John A. Holm during decreolisation. This accounts for such hypercorrect forms as Miskito Coast CE skriim waya ' screen wire' and denasalised forms such as Bahamian CE /abaras/ 'embarrassed'. Finally, a number of West African languages have vowel harmony, in which there is a tendency for words to have vowels all of the same height or laxness or even the same vowel. Remnants of vowel harmony can be found in many Atlantic Creoles, including those of Suriname, in which such rules appear to have played a role in determining paragogic vowels, for example Sranan bigi 'big', deck 'dead', ala 'all', mofo 'mouth', brudu 'blood' (Alleyne 1980: 67). Epenthetic vowels also seem to have been affected: Ndjuka somoko 'smoke'. There may also be remnants of vowel harmony in Jamaican, particularly in the epenthetic vowels in simit ' Smith' and worom ' worm' (although the latter may actually be a British regionalism). Consonants Alleyne (1980: 76) has postulated that the inventory of consonants of the earliest English-based Creoles included some African sounds (the coarticulated and pre-nasalised stops discussed below) and lacked some English sounds (the voiced fricatives /v, z, 3/ and the interdentals /6, 5/. Apparently basing his hypothesis on the Surinamese Creoles, he further suggests that the English affricates /tj, &•$/ were realised as palatals /tj, dj/ and that two pairs of English phonemes /s, J"/ and /r, 1/ were each single phonemes with allophonic variants conditioned by the phonetic environment. Pidgins and their ensuing Creoles can be expected to have an inventory of phonemes representing the subset common to both their superstrate and substrate languages - although Creoles are likely to preserve those phonetic realisations of a pidgin's phonemes that are most common among the group whose children are beginning to speak the language natively - that is, those of substrate rather than superstrate speakers. The preservation of some African phonemes in Saramaccan (and to some extent Ndjuka) is unusual and suggests the survival in Suriname of one or more African languages having those sounds, at least among those generations which developed the two Maroon languages. Like a number of West African languages, Saramaccan has labiovelar coarticulated stops; the voiceless phoneme is represented as /kp/ and the voiced one as /gb/, although each represents a single sound. They are articulated with the back of the tongue against the velum and the lips closed; the tongue is lowered and the lips open 368 English in the Caribbean Table 7.1. — Voice + Voice — Voice + Voice Palatalised consonants Alveolar Alveopalatal t d s z tj i 3 Palatalised alveolar tj s i Palatalised velar 9J Velar k 9 simultaneously while air is expelled (or drawn in in the case of the labiovelar implosives). Saramaccan has both sounds, often in words of African origin for flora and fauna, such as kpasi' vulture' or gbono-gbono 'moss'. Saramaccan /kp/ and /gb/ have the allophones /kw/ and /gw/ respectively; in some dialects of Ewe, an African language thought to have been brought to Suriname in the seventeenth century (Smith 1987), /kp/ and /gb/ correspond to /kw/ and /gw/ in other dialects of the same language (Boretzky 1983: 62). Only /kw/ and /gw/ occur in Sranan, often corresponding to Saramaccan /kp/ and /gb/; Ndjuka also generally has /kw/ and /gw/, but some speakers have variants of certain words with the coarticulated stops, for example gwe or gbe 'leave' (cf. go away). Alleyne surmised that [kp] and [kw] were allophones in the earliest creole, but only the latter survived in those varieties that remained in contact with Dutch, which lacked the coarticulated stop. Pre-nasalised stops are also frequently found in the Atlantic Creoles' substrate languages. They consist of stops preceded by homorganic nasals (e.g. /mb/, /nd/, /rjk/) functioning as a single phoneme, that is, as C in languages permitting only CV syllabic structure. Saramaccan has four pre-nasalised stops - the above plus palatal /jidj/ - to which Rountree (1972: 22ff.) assigns phonemic status. Ndjuka also has such stops, as in the name of the language. However, Sranan has simple nasals where Saramaccan has pre-nasalised stops: meti instead of mbeti' meat', neti instead of ndeti' night', etc. Palatalised consonants in the English-based Creoles also appear to reflect substrate influence. Palatalisation is the raising of the tongue towards the hard palate, often as a secondary feature of articulation, as in the initial sound of the standard British pronunciation of dew as opposed to do. In some Creole and African languages, the sounds in table 7.1 are related via palatalisation (/)/ is the palatal glide, English y). Alleyne 369 John A. Holm (1980: 56ff.) traces the /tj/ and /dj/ in the Surinamese Creoles to two sources. First, /k/ and /g/ developed the palatalised allophones [tj] and [dj] before front vowels: kina or tjina' leprosy', and_g«'or djei' resemble'. Secondly, the alveopalatals /tj/ and /d$/ in English and Portuguese were re-interpreted as these palatalised alveolars: djombo 'jump' or tjuba 'rain' (cf. P chuvd). Since these also occurred before back (i.e. non- palatalising) vowels, a phonemic split took place because the palatalised alveolars now contrasted with velar stops: e.g. Saramaccan tjubi 'hide' vs kubi 'kind of fish'. Later influence from English and Dutch established velar /k/ and /g/ before front vowels; sometimes these replaced earlier palatalised alveolars, as in rvaki' watch' (earlier watji) or tvegi 'wedge' (earlier wedji). There are some remnants of these phenomena in the Creole English of the Caribbean proper, for instance Jamaican lexical variants like kitibu or tsitsibu' firefly', and_gaag/ or d^aagl 'gargle'. Substrate influence appears to have reinforced the retention of archaic or regional British /kj/ and /gj/ before front vowels in Caribbean CE, as in kyabaj' cabbage' and gyaadn ' garden'. The Surinamese Creoles generally have /s/ where English has /// (e.g. Sranan sipi 'ship', fisi 'fish') but the allophone [J] can occur before high front /i/ and the glide /j/, such as [Jipi] 'ship' or [Jjerj] 'shame', much like allophones of /s/ in West African languages like Ewe and Ibo. Remnants of this can be found in Jamaican lasa 'last year' or Gullah [Jyiam] 'see them'. English /$/, which was just becoming nativised in the seventeenth century, normally corresponds to Jamaican /d^/: pleja 'pleasure'. In Gullah [3] occurs only as an allophone of /z/, as in [13JU:] 'is you', parallel to /s/ and its allophone [J]. Although /I/ and /r/ are separate phonemes in English, they are related in a number of African languages, either as allophones or as the distinctive parts of allomorphs or as corresponding sounds in different dialects of the same language. In the Surinamese Creoles these two sounds merged as /I/ in word-initial position: /obi 'love; rub'. However, /r/ can occur between vowels (e.g. kaseri 'kosher'), even when the etymon has /I/ in English (e.g. furu 'full') or Dutch (e.g. eri 'whole' from Du. beet). The English Creoles of the Caribbean retain only a few lexical remnants of this alternation, such as Jamaican flitat^ ' fritters' or Bahamian ling' ring for playing marbles'. The English labial sounds /b/, /v/ and /w/ have tended to merge in the Creoles. A number of African substrate languages have no /v/, and the earliest English Creoles may have also lacked this sound. In the Surinamese Creoles /b/ regularly corresponds to English /v/, as in libi 37° English in the Caribbean 'live', but Saramaccan has acquired /v/ in loans from Portuguese (e.g. vivo 'alive'). There are lexical remnants of /b/ or /v/ in Caribbean Creole English: beks ' to be annoyed' (cf. E vex), nabel' navel' or bib 'heave'. In Gullah and Bahamian /v/ and /w/ have fallen together as a single phoneme /|3/, a voiced bilabial fricative, with [v] and [w] as allophones in apparently free variation. This feature is also found in the speech of whites in coastal South Carolina and the Bahamas (Holm 1980a) as well as in the Caribbean proper, for instance the Bay Islands of Honduras (Warantz 1983). It may be related to the alternation of /v/ and /w/ in some varieties of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London speech. Suprasegmentals English speakers from Britain and North America are often struck by the distinctive intonational patterns of Creole English. There is increasing evidence that these patterns were influenced by the African substrate, which consisted almost exclusively of tone languages. These differ from intonational languages like English, which have three interrelated prosodic features: pitch (high vs low notes), stress (loudness) and length (how long a syllable is drawn out). These are linked in English in that syllables that receive primary stress also receive greater length and more prominent pitch. However, in tone languages each syllable has its own tone or relative pitch, which is not related to stress or length. In tone languages the relevant pitch pattern is that of each word or segment, while in intonational languages the relevant pitch pattern is that of the whole sentence (e.g. to convey emphasis, a question, an attitude, etc.). There is also an intermediate type of language, which is neither a tone nor an intonational language; this is the pitch-accent language, in which only one syllable per word can receive the tonal accent. Saramaccan is a tone language, with minimal pairs such as da (high tone) 'to give' vs da (non-high tone) 'to be'. Tone plays an important role in Saramaccan not only on the lexical level but also on the grammatical level by marking syntactic units: for example, the tones of the words mi' my' and tatd' father' are different in isolation from their tones when they occur as a noun phrase, mitata (Voorhoeve 1961: 148). Saramaccan words normally have high tone on the syllable cor- responding to the stressed syllables in their etyma, as in fdja tongo ' tongs for a fire'. Ndjuka is also a tone language, but Sranan is not, generally having stress where the Maroon languages have high tone. 37 1 John A. Holm Remnants of tone can be found in Jamaican Creole, which has a pattern of pitch polarity: each syllable is opposite in tone to the preceding one, that is, high tone is followed by low, then high, etc. (Carter 1982). Guyanese uses tone to distinguish minimal pairs dis- playing pitch-accent such as turkey (the bird) vs Turkey (the country), which makes it a pitch-accent language (Carter 1987). Studying the speech of West Indians in London, Carter (1979) concluded that Creole intonation patterns consistently conveyed unintended connotations to speakers of British English; intonation patterns that conveyed a pleasant attitude in Creole English were almost without exception interpreted as unpleasant (e.g. surly, judicial, detached, cold, hostile, etc.). 73.3 Syntax Like its lexicosemantics and phonology, the syntax of Creole English was influenced by its superstrate (e.g. the form of the habitual marker does, from archaic and regional English), by its substrate (e.g. much of its system of pre-verbal tense and aspect markers), by adstrate languages (e.g. the influence of the Dutch complementiser dat 'that' on the Sranan taki in noun complements like a bribi taki 'the belief that '), by language universals (e.g. the loss of case marking in the pronominal system), and by creole-internal innovations (e.g. the development of 'for him' from a prepositional phrase to a possessive pronoun {i^fo im 'it's his') to an emphatic possessive adjective {i^fo imjab 'it's his job'). However, syntax is the linguistic level on which the Atlantic Creoles' similarity to one another and to their substrate is most readily apparent. If its vocabulary underscores Creole's identity as a variety of English, its grammar proclaims its African origins. The verb phrase While it is true that no particular set of syntactic features will identify a language as a Creole without reference to its sociolinguistic history, it is also true that the structure of the verb phrase has been of primary importance in distinguishing Creole varieties (e.g. Jamaican Creole English) from non-creole varieties (e.g. Caymanian English) of the same lexical base. In the Caribbean, the non-creoles have their European system of tense-marking (e.g. verbal inflections and auxiliary verbs) more or less intact, whereas the Creoles have a radically different way of dealing with tense and aspect. Basilectal varieties of Creole English have 372 English in the Caribbean no verbal inflections; instead, verbs are preceded by particles indicating tense or aspect. These often have the outer form of their etymological sources, the English auxiliary verbs which occupy a similar position and serve a similar function. But semantically and syntactically these particles are much more like the pre-verbal tense and aspect markers in many substrate languages. Table 7.2 (from Holm 1988, which provides sources) gives an overview of the following discussion of the Creole English pre-verbal markers, and also shows how the Creole English verbal system closely parallels that of other Atlantic Creoles as well as that of substrate African languages. The unmarked verb (with the zero marker 0 in table 7.2) refers to whatever time is in focus, which is either clear from the context or specified at the beginning of the discourse. Not marking stative verbs (which refer to a state of affairs, e.g. / know the way, I have a sister, etc.) usually corresponds to using the simple present tense in English, whereas not marking non-stative verbs (referring to actions, e.g. Wi kotn doun hiir ' We came down here') usually corresponds to using the past tense. In some Western Caribbean varieties of Creole English that do not mark habitual aspect (see below), unmarked non-stative verbs can also have habitual meaning. For example, a Miskito Coast Creole English speaker, discussing how each jungle spirit guides the animals under his protection to hide them from hunters, said the following: Him a di uona. Him tek dem an put dem an dis wie die kotn and him liiv dem aal hiia an guo de ' He is their owner. He takes them and puts them on the right path They come and he leaves them all in that place and goes off' (Holm 1978). Anterior tense markers (e.g. Jamaican {b)en in table 7.2) indicate that the action of the following verb took place before the time in focus (i.e. the time reference of the unmarked verb). The anterior tense can correspond to the English past or past perfect; unlike these, however, the anterior is relative to the time in focus in the discourse rather than the time of the utterance. While the earliest English Creoles apparently had anterior markers derived from English been, decreolising varieties often have alternative forms derived from did, had or was; these frequently deviate less from standard usage and are thus less stigmatised. Progressive aspect markers (e.g. Jamaican de in table 7.2) indicate that an action is in progress, such as im de sing' he is singing'. Creole de (with variants da and a) may come from English there; it also means 'to be (located)' (see below). The development of the Creole construction could have been influenced by a language universal: many European, 573 Table 7.2. Tense and aspect markers in various Creole and African languages Sao Tome' CP Cape Verde CP Papiamentu CS Palenquero CS NegerhoUands CD Lesser Ant. CF Haitian CF Sranan CE Jamaican CE GullahCE Yoniba Bambara Unmarked 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Anterior ta(va) — — ba (h)a te — t(e) — ben — (b)en — bin — ti — Progressive s(a)ka — ta — ta — ta — lo — ka — ap — (d)e — (d)a~ de — (d)a-~ — in ri — be — Anterior tava ka — ta — ba tabata — taba — alo — teka — t-ap — bene — (b)ena — bina — ti li- mn be— Habitual ka — ta — ta — ase — lo - ka(n) ka — #~ap — ir~(d)e — B'-a da~doz maa ri- be— Anterior tava ta — ba tabata — aseba — aka — teka — t(e) (b)en — doi — ti maa ri — tun te — Completive za — ja — — kaba a — ka — — fin? fin — ? — ksba don — ~ — don don — — tin ye — ka ban Anterior a —kaba a —ba aka — don — - don — ti — tin tun ye — kaban Irrealis ka — ta — loS — tan — lo~ sa(l) — ke — (v)a — (g)o ~ sa — go ~ wi — gwol yfd- tena — Anterior ka — ta— ba loS a — tanba — asa — teke — t-a — ben o — wuda — wuda — yf6 ti — tun tena — English in the Caribbean African and other languages indicate that an action is in progress with a metaphor of location, for example early Modern English / am on writing or I am a-writing, or Bambara A be na tobi la' He is (at) cooking sauce'. In decreolising varieties, de can alternate with or be replaced by a more English-like construction with no auxiliary before the verb plus -in, as in this Miskito Coast Creole English passage: Digalno de briid, man. Digal, shi did fiil laik shi wa briidin, bot shi no briidin ' The girl wasn't pregnant. She felt as if she was pregnant, but she wasn't pregnant'. Note that the anterior marker can precede the progressive marker in nearly all of the Creole and African languages in table 7.2, resulting in a meaning corresponding to English 'he was doing' or 'he had been doing'. Habitual aspect markers (e.g. Gullah do% in table 7.2) indicate that an action occurs or recurs over an extended period of time. For example, a Nicaraguan Creole speaker used this marker to stress the fact that his seventy-year-old aunt was in the habit of rowing her canoe some forty miles to Bluefields to sell produce and buy supplies: Shi aluon doz guo doun to bluufiil^ bai kanu. A number of African languages use the same marker to indicate both progressive and habitual actions, as do many Creoles (table 7.2): for example, da is used this way in the Leeward Islands; in the Windwards (perhaps also under the influence of the local Creole French, in which ka marks both aspects) the verb plus -in can have habitual meaning, as in Grenadian CE Gud children goin tu hevn 'Good children go to heaven' (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985: 163). Habitual da varies with do%, apparently influenced by the English auxiliary does. Like the simple present tense in general, this auxiliary conveys the idea of habitual action (e.g. He does drink) and in the seventeenth century it did not require emphasis as in the modern standard. Unstressed does, do and da survive in England's southern and western dialects with habitual force; similar forms, perhaps influenced by Gaelic, also survive in the English of Ireland with habitual meaning, such as He does write or He does be writing (Barry 1982: 109). Today habitual do% is found in mesolectal varieties of Creole English throughout the Caribbean, with the notable exception of Jamaica (Rickford 1974). This habitual do^ has the reduced forms /^ and %, for instance Bahamian They is be in the ocean (Holm with Shilling 1982: 111). Rickford (1980) suggests that the complete loss of these reduced forms left be itself with habitual force in some varieties: Bahamian Sometimes you be lucky or They just be playing. However, there is a good case for the convergence of a number of influences in the development of the latter forms, which are also found in American Black English. In addition to 375 John A. Holm substrate influence on progressive/habitual da and the creole-internal innovation reducing and deleting do%, there is good evidence of the influence of regional varieties of the superstrate. Rickford (1986) suggests that habitual be in the English of northern Ireland influenced the development of habitual be in the Black English of North America (where the Scots-Irish predominated among Irish immigrants), whereas habitual do be in the English of southern Ireland influenced the development of does be in the Caribbean (where the southern Irish predominated in the seventeenth century). Finally, it should be noted in table 7.2 that in most of the Creole and both of the African languages considered, the habitual marker can be preceded by a marker of anterior tense to refer to a habitual action before the time in focus in the discussion. The completive aspect marker (e.g. Jamaican don in table 7.2) indicates that an action has been completed: MCC At don giv im a dairekshan 'I have (already) given him an address'. In the Surinamese Creoles the completive marker kaba (see etymology above, p. 360) only occurs after the verb - as does that of a number of African languages - suggesting that it originated as a serial verb (see below). Jamaican don can occur either before or after the verb (but does not combine with other verbal markers), whereas MCC don occurs only before the verb (and can be preceded by the anterior marker), suggesting a development from serial verb to pre-verbal marker motivated by systematicity (via creole-internal innovation) rather than decreolisation (Bickerton 1981: 80ff.). The irrealis marker (e.g. Jamaican go in table 7.2) indicates that the action of the following verb is not (yet) a part of reality. Used alone, it approximates in meaning the future tense, as in Guyanese CE Fraidi awi go mek 'Friday we will make [some]' (Bickerton 1975: 42). Used in combination with the anterior marker, the irrealis marker can impart the idea of the perfect conditional: Guyanese CE Awi bingo kom out see/' We would have come out all right' (ibid.). This combination of markers and meaning is found in most of the Atlantic Creoles, as well as Bambara; its development may reflect the influence of a linguistic universal as well. The Surinamese Creoles have two other combinations of markers not indicated in table 7.2. First, Sranan irrealis sa can be followed by progressive e to produce a future progressive meaning: a sa e go ' he will be going'. Secondly, these two markers can be preceded by anterior ben: a ben sa ego'he would have been going' (Voorhoeve 1957: 383). Besides verbal markers, several other features of the Creole verb 376 English in the Caribbean phrase bear mentioning. One is the complementiser, corresponding to the English infinitive marker to. The oldest form of the Creole complementiser is apparently fo (with variants fu and fi), as in MCC a friedfoguo 'I'm afraid to go'. This/o is (torn for in archaic and regional British dialects, such as I came for see in western England (LAE, S3), or I came for to see in archaic English. This/o has become stigmatised in some decreolising varieties and is being replaced by to or simply omitted: at niid-tes mat ai 'I need to have my eyes tested'. Unlike English, however, Creole fo can be followed not by an infinitive but a clause with a subject and tensed verb: MCC Dem sen dem for ai dringk 'They sent them [i.e. the tea bags] for me to drink'. Saramaccan can actually mark the verb for tense: Mi ke tsuba kai fu ma sa-go a wosu, literally 'I want rain fall so-that I-not will go to house', that is, 'I want it to rain so I won't have to go home' (Byrne 1984: 102). Creole verbs can come in a series without a conjunction (e.g. 'and') or complementiser ('to') between them, for instance MCC Aal di waari ron horn bat mi, literally ' All the wild-boars ran came by me', that is,' came running up to me'. Serial-verb constructions are unusual in English (e.g. Go get it) but common in a number of West African languages and Atlantic Creoles. They fall into several broad categories, based on the combined meaning of the verbs; one of these is directionality, as in the above example in which kom conveys the idea of 'motion towards'. Creoleguo 'go' achieves the opposite effect: Jamaican CE ronguo lefim 'run away from him'. Another category is the instrumental, as in Ndjuka A teke nefi kotia meti, literally ' He took knife cut the meat', that is, 'He cut the meat with a knife' (Huttar 1981). Sranan tjarikon (literally ' carry come') means ' bring'; these can be combined with gi ' give' to show that the carrying was for someone (i.e. dative): Kofi tjari den fist hon gi mi 'Kofi brought the fish for me'. Creole English verbs with meanings involving saying or thinking can be followed by the verb for 'say' introducing a clause: A nuo seyu bi^i 'I know that you're busy'. This demonstrably African construction has survived in American Black English in They told me say they couldn't get it (Rickford 1977: 212). Finally, in some English-based Creoles the verb meaning ' surpass' can be used after adjectives (a subcategory of verbs) to indicate a comparison, as in Gullah / to/pas mi' He is taller than I' (Turner 1949: 215). Creole English, like other Atlantic Creoles and a number of West African languages, has several different words corresponding to English be whose use is determined by the following grammatical construction. 377 [...]... FACE diphthong; the lowering and unrounding of the starting-point in the GOAT diphthong; the raising and fronting of the starting-point in the MOUTH diphthong; 4 centralisation of the KIT vowel; 5 6 7 the raising of the TRAP vowel; the retraction and rounding of the starting-point of the PRICE diphthong; the use of assimilated forms /tf/ and / of / t j / and 8 the dropping of unstressed... centralisation of / i / ; the use of the a long vowel in HAPPY ; the fronted and raised vowel in the START lexical set; the diphthongisation of the FLEECE vowel; the diphthongisation of the GOOSE vowel; the retraction and rounding of the first element in the PRICE diphthong; 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 the fronting and raising of the first element in the MOUTH diphthong; the lowering and retraction of the first... type of settlement, in which specific groups settled in the same area, was, to a lesser extent, carried forward into the 1880s There was an English purchase of a large block of land near Feilding, with 1,600 immigrants arriving in the years 1 874 -7, and there were 4,000 Irish immigrants to the Bay of Plenty in the years 18 75 - 84 (Oliver 1981: 74 ) The second type of immigration was the direct result of the. .. Black English Conclusion Understanding the history and nature of English in the West Indies requires an understanding of Creole The literary language of the Commonwealth Caribbean is much the same as that of Britain except for a relatively limited amount of lexicon; but the folk speech of most territories is a mixture of English and Creole, and it is the latter that is not well known outside the West... in the FACE diphthong; the lowering and/or fronting of the first element in the GOAT diphthong; the use of dark / I / pre-vocalically; the reduction of /kw/ to / k / word-initially; the use of the TRAP vowel rather than the START vowel in words like dance; the neutralisation of the STRUT vowel and the LOT vowel before / I / and a voiceless obstruent: needless to say, the complaint is not phrased in these... to be determined in terms of the orthography, although the influence of an underlying morphophonemic value cannot be ruled out As in South African English (Lass 19 87: 3 07) , the and a do not always have the same range of allomorphs in New Zealand English that they have in standard English Rather, they are realised as /5a/ and / a / independent of the following sound Where the following sound is a vowel,... from Ihimaera (1986: 111): Her act of assertion would have been regarded as a violation of the tapu of the marae and the tapu of the male In most other tribes, excluding the matriarch's own and just a few others, the art of the whaikorero was the province of the male Even in her own lands, the matriarch's rank had to be impeccable to allow her to speak Wisely, on the marae in Wellington, a place strange... about the British and Africans and Creoles, as well as their language FURTHER READING The past few decades have seen the growth and development of a substantial body of literature about the English- based Creoles in the West Indies, often in connection with studies of the processes of pidginisation and creolisation A landmark publication on this topic was the collection of articles edited by Hymes (1 971 )... starting-points for the diphthong; variation between [i] and [i:] for the HAPPY vowel Features stated to exist in Australia but not (or not widely) in New Zealand include: 1 2 the lowering of the starting-point of the diphthong in the FACE vowel; the lowering and unrounding of the starting-point of the diphthong in the GOAT vowel; 392 English in New Zealand 3 a lengthening of short vowels, especially the TRAP... allophone of the vowel phonemes in FOOT or GOOSE The two systematic differences between the vowels of New Zealand English and those of RP are (1) the lack of a phoneme / a / contrasting with the vowel of KIT in unstressed syllables and (2) the variable merger of / i a / and /ea/ Where the FEAR and SQUARE vowels are merged, the phonetic result of the merger may fall anywhere in the range covered by the two . immigrants arriving in the years 1 874 -7, and there were 4,000 Irish immigrants to the Bay of Plenty in the years 18 75 - 84 (Oliver 1981: 74 ). The second type of immigration was the direct result of the discovery of. for explanations of the varying linguistic paths that English and Creole have taken in different parts of the Caribbean. The study of Creole gives us the story of the birth of a new language. Such. in table 7. 2) indicate that the action of the following verb took place before the time in focus (i.e. the time reference of the unmarked verb). The anterior tense can correspond to the English