Morpho-phonological Influence on Orthography In Haitian Creole

The orthography of HaitianCreole is a near morphemic

representation of the spokenlanguage. This facilitates thespeaking, reading, writing andtranscribing the langue. Due

to the stability of theorthography, and its

faithfulness to the spokenlanguage, it may lead to

multiple representation of aword since its pronunciationmay differ diatopically. This

Morpho-phonologicalInfluence on OrthographyIn Haitian Creole

J.Dimanche.

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Chapter I

Introduction

Over the last sixty years, Haitian Creole has seen muchadvancement in its linguistics studies, including but not limitedto morphology (Sylvain 1936; Degraff 2001), sociolinguisticvariation (Hypolite 1949, 1985; Valdman 1975; Hazaël-Massieux2005), phonetic and phonology (Férère 1974; Dejean 1980a), andorthography (Hall 1951a,b; Churchill 1957; Pompilus 1973; Dejean1980a-b; Scheiffelin & Rachelle 1998). Having seen its originfrom the end of the XVII century (Hazaël-Massieux 2005) throughthe amalgamation of French, African languages, and the indigenouslanguage of the country (Valdman 1975:175), Haitian Creole isneither a new, nor an ancient language. However, being no morethan 200 years old, the linguistics studies of the language seenthus far are but mere starting points for further studies. Thoughthe language has seen many studies from these areas, there ishowever a lack of research from the influential effect of onelinguistic structure to another.

Purpose of study

Haitian Creole’s orthography is a near phonemicrepresentation of the spoken language (Dejean 1980a: 83);therefore, there is a direct correlation between the language’sorthography and its phonology. This correlation can facilitatewriting, enunciating, reading, teaching as well as transcribingthe language. However, because this ‘graphy’ is written based onthe pronunciation, it may lead to multiple ways of spelling asingle word in the written language. Through the study of thepronouns, this paper seeks to answer the question of if thephonological variation attested in the spoken language influencethe orthography of the language.

This paper is divided into four chapters. The first oneintroduces the paper, its purpose, as well as its format. Thesecond chapter provides an article review of studies conductedthus far in the field of phonetic and phonology as well asorthography. It also provides some background information on the

Morpho-phonological Influence onOrthography

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orthography of the language. The third chapter presents a moreconcise description of the goal of the paper, along with themethodology of the study. The last chapter presents the findingof the study in conjunction with the conclusion inferred from theanalysis. It also presents a discussion of further studies to beconducted to shine more light on different aspect of the languageas well as its inter-structural influences.

Chapter II

Phonetic and phonology of Haitian Creole

Scholars believe that the language saw its origin in thelate XVII century through the European colonization (Hazaël-Massieux 2005: 39) in addition to the influence of the Frenchlanguage of the settlers and the West African languages broughtby the slaves; yet, Haitian Creole can be traced back to thefirst inhabitants of the country, the Tainos Indians (Bonenfant2011:28). Haitian Creole is an amalgamation of languages. Itcontains French, from which it acquires most of its terminology,as well as Arawak of the indigenous and Spanish from the firstsettlers of the land. I acquires some terminology for English aswell due to contact during the American Occupation from 1914 to1915. These terminologies along with the syntax of the WestAfrican language spoken by the slaves make up the Haitian Creolelanguage. In addition to terminology and syntax, each of theselanguages stated had phonological influences on Haitian Creole.Due to these influences, multiple variety of the language areattested throughout the country. However, they are notsignificantly different from one another.

Based on these influences, three diatopic variaties havebeen attested: the North, the South and the center (Bonenfant2011: 28). The latter shows the most variation from the previousones due to its high frequency of contact with other languages,e.g., French, Spanish, and English. This variety contains manyphonemes, such as the front round vowels, that are not attested

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as frequently in the North, nor in the South (Dejean 1980).Additionally, because the schools are thought in French, theeducated members of the country speak a ‘decreolized’ variety ofthe language (Valdman 1991), which contains not only words withFrench phonological influences, but also French words, instead ofHaitian Creole words.

In order to choose a standard for the Haitian Creolelanguage, the variation found in the center was adopted; however,it was purged from any phonological influences from otherlanguages (Villeneuve, Seigel, & Valdman 2013: 1). And since theorthography is a near phonemic representation of the language,i.e., the Standard Spoken Language, it should also containminimal influences from French, Spanish, or English.

Orthography of the Haitian Creole

The official standardized orthography of the languagecontains thirty-two phonemic symbols representing the phonemicsounds attested in the Standard Haitian Creole. These symbols,made up of letters, or a combination thereof, are referred to asthe alphabets or letters of the alphabet of Haitian Creole.

As presented in Table 1 below, each letter of the HaitianCreole Alphabet has a direct correlation to one IPA symbol, onesound, except for ‘ui,’ /ɥi/ and ‘oun,’ /un/, that are made up of acombination of a vowel and a consonant. These letters are furtherseparated into vowels: a, an, e, è, en, o, ò, on, ou, ui and oun; semi-vowels: w, y, and the remaining letters make up the consonants ofthe language (Note that à is the same as a, /a/ but only used todifferentiate between an /ɑ̃/ and àn /an/). Due to the limitedamount of phonemes used in the language, having an orthographythat represents its phonology simplifies the process in which onereads, writes, speaks and learns the language.

In English, a word containing the same set of letters may beattested with a different set of phonemes. As found inTagliamonte (2012)’s Variationist Sociolinguistics, tomato can beattested with either an [e] or an [a:] sound for the mid-syllable,or in the case of neither, the first syllable can be enunciatedwith either [i], or [aj] (177). Similarly, in French, a letter ofthe alphabet may represent different sounds depending on its


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environment; as shown by Antes (2006), e from the alphabet may beattested as [ɛ] in ‘les’(the - plural), [e] in ‘aimer’ (to love), and[œ] or not attested at all in ‘venue’ (to come) (53). In addition,multiple different letters of the alphabet may combine to createa phoneme; therefore, the same sound may be represented indifferent combinations of letters (Béchade 1992). Contrarily tothese languages, the [letters] of the alphabet correlate directlyto a phoneme. Consequently, every lexeme can be pronounced, basedon the knowledge of the alphabets, and can be written based onits pronunciation.

Table 1: The alphabets of Haitian Creole based on Pressoir’s 1968proposition

HC IPA HCexamples Enlish HC IPA HC

examples Enlish

Vowels Consonantsa /a/ apa apple b /b/ bagay ballà /a/ pàn apple ch /ʃ/ chache shine

an /ɑ̃/ anvan genre d /d/ don donation

e /e/ te clay f /f/ fè fallè /ɜ/ tè pet g /g/ gade gide

en /ɜ̃/ gen equivalent j /ʒ/ jwenn vision

i /i/ Li it k /k/ kite kiteo /o/ pote no l /l/ lakou learnò /ɔ/ pòt form m /m/ mwen me

on /ɔ̃/ yon bonappétit n /n/ non no

ou /u/ ou you p /p/ pa pie

ui /ɥi/ uit huis-

clos r /ɣ/ raje ruin

oun /un/ moun moon s /s/ sèl sell

Semi-Vowels t /t/ te teaw /w/ wow wow v /v/ vole vol

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y /j/ yo yo z /z/ zero zero

H /h/ hinghang hinghang ng /ŋ/ kingkong kingko

ng

Haitian Creole orthography saw many changes since its firstattempt by McConnell in the 1940’s which contained most of thealphabet of the French language (Dejean 1980:19). From thesechanges, we saw a decrease in the number of letters. Theconsonants remained relatively the same throughout those changes,except for the letters c, k and q(u) of the French language whichare reduced to k to represent the phone /k/. In addition, ng [ŋ]was removed and left to be represented by two phones /n/ and /g/.Beside this consonant, the main problems arrived in representingthe nasal vowels, the round vowels, and the semi-vowels.

Using the French language, the closest language to HaitianCreole, as well as the main source of its terminologies (Valdman1975:174), McConnel introduced the French representation of thenasal vowels an, in, and on to represent the phonemes /ã/, /ɛ̃/and /õ/ respectively (Dejean 1980:22). He also introducedrepresentations for the front round vowels, which were laterdismissed. There were over twenty different propositions for therepresentation of the language between 1940, and the adoption ofPressoir’s proposition for the orthography in 1968. The latter,which uses an, and on /ã/, and /õ/, but en for /ɛ̃/, is now usedas the official orthography of the language (168). Given that theorthography is based on the pronunciation of the lexemes, if alexeme is attested differently phonologically due to eitherdiotopic variation or contact, it risks having more than one wayof being spelled.

Phonetic variatonal studies

Since “Phonological variables are straightforward, in thesense that they are obvious functional equivalents” (Tagliamonte2012:177), they may also be easily attested. Phonologicalvariation is one of the well-studied area of sociolinguisticvariation, possibly due to its high sensitivity to social andgeographical influences (177). Within the phonological


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variations, Tagliamonte (2012) has studied the omission of thealveolar plosive /t/ and /d/ with ing, at word final positions,Beeby & Scheiman (1999) studied the variations of /dõt/, don’tbased on its collocational frequency in addition to Labov who hascovered multiple different aspect of phonological variationswithin the English language. In French, we have Thomas (2002) whostudied the attestation of the schwa and the liquid /l/ ingraduate students’ speech patterns.

Similarly, Haitian Creole has seen many variational studies.Amongst the well-documented studies, we have the use of the frontround vowels /y/, /∅ / and /œ/ in the urban area, versus thecounterpart front vowels /i/, /e/, and /ɛ/ in the rural area,along with the attestation of the postvocalic /ʀ/ in speechpattern found in the urban area of Port-au-Prince due to contactwith French (Valdman 1975). Hyppolite (1949) and Valdman (1984,1988), have conducted multiple studied diatopical phonologicalvariations in the Haitian Creole language. In addition to thegeographical variations, Fattier-Thomas (1984) alsodifferentiates between educated and rural varieties. One of thelatest studies conducted in Haitian Creole is theMorphophonological Variation in Haitian Creole: the Case of 3SG,by Villeneuve, Seigel, & Valdman, in which they compare thevariants of the 3rd person singular li / l’ of the Standard HaitianCreole verses i/y of the Cap Haitain Creole.

Though not all of these variants may be attested in thewriting of the language, such as the front round vowels, or thepost-vocalic /ʀ/, since they were removed from the officialorthography of the language, other variants such as i for li couldbe accepted in written text. In his study of the history, anddevelopment of the French language on a phonological,morphological, semantic, and syntactic level, Lodge (1993) alsopresents the orthographical changes that occurred throughoutthese centuries. His study also shows a clear correlation betweenthe spoken language, and the written language. Though the writtenlanguage was heavily influenced by the academia in the 16th

7 J. Dimanche

century, orthography changed along with the spoken language, asit was a representation of the spoken language.

Though French is more phonologically and orthographicallycomplex that Haitian Creole, this study seeks to find whether,and how these phonological variations studied influence theorthography of the language by analyzing how the spoken variantsoccur in written text.


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Chapter III

The Study

Table 2: The variants of the pronouns of Haitian Creole.1s 2s 3s 1/2p 3p

LongForms

mwen ou li nou yo

ShortForms

m w l/i n y

(Note that there both 1st and 2nd grammatical plural are combinedinto one. They are differentiated in neither the spoken, nor thewritten language)

Haitian Creole contains five sets of pronouns, each of whichcontains at least two variants as shown in Table 2 above. Thesepronouns are used as subject (1), object (2), as well as to showpossession (3), and emphasis (4).

(1) Yo kite moun yo antre lib. - They let the people enter freely(2) Sa kapab menm voye ou nan peyi san chapo. - This can

even kill you.(3) Nou menm tou, se pou nou chèche kenbe tè nou ak

pyebwa ak zèb. - Us too, we have to try to keep our soil with trees andwith grass.

(4) Mwen menm, mwen pa kite yon sèl ti pye raje sou lakoua. - Me, I don’t leave not even one weed branch on the backyard

In certain languages, such as French, or English, differentforms of pronouns are used in different syntactical positionse.g., Je, moi, and mon/ma in French, or I, me, and my are used assubject, object, and to show possessions, respectively.Contrastively, in Haitian Creole, the same forms are used in allof these positions. Therefore, they are expected to appear morefrequently than they would in these languages. Additionally,

9 J. Dimanche

these sets are used in both the spoken, and in the writtenlanguage.

Due to their high usage frequency, these pronouns are alsoexpected to go through some variations, as shown by the multipleattested forms, along with the new form /i/ studied by Villeneuve,Seigel, and Valdman, in their study of the spread of the StandardHaitian Creole in the North (2013).

Because the orthography is a near phonemic representation ofthe spoken language, if there are different forms of pronounsused in the spoken language, they should be attested in thewritten language as well. Additionally, if the morpho-phonologyof the language influences its orthography, the forms of thepronouns found in the spoken language should be attested atsimilar frequency in the written language. Therefore, this studyseeks to find whether these forms attested in the spoken languageare attested at the same frequency in the written language.


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Methodology

In order to conduct this study, data from two corpora areanalyzed. The first corpus is Indiana University’s corpus ofspoken Haitian Creole, which was recorded in 2007 by Dr. Valdman.This corpus is made up of ten hour-long interviews which tookplace in rural and urban areas of Cap Haitien. They represent thespeech of twenty participants covering a wide range of topics,from religion to education. The corpus is made up of tendocuments containing a total of 115 thousand words. This corpuswill be used to provide variants within the speech patterns ofthe Cape Haitians.

The second corpus used, Kokray, is a dynamic corpus ofwritten text in Haitian Creole. It is made up of writtendocuments mainly in the field of agriculture. This corpus is madeup of ten different documents, containing about 100 thousandwords, covering multiple different sectors within the agriculturefield. This field is chosen because it is the most documentedfield in Haitian Creole, as well as the main sector in which mostof the participants recorded work.

From each of these corpora, a random sample of one hundredtokens are taken for each grammatical person. This excludes formsthat are ambiguous in their syntactical usage and variants thatwere not used as pronouns. After a primary analysis of the data,it was found that y, is not only used as third person plural, itis also used as third person singular in many object placements;it is used as another shorten form for li. Since it has yet to bestudied, it is also removed from the samples.

From these samples, a comparative analysis is conductedbetween the usage of the long and short forms based on theirsyntactical usage. Based on the last phonespme, of the lexemepreceding the variants, as well as the first phoneme of thefollowing lexeme, a phonological analysis is also conducted ineach corpus. Additionally, a comparative analysis is conductedbetween the two corpora to see the differences between how these

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forms are used in the spoken language versus the writtenlanguage.

Chapter IV

Spoken corpus

As a point of departure, Figure 1 presents a macro leveldistribution of the pronouns across the syntactical positions. Inthe spoken corpus, more than 75 percent of the pronouns, bothlong and short forms, are used in the subject positions. The restare used as object, to show possessions, and emphasisrespectively.


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Figure 1: Frequency Syntactical distribution of the pronouns(left)Figure 2: Percentage syntactical distribution of the variants ofthe pronouns (right)

Emphatic Object Poss. Subject-20

30

80

130

180

230

Long Short

Emphase Objet Poss. Sujet0%20%40%60%80%100%

Long Short

As shown in Figure 1, the pronouns are used across thesyntactical positions though there is a preponderance of subjectusage. Additionally, though there is not much of a differencebetween the use of the short form versus the long form usage inPossession, and Subject positions (see figure 2), there is aremarkable preference of long forms in Emphatic position versusshort forms because all the variants used to show emphasis arelong forms of the pronouns.

The sample also show that not only there is a differencebetween the usages of long form versus short forms, there is alsoa difference in preference of these forms in the singulargrammatical persons versus the plural grammatical persons.

Figure 3: Overall distribution of the variants in the spoken corpus

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mwen m ou w li l i nou N yo y0

20

40

60

80

100

Figure 3 shows that the first and the third grammaticalpersons have higher preference towards short forms. In additionto the short form l, the short form i is much preferred than thelong form, li, and the known short form l. The data also showsthat contrastively, the plural grammatical pronouns prefers longforms over the short forms. One of the main reasons for thisusage could be to avoid ambiguity, especially in the case of ybecause it is also used as third grammatical person singularmarker.

The phonological analysis of the data in Figure 3 shows thata higher frequency of lexemes preceding the pronouns, long andshort forms ends with vowels, while the lexemes following thepronouns more frequently start with consonants. Figure 4: Frequency phonological distribution of lexemes endingwith vowel/consonants (left side), and lexemes starting withvowel/consonants (right side)

Consonants Vowels Consonants Vowels0

50

100

150

200

Long Short

(On the left, the lexemes precede the variants, on the right, thelexemes follow the variants.)

Additionally, Figure 4 also shows that, though most of thepreceding lexemes end with vowels, short forms prefer preceding


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lexemes ending with vowels more than the long forms. As shown onthe left side of Figure 4, of fifty-six lexemes ending withconsonants preceding the pronouns, less than thirty percentprecede the short forms. Contrastively, sixty percent of thepreceding lexemes ending with vowels collocate with short formsof the pronouns. The lexemes following the pronouns that startwith vowels also show higher preference in collocation with shortforms.

Written Corpus

Similar to the spoken corpus, the pronouns are used acrossall the syntactical positions in the written corpus, with most ofthem, short and long forms, used in the Subject area. (see Fig.5)

Figure 5: Frequency Syntactical distribution of the pronouns(left)Figure 6: Percentage syntactical distribution of the variants ofthe pronouns (right)

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Emphatic Object Poss. Subject050100150200250300

Long Short

Emphatic Object Poss. Subject0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Long Short

Comparing short versus long form of the pronouns in each ofthe syntactical positions, as shown in Figure 6 the writtencorpus shows an overall high preference towards long forms versusshort forms for of the pronouns. Though in the Possessionpositions, the short form frequency is closer to that of the longforms than in the other positions, it is still attested at muchlower frequency. Additionally, in the subject position where mostof the variants are used as shown in table 5, only fifteenpercent short forms.

Figure 7: Overall distribution of the variants in the writtencorpus


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mwen m Ou w Li l Nou N Yo Y0

20

40

60

80

100

The frequency of the overall usage of the variants shown inTable 5 above confirms the preference of long forms usage in thewritten corpus. Other than in first grammatical person, there isa clear difference between the usages of short versus long formsof the pronouns. Even for the first grammatical person singular,which only had 78 total variants in the written corpus, thoughthere is not by much difference, the long forms are more frequentthan the short forms.

Figure 8: Frequency phonological distribution of lexemes endingwith vowel/consonants (left side), and lexemes starting withvowel/consonants (right side)

Consonants Vowels Consonants Vowels0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Long Short

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The phonological analysis, as shown by Figure 8, does notany show phonological influence towards the preference of aparticular set of variants. From both groups of lexemes precedingthe variants, most of them are followed by long forms of thepronouns. This may be due to the high preponderance of long formsin the written corpus. Though more of the lexemes starting withvowels following the pronouns prefer short forms, there is notmuch of a difference.

Conclusion

The syntactical analysis of the data analyzed show that thedifferent forms of the pronouns are used in some aspect similarlyin both the written and the spoken language, differently inothers. Though in both corpora, the plural grammatical personsprefer the long forms, the written corpus shows overallpreference of long forms while the spoken corpus prefers theshort forms. Additionally, the third grammatical person singularforms i, which is the most frequent variant in the, and y whichhas not yet seen much light in studies, but is in great abundancein the spoken corpus are not attested in the written corpus.

The phonological analysis of the corpora shows that theyhave some similarities in that the short forms tend to followlexemes ending with vowels. However, unlike in the writtencorpora where the long forms are predominant, in the spokencorpora, most of the lexemes ending with vowels are followed byshort forms rather than long forms. Additionally, in the spokencorpus, the short forms prefer to be surrounded by vowels than byconsonants. Though the spoken corpus shows a phonologicalinfluence on the choice of short forms versus long forms, asshort forms tend to precede lexemes starting with vowels, theseinfluences are not carried over to the written corpus. Thewritten corpus shows an overall preference of long forms ofpronouns over the short forms.

Based on this analysis, the spoken language does notinfluence the written language. Though the pronouns are used insimilar mannerism in both corpora, short forms of pronouns areused remarkably more frequently in the spoken language than inthe written language, while long forms are overly preferred in


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the written language. Additionally, there are other variants ofthe pronouns attested in the spoken language that are notattested in the written language.

Discussion

Due to certain limitations, such as time to conduct thestudy, restriction in corpus size, and text type, the study couldnot embark a full sociolinguistic analysis of the usage of theseforms. Therefore, a study of a larger amount of data, will bringmore conclusive results on the morpho-phonological influence onthe written language. Additionally, more studies of the languageare necessary to distinguish when the short forms are used in thewritten language versus the long forms. The new variants y,attested in the spoken corpora also needs to have more light shedon it. Maybe the low frequency attested as third grammaticalperson plural is to avoid ambiguity with its usage as thirdperson singular.

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Morpho-phonological Influence on Orthography In Haitian Creole

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