THE EDITOPR, Sir:

In any official description of our creole language (patois), we are told that it includes words of African origin. However, I had never been sure which of our words could be so categorised.

Therefore, I was quite thrilled to learn at the Maroon festival (quite a thrilling experience in and of itself actually), from their Ghanaian adviser, that bissy (the kola nut of Jamaican traditional medicine fame), sussumba and ackee were African words.

He also told us that our word for untidy - chaka-chaka - was also African.

Speculated on words

Armed with this immense body of knowledge, and with the dilettante's freedom from professional obligation, I speculated, based on the sound of the word, that senseh (fowl), which in recent times has been used more often in an unflattering way to describe unkempt hair (a favourite reference by my mother for my trendy high-school haircut), was of African origin.

My next candidate was fenke-fenke (pejorative word to describe annoying lack of assertiveness in a person). With a little research, I learned that I was right and that both terms were, indeed, of African origin. The doubling up of the word in those adjectives now makes me wonder whether the tendency in our vernacular to double a word to communicate emphasis might also be African.

We are all familiar with pretty- pretty, big-big, little-little, fool- fool, or that delightful gem, nengeh-nengeh.

In colloquial English, they use consecutive words that rhyme, such as pell-mell, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, higgedly-piggedly, but it is not quite the same.

God annoyed

With my new-found 'skill', I would like to propose that the verb nyam, which means to eat voraciously with no attention to delicacy, is also of African origin.

Its status as a crude version of the English 'eat' might possibly reflect the succumbing of our African ancestors to the propa-ganda that their language was inferior to that of their owners.

On the other hand, to speculate even more adventurously, it might be related to a West African folk tale where a goddess annoyed the god Nyame so much with the noise of her food preparation (she was banging a mortar and pestle) that he left Heaven to escape the noise or quite possibly the nengeh nengeh-ing, we shall never know.

At any rate, given the sound of the word nyam, it is far too tempting to ignore that it might be of African origin.

Welcome feedback

Sir, encouraged by a complete lack of professional egotism, since this is not my profession, I would love feedback from your readers as to whether they agree, or whether they think that assigning the word nyam to an African source is too much of a stretch. Other candidate words, for my feedback, are of course, also welcome!

I am, etc.,

KARIS CHIN-QUEE

kpc11@psu.edu

500 University Drive H166

Hershey, Pa

Via Go-Jamaica