Choose Your Words More Carefully, Mr Rennie

04, Apr 2000
I read with great interest the article by Bukka Rennie entitled "Where 'lime', the concept, came from" (Guardian, Monday, March 20) and found it quite interesting. However, I take serious exception to his remark that "...corruption of words and concepts is typical of T&T."

Webster's New World Dictionary of American English defines corruption as "(1) to spoil; contaminate; rotten (2) deterioration from the normal or standard". By this definition his comment suggests that the people of T&T have taken a perfectly good language and destroyed it. While I am certain that this was not his intention, he has inadvertently become a purveyor of racist interpretation of language development.

Historically, this interpretation has blinded Europeans from making a comparison of language transfers between the past and present languages of ethnic groups.

Rather than acknowledge the ability of a people to create a new version of what is essentially a foreign language, improve upon it and use it to communicate the flavour, spirit and essence of their very being, it is interpreted as corruption, contamination, bastardisation or pigeonisation.

These labels are pejorative terms, loaded culturally against the new version and, therefore, deemed unacceptable by purveyors of the "superior language".

Language is dynamic and reflects culture in motion. Hence, referring to this adaptation of language as corrupt is to ignore the fact that the new version is prejudically defined on the basis of the nature of a political situation of oppression vis-a-vis colonisation or imperialism.

Use of the term "corruption" perpetuates a notion of backwardness and inferiority often associated with oppressed people.

Understand that language could be used as a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation, either way it creates an impact.

In the future, he should choose his words more carefully.

J Michael De Gale,
Toronto, Canada,