A Jamaican language primer for native speakers and beginners alike. There are six sections: Origins, Grammar, Orthography, Vocabulary, Texts and a 50-page illustrated dictionary, presenting the basilectal register or "broad patois," using a modified Cassidy system for writing Jamaican. Selections include works by Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, Joan Andrea Hutchinson and Carolyn Cooper, alongside excerpts of classics from Laozi, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, and Dickens, translated into Jamaican for the first time.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing

Another book of quotations? Indeed there are numerous excellent extant anthologies of quotations, but these tend to be very broad, with a bias toward classical and well-known authors; those works which document the contributions of Black authors have tended to focus on African-Americans, considerable as their output is. Undeniable recognition of this prevalence is reflected in the title of the present volume which pays homage to W. E. B. Du Bois? classic work and in the preponderance of entries from American sources. Nevertheless, effort has been made to cast a wider net to capture under-represented and unfamiliar voices. Khemetic texts preserved in papyri and stelae are the earliest literature to have survived, followed by the writings of North African Romans and Ethiopian philosophers and clerics, and the lately recovered Timbuktu manuscripts from their repositories in the desert sands of Mali. The Transatlantic slave experience gave rise to the slave narratives and abolitionist literature from both sides of the Atlantic, which remained predominant right up to the 20th century. Post-Emancipation under colonial rule and white domination, Black poetry and prose emerged, adhering to prevailing standards, evidenced typically in the work of Phillis Wheatley and the sonnets of Claude McKay. With the Civil Rights and Black Power movements would come iconoclastic expressions of protest and identity. There is a sizeable body of literature by Black authors from Africa and the diaspora who speak to universal values and eternal verities. This anthology of their work focuses on the inner life, on personal development and self-actualization. 3000 quotations have been selected to inspire, enlightenand encourage; they have been arranged in 200 psycho-spiritual categories and in chronological order. The resulting timeline of thought in itself is useful and instructive as it demonstrates very clearly the evolution of consciousness evident in the contemporary thinking on particular subjects. Like its predecessor, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, this volume contains a full biographical index and bibliographical references. Much of the material is anthologized here for the first time.

A controversial new analysis of the development of New World creole languages among slaves. Mc Whorter makes a vast amount of new data available in his book, and posits that New World creole languages developed in West Africa, not on the plantations in the New World.

The method and plan of this dictionary of Jamaican English are basically the same as those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655. It contains information about the Caribbean and its dialects, and about Creole languages and general linguistic processes. Entries give the pronounciation, part-of-speach and usage of labels, spelling variants, etymologies and dated citations, as well as definitions. Systematic indexing indicates the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries.