dirk Schermer. Anna Elisabeth must have been a com-
fortable speaker of Papiamentu — she may well have been a uent Dutch-Papiamentu
bilingual.16 Although the text is short, evidence of her command of the language is
found, for instance, in the use of features that are typical of ‘native’ Papiamentu, such
as verbal serialization (manda kumindá send-greet ‘send greetings’, line 8), redupli-
cation (moetje moetje <much-much> ‘very much’, line 8), and the reduction of duna
‘g iv e’ to naa (line 7) which is typical of (rapidly) spoken Papiamentu.
e fact that the Dutch Curaçaoan Anna Elisabeth was uent in Papiamentu
and used it in letters to her husband is socio-linguistically and historically salient
for several (partially overlapping) reasons:
a. Whereas it was well-known (owing to the private letter from 1775) that
Papiamentu had become the main communication vehicle among the Curaçaoan
Sephardim by the second half of the 18th century, up to date we had no such
empirical information on the role and diusion of Papiamentu among the Dutch
Curaçaoan upper class in that early period. Anna Elisabeth’s letters suggest that
16. Christel Monsanto (Curaçao), who found various documents concerning the Charje fam-
ily in Curaçaoan archives, kindly conrmed that Anna Elisabeth was born 11 August 1763 at
Curaçao. She also suggested the importance of local yaya’s ‘nannies’ which ties in with Rupert
(2012: 235).
54 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
it had indeed diused among the Dutch segment of the Curaçaoan upper class in
the course of the 18th century.
b. Father G.B. Bosch, who visited Curaçao in the 1820s, wrote down his ex-
periences in a 1829 travelogue. Amongst other things, Bosch (1829: 212) suggests
that the creole was initially more prevalent among women than among men: ‘op
Curaçao ( … ) is een Spaansch patois, papiemento genaamd, de taal, die de Negers
en gekleurden, die de kinderen der blanke inwoners en een groot gedeelte van het
schoone geslacht bij voorkeur onder elkander spreken’ [‘on Curaçao, a Spanish
patois, called Papiemento, is the preferred language among the Negroes and co-
loureds, the children of the white inhabitants, and a large part of the fair sex’].
With particular respect to Curaçao and Jamaica, Rupert (2012: 235) also posits a
correlation between gender and creole language acquisition: ‘European women
who lived in the colonies frequently picked up creole languages faster than the
men, at least in part owing to their close association with domestic servants and
their children’s contact with slave children and nannies.’ Anna Elisabeth’s letters
provide a unique conrmation that this socio-linguistic state of aairs indeed ap-
plied to late-18th-century Curaçao.17
c. From the beginnings of the slave trade on Curaçao in the 1650s and the
subsequent creolization of the island’s society, the West India Company’s settle-
ment policies aimed at maintaining a strict socio-cultural division between whites
and the Afro-Curaçaoans. For instance, slaves were not allowed to become mem-
bers of the Protestant church18 and the use of Papiamentu was ocially prohibited
on plantations and schools (Hartog 1968: 148; Fouse 2002: 138). Anna Elisabeth
addressing her husband in Papiamentu, however, suggests that the West India
Company’s prescriptions had only limited impact on the socio-cultural reality.
Apparently, there was no way of preventing Papiamentu from making its way
into the daily life of the white upper class. In fact, the letters compel us to con-
clude that the Dutch Anna Elisabeth had a surprisingly positive attitude towards
Papiamentu: only then can we account for the fact that she used Papiamentu in
private letters to her husband and even chose Papiamentu terms of endearment to
refer to him in the letter addressed to her Dutch mother-in-law.
17. Hartog’s (1968: 158) assertion that ‘About 1825, this idiom [Papiamentu] was spoken by all
coloured persons, and among the whites particularly by the ladies’ is probably based on Bosch’
travel account.
18. is state of aairs was fully exploited by the Venezuelan Catholic missionaries who visited
Curaçao regularly, baptizing the incoming slaves. As a result, in the rst half of the 18th century,
Curaçao’s slave society had become predominantly Catholic, rather than Protestant or Jewish
(Klooster 1998: 291; cf. also Hartog 1968: 178), compelling the Dutch West India Company to
ocially allow Catholicism on the ABC islands in the 1730s (Israel & Schwartz 2007: 29).
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 55
d. As mentioned previously, Anna Elisabeth’s husband Dirk Cornelis Schermer
must at the very least have had a basic knowledge of Papiamentu, even though he
had been on Curaçao only for rather brief periods of layover. Being a sailor, he may
have had his rst encounters with Papiamentu on board ships of the Dutch West
and East India Companies. e case of the Jonge Johannes discussed in §1 suggests
that Papiamentu indeed was not uncommon on board ships of the West India
Company, though this remains questionable for the East India Company which
was not involved in the Caribbean.”
5.2 Linguistic observations
From a strictly linguistic point of view, the 1783 Papiamentu text rearms an im-
portant conclusion drawn previously by other authors on the basis of the 1775
and 1803 Papiamentu texts, namely that late-18th-century Papiamentu does not
dier signicantly from modern-day Papiamentu and, thus, that the grammar of
the language had become quite stable at a relatively early date (see Wood 1972; cf.
Kramer 2008: 99). Exceptions to the continuity between early and modern-day
Papiamentu in Anna Elisabeth’s letter are limited to vocabulary items such as jo-
ego ‘child, son, daughter’, coemda ‘to greet’, and presto ‘quick(ly)’. In the transition
from early to modern-day Papiamentu, joego (< Sp. hijo) has been reduced to yu,
the short form coemda has been abandoned in favour of the trisyllabic form ku-
mindá (indeed, the continuation of, or merger with, the form koemenda found in
line 8), and prestoe (< Sp./Port. presto) has been replaced by synonyms such as lihé.
As far as the morphosyntax is concerned, the letter and sentences are too short
to allow any far-reaching analyses, though we may at least point at the use of the
third person plural pronoun nan as a postnominal pluralizer in line (4), the ver-
bal serialization manda koemenda in line (8), and the polyfunctionality of ta as a
preverbal imperfective aspect marker in line (3) and a copula ‘be’ in line (9), all
features characteristic of present-day Papiamentu.19
At a phonological level, we see that several sound changes that characterize
modern-day Papiamentu had already (largely) been completed by the time of writ-
ing:
a. e words toer (modern Pap. tur < Port. tudo ‘all’) and saloer (modern Pap.
salú < Sp. salud ‘health’ (≠ Port. saúde)) exemplify the change of etymological (i.e.
Spanish or Portuguese) -/d/ or -/dV/ to modern-day Pap. -/r/ and oen even -/Ø/.
Similar developments can be seen in the transitions from Port. metade~Sp. mitad
19. An anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out that, synchronically, it is incorrect to analyze ta
as a polyfunctional morpheme: when used as a preverbal aspect marker, ta always has a high
tone; when used as a copula, ta has polar tone.
56 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
‘half ’ to Pap. mitá~mitar, from Sp./Port. medida ‘measure’ to Pap. midí, or Port.
pode ‘[3sg.pres.] be able’ > Pap. por.
b. e verb trese, derived from Port. trazer (≠ Sp. traer), shows vowel harmony
and the devoicing of the etymological /z/, processes that are typical of the older
layers of the Papiamentu vocabulary (cf. Jacobs 2012a:Chapter 1).
c. e word anja ‘year’ (written <aña> in modern-day Papiamentu following
Spanish spelling) is one of several basic vocabulary items that have undergone the
change from etymological /o/ to /a/. Compare, for instance, Pap. bisiña ‘neigh-
bour’, biña ‘wine’ and kurpa ‘body’, from Port. vizinho, vinho and corpo.
d. An interesting case of sandhi is found in the reduction of duna ‘give’ to naa
(line 7). is reduction is still typical of (rapidly) spoken Papiamentu at present.
e. e aphaeresis and syncope of unstressed syllables of plurisyllabic words,
typical of Papiamentu (e.g. Merka < Sp./Port. América), is reected in bisyllabic
Coemda (line 4), which occurs side by side with trisyllabic koemenda (line 8), both
meaning ‘to greet, salute’ and derived from Sp./Port. encomendar (whose prima-
ry meaning is not ‘to greet’ but ‘to commend’). Present-day Papiamentu to our
knowledge only has preserved the trisyllabic variant kumindá ‘greet’, but similar
variation is found in the present-day Papiamentu pair lanta and lamantá, both
derived from Sp./Port. levantar. In this latter case, the pair was preserved probably
due to the fact that the variants have developed a subtly dierent meaning: lanta
‘to stand up’, lamantá ‘to revolt’.
In the domain of the vocabulary, apart from the fact that the letter gives us a
better idea of the time-depth of certain lexical and lexico-semantic particularities
of present-day Papiamentu (such as kumindá ‘to greet’, dushi ‘sweetheart’), an in-
teresting fact is the presence in the text of several Lusitanisms:
trese ‘carry’ < Port. trazer (≠ Sp. traer)
tur ‘all’ < Port. tudo (≠ Sp. todo)
morto ‘death’ (line 9) < Port. morto (≠ Sp. muerto)
te and na (contracted in toena, line 9), with te ‘until’ < Port. até (≠ Sp. hasta)
and na ‘in’ < Port. na (≠ Sp. en + la).
bon < Port. bom (≠ Sp. bien)
nobo < Port. novo (≠ Sp. nuevo)
ese Lusitanisms, found also in present-day Papiamentu, are revealing in the
context of the much debated origins of Papiamentu, and more precisely of its
Portuguese elements. eir presence in Anna Elisabeth’s repertoire is evidence
that they were rmly integrated also in the ‘Dutch’ variety of Papiamentu at an early
date. It is implied, for instance, that the many Portuguese-derived items in the ba-
sic vocabulary of Papiamentu cannot be attributed to Curaçao’s Sephardic Jewish
community (pace Sanchez 2009: 835). Rather, Anna Elisabeth’s linguistic heritage
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 57
suggests that these Lusitanisms were part of the original Papiamentu grammar
irrespective of any Curaçaoan Sephardic linguistic input. is, in turn, is in line
with the hypothesis (to which we subscribe; cf. footnote 21) that Papiamentu was
imported from elsewhere as an originally Portuguese-based creole and was subse-
quently (partially) relexied towards Spanish.
It should be noted, on the other hand, that the letter does not contain any
Lusitanisms that are not also found in present-day Papiamentu and the same holds
for the 1775 and 1776 samples. In other words, the relative proportion of Spanish-
to-Portuguese vocabulary in earlier forms of Papiamentu was roughly equal to
what it is today.20 In discussing the 1775 Papiamentu letter, Wood (1972) already
drew attention to this fact and (like others aer him) interpreted this as evidence
against the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexied descendant of a previously
Portuguese-based pidgin or creole.21 If that hypothesis were correct, Wood argued,
we would certainly expect to nd additional (viz. not yet relexied) Portuguese
vocabulary items in these early written attestations. Jacobs (2012b), however, ar-
gues against Wood, by noting that he erroneously assumed relexication to be a
gradual process, whereas, in fact, most established cases of relexication have been
shown to occur in the space of time of a single generation or less (i.e. typically no
more than two to three decades). Under that premise, the pronounced Spanish
character of the Papiamentu vocabulary in written attestations of the late-18th
century is merely predictable: if Papiamentu was brought to Curaçao in the second
half of the 17th century, relexication of its originally Portuguese vocabulary may
well have been completed already by the turn of the 18th century.
20. Words of Spanish origin in the letter include, for instance, Pap. bini, joego, jora, adjoos, saloer,
moetje are derived from Sp. venir, hijo, llorar, adios, salud, mucho rather than from Port. vir,
lho, chorar, adeus, saúde, muito. Many other words are of indecisive Spanish/Portuguese origin
(e.g. Pap. ta < Sp./Port. estar ‘to be’).
21. is view of the origins of Papiamentu found broad support in the heyday of the so-called
monogenesis framework, in which practically all creoles worldwide (be they French-, English-,
Spanish-, Dutch-, or Portuguese-based) were said to descend from a common Portuguese-based
proto-variety. Supporters of monogenesis models quite consistently put Papiamentu forward as
a prime example of the diusion and subsequent relexication of the alleged Portuguese-based
proto-variety. At present, very few (if any) linguists still subscribe to creole monogenesis, but
the specic view that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creole of the
Cape Verde Islands has received renewed attention particularly in the works of Martinus (1996),
Quint (2000), and Jacobs (2009, 2012a), and is increasingly nding resonance in the literature
(e.g. Clements 2012; McWhorter 2012).
58 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
6. Final remarks
Tracing the linguistic diversity of the past, various types of, more or less scarce,
sources are available, both speech-based such as recorded court testimonies
and speech-like such as private letters.22 Both types of sources deliver the earliest
Papiamentu text samples: a court testimony and a private letter, both by Curaçaoan
Sephardic Jews. By the private letters discussed in the present paper, our knowl-
edge of late-18th-century Papiamentu is further extended. e Papiamentu letter
by Anna Elisabeth shows us, amongst other things, that Papiamentu had spread
among, and become socially acceptable in, the Dutch upper class of Curaçao at a
remarkably early date.
We may oen wonder how people in the past communicated in various circum-
stances abroad. Anna Elisabeth’s letters provide us with a view on the multilingual
late-eighteenth-century society of Curaçao and on the function of Papiamentu for
Dutch-Curaçaoan writers and their addressees. As she is the only individual of the
family network who writes in Papiamentu, we may assume that the gender dif-
ference noticed for the 1820s by Bosch existed earlier in the 1780s. Her husband,
however, must also have had a reasonable passive command of Papiamentu in
order to be able to understand the remarkable letter from his son. What remains
a bit of a mystery, however, is the precise function of the Papiamentu letter in the
Dutch correspondence between spouses. Are the expression of longing and the
transfer of greetings in Papiamentu an example of ‘Spielerei’ that was appreciated
by husband Dirk Schermer? Whatever its function was, the letter gures as a lively
and precious early Papiamentu fragment from the past.
Received: 9/28/12
Revised: 2/21/13
Accepted: 2/21/13
References
Bartens, Angela. 1996. Die iberoromanisch-basierten Kreolsprachen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter
Lang.
Bosch, Gerardus-Balthasar & Leonard Eduard Bosch. 1829. Reizen in West-Indië 1. Utrecht:
Van der Monde.
22. Cf. Culpeper & Kytö (2010: 17) who distinguish three categories of speech related texts, i.e.
speech-based, speech-like and speech-purposed (such as plays), each of which has own charac-
teristics, advantages and disadvantages for research.
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 59
Clements, Clancy J. 2012. e Spanish-based creoles. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea
& Erin O’Rourke (eds.), e handbook of Hispanic linguistics, 27–46. Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118228098.ch2
Culpeper, Jonathan & Merja Kytö. 2010. Early modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as
writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elspass, Stephan. 2012. e use of private letters and diaries in Sociolinguistic investigation. In
Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (eds), e handbook of historical sociolinguistics.
156–169. DOI: 10.1002/9781118257227.ch9
Eybers, G. J. 1916. E testament Nobo di nos Señor y Salbador Jesus Christo: Fielmente traduci
segun e texto original. Amsterdam: Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap.
Fouse, Gary C. 2002. e story of Papiamentu. A study in slavery and language. Lanham:
University Press of America.
Frijho, Willem & Marijke Spies. 1999. 1650: Bevochten eendracht. e Hague: Sdu Uitgevers.
van Gelder, Roelof. 2006. Sailing letters. Verslag van een inventariserend onderzoek naar
Nederlandse brieven in het archief van het High Court of Admiralty in e National
Archives in Kew, Groot-Brittannië. Den Haag: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Hartog, Johan. 1968. Curaçao, from colonial dependence to autonomy. Aruba: De Wit.
Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.). 2012. e handbook
of historical sociolinguistics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118257227
Israel, Jonathan & Stuart B. Schwartz. 2007. e expansion of tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil
(1624–1654). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Jacobs, Bart. 2009. e upper Guinea origins of Papiamentu: Linguistic and historical evidence.
Diachronica 26(3). 319–379. DOI: 10.1075/dia.26.3.02jac
Jacobs, Bart. 2012a. Origins of a Creole: e history of Papiamentu and its African ties. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9781614511076
Jacobs, Bart. 2012b. Embedding Papiamentu in the mixed language debate. Journal of Historical
Linguistics 2(1). 52–82. DOI: 10.1075/jhl.2.1.05jac
Klooster, Willem. 1998. Illicit riches. Dutch trade in the Caribbean, 1648-1795. Leiden: KITLV
Press.
Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit
und Schrilichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie undSprachgeschichte.
Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36. 15–43.
Kouwenberg, Silvia & Pieter Muysken. 1995. Papiamento. In Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken
& Norval Smith (eds.), Pidgins and creoles: An introduction, 205–218. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cll.15.23kou
Kramer, Johannes. 2004. Die iberoromanische Kreolsprache Papiamento. Hamburg: Helmut
Buske.
Kramer, Johannes. 2008. Die früheste Erwähnung und das früheste Wörterbuch des Papiamento.
Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 14(1). 99–114.
Kunst, Antonie Johannes Marie. 1983. Jean Rodier, Fransman, hugenoot en Gouverneur van de
‘eilanden van Curaçao’. In R. O. L. Palm, E. H. J. Martis, & Ernest Cohen Henriquez (eds.),
Miscellanea iuridica antiliana, 71–88. Leiden: Societas Iuridica Antilliana.
Lipski, John M. 2005. A history of AfroHispanic language: Five centuries, ve continents. New
York: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511627811
Maduro, Antoine J. 1971. Bon papiamentu (i un appendix interesante). Curaçao: author’s edi-
tion.
60 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
Martinus, Efraim Frank. 1996. e kiss of a slave: Papiamentu’s West-African connections.
Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam dissertation.
Maurer, Philippe 1998. El papiamentu de Curazao. In Matthias Perl & Armin Schwegler (eds.),
América Negra: panorámica actual de los estudios lingüísticos sobre variedades hispanas,
portuguesas y criollas, 139–217. Frankfurt am Main:Vervuert.
McWhorter, John. 2012. e nature of argument: Is the creole exceptionalism hypothesis dead?
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27(2). 377–387. DOI: 10.1075/jpcl.27.2.07mcw
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics: Language
change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Pearson Education.
Niewindt, Martinus Joannes. [1833]2002. PrefectoApostulico di Curaçao na Cristian di su
Mision. Bloemendaal: Libri Antilliani.
Nobels, Judith & Marijke van der Wal. 2012. Linking words to writers: Building a reliable corpus
for historical sociolinguistic research. In Nils Langer, Stean Davies, & Wim Vandenbussche
(eds.), Language and history, linguistics and historiography: Interdisciplinary approaches,
343–361. Bern: Peter Lang.
Quint, Nicolas. 2000. Grammaire de la Langue Cap-Verdienne. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Rupert, Linda. 2012. Creolization and contraband. Curaçao in the early modern Atlantic world.
Athens/London: e University of Georgia Press.
Salomon, H. P. 1982. e earliest known document in Papiamentu contextually reconsidered.
Neophilologus 66. 367–376. DOI: 10.1007/BF01998981
Sanchez, Tara. 2009. Papiamentu. In Keith Brown & Sarah Ogilvie (eds.), Concise encyclopedia
of languages of the world, 835–836. Oxford: Elsevier.
van der Wal, Marijke. 2011. ‘Mie alma dousje & mi courasson’. Creools tussen Curaçao en
Rotterdam. In Daer wij ul hoogelijck voor bedancken. Brieven belicht voor Wikiscripta
Neerlandica, 31–37. Leiden: Brieven als Buit.
van der Wal, Marijke, Gijsbert Rutten & Tanja Simons. 2012. Letters as loot. Conscated let-
ters lling major gaps in the history of Dutch. In Marina Dossena & Gabriella Del Lungo
Camiciotti (eds.), Letter writing in late modern Europe, 139–161. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.218.09wal
van Wijk, Henri. 1958. Orígenes y evolución del Papiamentu. Neophilologus 42. 169–182. DOI:
10.1007/BF01511371
Wood, Richard E. 1971. e English loanwords in Papiamentu. Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 48.
173–189. DOI: 10.1163/22134360-90002217
Wood, Richard E. 1972. New light on the origins of Papiamentu: An eighteenth-century letter.
Neophilologus 56. 18–30. DOI: 10.1007/BF01740494
Online sources:
www.brievenalsbuit.nl
e discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783 61
Appendix
Jan Boufet’s Papiamentu letter. National Archives (Kew, UK), HCA30–370, pictures taken by the
Letters as Loot/ Brieven als Buit-project, Leiden University.
62 Bart Jacobs and Marijke van der Wal
Author’s addresses
Bart Jacobs
University of Konstanz
Department of Romance Linguistics Faculteit
der Geesteswetenschappen
Fach D 185
78457 Konstanz
bartjacobs3@googlemail.com
Marijke van der Wal
Leiden University
Witte Singel-complex
P.N. van Eyckhof 1
2311 BV Leiden
m.j.van.der.wal@hum.leidenuniv.nl
