4 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics – Charles Rampini, Letters from Jamaica, Edinburgh, (1873), Appendix; 175–182. There was one more “principal informant” for Beckwith, i.e. George Parkes, who was an active man in the community. A large part of the proverbs was collected from the students of the Teaching College in Mona, Jamaica. An excellent source of Jamaican proverbs is Frederick Cassidy and Robert LePage’s Dictionary of Jamaican English ([1967] 1980), in which the authors trace back the African roots of the proverbs, thus locating their African ancestry. Jamaican Creole proverbs are a concoction of African tradition and of the overwhelming English culture that dominates over most of the Caribbean region. On the basis of these proverbs one can attempt to discover the linguistic and cultural patterns of the society under investigation. The sources of research material in the field of creole studies can be various, as Geneviève Escure notices: [t]he field of creole studies reflects the multiple ways of obtaining data represented in general linguistic studies. These include ancient records, court transcripts, texts, old grammars, c o l l e c t i o n o f p r o v e r b s , diaries, reported observations, word lists, sentence lists […], newspaper articles, radio programs, sermons, songs, traditional tales (such as the well-known Anansi Stories), elicitation techniques and interviews, spontaneous conversations, and native speakers’ judgments. (2008: 570, emphasis mine) The sentient imagery that Jamaican proverbs display is the legacy of West African traditions that pervades the entire Jamaican parlance. “Such animate imagery, a carryover of West African proverbs, infuses Jamaica talk with life and is used to crystallize sayings based on the wisdom of experience, often using living creatures as teachers” (Koss [1996] 2008: 303). The collection of Jamaican proverbs presents a very distinct type of knowledge regarding the developing socio-economic and linguistic contacts which started as an atrocity performed by one politically dominant nation upon another ethnically, economically, politically and subsequently linguistically challenged peoples. “In the context of a society torn from its roots and oppressed, the islanders have evolved countless sayings that express simple warnings about behavior and interpersonal relationships” (ibidem). For example: (1) (a) If Mr. Go- ’way no come, Mr. Dead wi’ come [If Mr. Go-away does not come, Mr. Dead will – It is a threat implying that if a man does not leave, he may get killed]
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