Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1934. PIDGIN ENGLISH

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 102, 27 October 1934, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1934. PIDGIN ENGLISH

Mr. 0. M. Green has contributed to the September "Fortnightly" an article on "Pidgin English," which, though highly entertaining, is not without its pathetic side.

In some indefinite waj*, ho writes, one associates pidgin English with all that is most endearing in tho Chinese nature: their love of mirth, good fellowship, and readiness- to livo and let live. . . . Thero is no more lovable being on earth than a Chinese, and somehow ho is never so lovable as when talking pidgin English.

But the highbrows of both races have set their faces against it, and, what is doubtless a much more powerful influence, the spirit of hatred and suspicion for the foreigner with which the Russians have inspired the Chinese has made them less willing to meet him halfway in a semiforeign dialect. That the use of pidgin English will please the hated foreigner is the reverse of a recommendation in the eyes of a Chinese patriot of the newest school.

Classical pidgin English is very rarely heard now, says Mr. Green. Even the modified pidgin, which is . hardly more than a sort of slang adapted to the Chinese idiom and very easily acquired, is going out, though, by the way, it is still vastly different from the gibberish that passes on the London stage for pidgin.

Mr. Green was happily inspired when he decided to collect some notes of the origin and working of "this racy invention of two civilisations, equally anxious to traffic together and baffled by each other's tongue" before it disappears. In illustration of the contempt of the expert for pidgin English, Mr. Green quotes from the "Encyclopaedia Sinica" of the Rev. Samuel Couling, a learned "sinologue"— surely as ugly a word as the inexpert makers of this dialect ever coined—as follows:—

The senseless dialect originated with the linguists in the old Canton days when very few foreigners spoke Chinese and no Chinese knew English. With the increase of intercourse it is rapidly passing out of use, and will happily vanish before long.

Is science justified in thus condemning an exceedingly interesting scientific phenomenon as common and unclean, and consigning it to limbo unexamined? "Senseless" is indeed used in a thoroughly unscientific, not to say senseless, fashion when it is applied to an invention which enabled people who could not understand one another's languages to communicate freely. "Not at all like Chinese and so unlike English that newcomers require to learn it" is the description given by Mr. Dyer Ball, another of Mr. Green's authorities; from whom he also quotes a good story.

A Boston visitor to Canton when taken shopping by a British resident, addressed the shopman in puro Emersonianj whereupon tho shopman turned in bewilderment to the Englishman, saying, "Moh bctta you flen' (your friend) talkce English talk; my no savvy Molican (American) talk."

A striking illustration of the way in which the opportunities for the study of the dialect have been neglected is provided by Mr. Green's statement that the only writer he knows who has thought pidgin English worth serious study is Charles Gbdfrey Leland. Yet Leland's delightful little volume of "PidginEnglish Sing-Song" appeared as long ago as 1376, and he does not appear to have ever set foot in China. He describes the dialect a"s "a very rude jargon in which English words, strangely distorted, owing to the difficulty of representing their sounds in Chinese writing, are set forth according to the principles of Chinese grammar." Leland mentions a volume of twelve or fifteen pages which had been published for the benefit of Chinese entering the service of English masters under the title, "A Vocabulary of Words in Use Among Redhaired People." Mr.. Green identifies this with a booklet called "Devils' Talk," which was on sale in the Canton bookshops about a generation previously. He explains that "Devils" here means, of course, "foreign devils," and he adds that a majority of the Chinese still believe that "all foreigners have red hair, which they regard as a peculiar disfigurement, proof of Heaven's contempt for the barbarian." The greater part of Leland's book consists of specimens of pidgin English in both prose and verse. The most famous of these is the version of Longfellow's "Excelsior," from which we quote the first slanza: That nighty-time begin chop-chop (quickly), One young man walkey, no can stop. Maskee (despite) snow, maskeo ice, Ho cally flag with chop (motto) so nice. Top-side galow! Valuable additions to Leland's anthology are made by Mr. Green, mostly in the way of conversations and phrases. The terseness and force of many of the latter are admirable. To say of some- man that "he hab got wata (water) topside," is at least as expressive, says Mr. Green, as to say he has bats in his belfry. And to say "he b'long numbnh one bad heart loafer man" is as vigorous an expression for a first-clnss evil-winded wastrel as could be wished.

"B'Jong all look-see pidgin' is in

deed an admirably emphatic phrase for ostentation and hypocrisy. From another source wq may quote:

S'poso some ting you no can do; then do him till you could;

which surely even the highbrow must admit to be an improvement on "Try, try again." The value of pidgin English as a "lingua franca" for the Chinese themselves—a service which in the seventies Sir Richard Burton thought that it might "at no distant date" perform for the whole world!—is indicated by Mr. Green's story of two amahs (Chinese nurses) who had accompanied their respective families to England and met on the waterfront at Brighton. After a fervent embrace they discovered that neither.,of them could understand a word that the other said, as their respective provinces spoke different dialects. But fortunately pidgin English supplied common ground. It was presumably the same kind of English that provided the Chinese footballers who visited New Zealand some years ago with the only language in which they could all understand one another. One of the best of Mr. Green's stories relates to another of our national games which it is pleasant to find flourishing in China. "Can do," he says, may mean that something can be done, or that it cannot be done, that one has had enough of it. A "griffin" (newcomer) -when plnying in a cricket match, had run one run, and it was for the batsman at the other end to call. When he did call "can do," the griffin not unnaturally started and was run out. "But I said 'can do,' " said the other indignantly. To which tho griffin with equal heat replied, "I play cricket in tho language it was born in, not in pidgin."

The queer use of the i-regative is further illustrated by Mr. Green. The crux of the once popular line, "Yes, we have no bananas," would, he says, in pidgin be "perfectly cqrrect and proper."

You go to call on some lady and, on the boy opening the door, you ask, "Boy, Mississi just now have got, no havo got?" To which he replies, "Yes, no hab got."

The same usage appears in the conversation between a friend of Mr. Green's and two Chinese coolies whom, in the War, he found sitting on a railway platform in France, miles from where they should have been.

My friend speaks Chinese, but not the particular dialect of theso coolies. So to ascertain whether they had or had not reached their destination, he simply asked them, "Finish, no finish?" To which they replied, "No finish." He thereupon put them on the next train to the base and all was well.