8 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics Special preferences, the fifth type of Jamaicanism, accounts for words which are, according to the author, not “exclusively Jamaican” but are the “preferred term in the island” (Cassidy 1961: 6). These are, e.g. puss, which is used more frequently than cat, or wis, which is more often used than vine. Cassidy also describes all of the combinations with the word macca, which is “[…] a thoroughly Jamaican word” (1961: 7). There are many other distinctive features that constitute the structure of Jamaican talk, and they concern adding or omitting words in a sentence, as “[s]ome words are unexpectedly present, […] where others are unexpectedly missing. New words are invented and slip into general parlance as quickly as others fall from grace, and vowel sounds go sliding off into diphthongs” (Koss [1996] 2008: 303). Jamaicans often drop their “h” and say ouse instead of house, they often drop the “th” sound as well and say t’ree for three, “the” is pronounced as de, “them” as dem, and the letter “w” is sometimes missing, hence they say ooman for “woman,” but they also add letters to words, e.g. hemphasize. The letters are misplaced in words, so “spaghetti” changes into pasghetti, or “ask” turns into aks. In the Patois variety, the word “up” is used to intensify meaning (Koss [1996] 2008: 303). The structure of the vocabulary reflects the influence and changes that were caused by Spanish and later English colonization. The reason why some of the vocabulary remained unchanged was due to the fact that the variety of English that was brought to the island stopped developing and evolved into a creole, thus the words and even their pronunciation maintained their forms as they had been used in the 17th century. 1.3. JAMAICA BEFORE THE ENGLISH INVASION Before the Europeans came to Jamaica it had been inhabited by the Arawak indigenous peoples (or the Tainos) for about seven centuries. Opinions about the Arawak population are not consistent. Robert Howard (1956: 45) suggests 600,000 inhabitants for the year 1500, although Franklin Knight and Margaret Crahan (1979: 7) believe there might have been 20,000. Cassidy indicates the places they were located: “[t]he Arawak family ranged through the western islands of the central American archipelago and occupied much of what is now Venezuela, the Guiana coast, and other parts of as far as the Amazon delta” (1961: 10). They became the first slaves to the Spanish, although heavy exploitation, which lasted 150 years, and epidemics
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