7.1 Preliminaries

Since my initial appraisal of MPP (Drechsel Reference Drechsel, Rickford and Romaine1999), Part II has accumulated a sizable body of linguistic data, notwithstanding limited historical resources and major constraints in methodology. Still, the accumulated data cannot necessarily amount to a complete account of MPP. I have no illusion that there may remain other, possibly better, sources yet to be discovered. However, the currently available information is extensive, detailed, and systematic enough to offer a solid philological foundation of MPP, to permit fairly specific, clear and well-grounded generalizations about its linguistic structure and its uses, as well as to outline future research.

Although philological data for MPP have been rich enough to permit generalizations about its grammar and lexicon, they prove deficient for any long-term variationist analyses. This limitation in resource does not, however, preclude a discussion on the nature and extent of linguistic variation in the Pidgin's historical documentation, to the extent that such is feasible from historical attestations. Even if an all-encompassing account remains out of reach, a limited review of historical attestations for MPP can still offer an outline of the Pidgin's range of variation with some valuable insights. The present chapter, then, includes an informal assessment of the Pidgin's linguistic variations, and addresses the question of when Pidgin English emerged and how it progressively competed with and eventually superseded MPP.

7.2 Grammar

Phonologically, MPP was thoroughly Polynesian and shows an inventory of five basic vowels – i, e, a, o, u, and likely lengthened variants, as is characteristic of Polynesian languages. For consonants, the Pidgin reflected a greater range of variation and included as many as sixteen distinct consonants because of internal diversification within the linguistic subfamily and occasional second-language interferences by speakers of non-Polynesian languages, including intermittent borrowings.

Table 7.1 reveals merely minimal phonological distinctions, with some variants within MPP; it does not recognize other allophonic variations such as between p and f, f and h, k and ‘, or even v and w at both the subphonemic and phonemic levels. The occurrence of voiced bilabial and alveodental stops and the alveodental fricative s remained secondary and is confirmed in incidental European borrowings as in tobako ‘tobacco’ and sabe ‘to know’, anda ‘to go’ and padre ‘priest’, Pranse ‘French people’, and sawe ‘to know’. Usually, speakers of Polynesian languages pronounced these “intrusive” consonants as their closest counterparts /p/, /t/, and /k/ respectively; they also reduced consonant clusters to single consonants, or added epenthetic vowels between consonants or paragogic vowels at the end of words, unless they had earlier learned to articulate a European language. Conversely, Europeans similarly displayed influences from their first languages, as is evident from recordings with an r-coloring or an epenthetic [r] for renditions of low vowels by Herman Melville in particular (see the discussion leading up to footnote 9 in 6.5 above).

Table 7.1 MPP's consonantal system

An explanation is also appropriate as to the inclusion of ŋ, limited primarily to Māori and perhaps Marquesan varieties of MPP, but not distinctive for Hawaiian or Tahitian ones. When, on their third voyage to the Pacific from 1776 to 1779 and on their way to northwestern North America, James Cook and his crew came upon Kaua‘i in the Hawaiian Islands as apparently the first European visitors, his unofficial naturalist William Anderson recorded five words with “ng,” a distinctly velar nasal or ŋ as a variable articulation of n: maŋō ‘shark’, moeŋa ‘mat’, pāpāriŋa ‘cheek’, Taŋaroa god of the sea, and taŋata ‘man’ (see (8) in 4.5). What James Burney (n.d. [Reference Burney1779]: 115), first lieutenant on the Discovery, already portrayed as “a mixture of the Otaheite and Tongitabu [Tongan] Languages,” that is as a mixture of Tahitian and actually Māori rather than Tongan, was a reduced form of Tahitian-Māori. Similar in form and content to Hawaiian equivalents except for the velar nasal, these entries apparently were words from Polynesian languages of the South Pacific that Europeans or Pacific Islander crew members introduced in the Hawaiian Islands by drawing on their earlier experiences with the Māori.

The phonologically most marked and distinctive sound remained the glottal stop (‘) as suggested by reconstitutions from comparative evidence. Its reconstitution is based on thin evidence and remains rooted in part on circular reasoning. Because in most instances Europeans did not recognize or note in writing the glottal stop as a distinctive sound, we can identify it in MPP solely by comparison with modern linguistic data in source languages – only then to claim these comparative data as proof for the glottal stop's occurrence in the Pidgin. Still, this reconstitution remains legitimate on the basis that speakers of Polynesian languages would unintentionally have maintained it in their pronunciation of MPP, even if Europeans and other foreigners altogether failed to recognize or ignored it. Except for the variations of voiced stops as well as the alveodental fricative in European loans, the glottal stop, and the velar nasal, this inventory of major sound distinctions in fact matches what the Italian-born French naturalist-surgeon Paul-Émile Botta (Reference Botta1831: 140–143; 1984: 36–37) already described for Pidgin Hawaiian in his Observations sur les habitants des îles Sandwich in 1828.

Phonotactically, MPP generally exhibited the same fundamental syllable pattern as Polynesian languages: (C)V in combinations of up to four and occasionally even five or six syllables per word, with longer words usually involving reduplications, as already recognized by Herman Melville (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968a [1846]: 72; see also (32) in 6.5) and others. Except for ie and eo, vowel combinations could include disyllabic sequences of any two of the five vowels in Polynesian languages, as is evident, for example, in ‘auhea ‘where’, ‘oia ‘he, she, it’, pauloa ‘all’, pepeiao ‘ear’, taio ‘friend’, and tūtae ‘āuri ‘nonbeliever’. That one or the other possible vowel combination in MPP disyllabic vowel sequences has not appeared in the historical documentation accumulated so far is as much the result of incomplete historical records as of vowel-sequence patterns in particular source languages. Then again, those lexical entries that follow this phonotactic pattern only partially or do not match it at all were obvious non-Polynesian borrowings of a rather small number (for examples, see the listing of borrowings in the discussion of the MPP's lexicon).

MPP's predominant Central East Polynesian vocabulary would suggest a stress pattern comparable to that of its source languages with “stress occurring on every second vowel counting back from the penultimate vowel” (Marck Reference Marck2000: 74). Such a pattern, however, did not necessarily apply to non-Polynesian speakers and ultimately remains difficult to reconstitute for lack of sufficiently reliable indicators in philological records.

Morphologically, MPP displayed frequent reduplication and sporadic triplication of nouns, verbs, adjectives, or other modifiers to indicate mass or plurality, repetition or continuation, or intensity. Already quite common in Polynesian languages, this repetitive morphological process assumed a productive, even innovative function in MPP, as already recognized by Sarah J. Roberts (Reference Roberts and Kouwenberg2003) for six prominent and a few supplementary instances of early Pidgin Hawaiian and as illustrated by fairly extensive historical documentation.

Reduplication in MPP was manifest in the paradigmatic data by John Liddiard Nicholas and Melville in (17) and (32) respectively, but occurred throughout much of the attested lexical record: aniani ‘mirror’ (Botta Reference Botta1831: 141); ‘aupito‘aupito ‘very, very’ (Slade Reference Slade and Denison1844: 40); fe‘efe‘e ‘elephantiasis’ in (32); hanahana ‘to make, to do, to work’ in (19), (21), (29), and (40); hulahula ‘feast’ in (32); ‘i‘i ‘strong’ in (42); ‘ino…(‘i)no ‘very bad’ in (4); itiiti ‘very small, very few, very little’ in (14), (17), (18), and (24); kaikai ‘to eat, food’ in (14), (17), (18), (27), (31), (32), (33), and (40); ka‘ika‘i ‘to lead’ in (27); kaukau ‘to eat, food’ in (19) and (39); kitekite/tiketike ‘to see’ in (17) and (18); lele ‘to fly’ (Botta Reference Botta1831: 141); li‘ili‘i ‘little, small’ in (33) and (40); likelike ‘like (comp.), just as’ in (19); makemake ‘to like, to want’ in (15), (19), and (46); matemate ‘to hurt, to kill; sick, ill’ in (14), (17), and (41); mimi ‘to urinate’ in (19); milamila ∼ milemile ‘to see, to look at’ in (19), and Choris (Reference Choris1812: Section “Ïles Sandwich,” 17); moemoe ‘asleep, to sleep’ in (15), (19), (27), and (33); mokomoko ‘fight, war’ in (19); mumumu (?) ‘to mutter’ in (14); naminami ∼ namunamu ‘to say, to speak, to tell’ in (15) and (19); nānā ‘to see, to look at’ in (27); nohonoho ‘to live, to reside’ in (10); nuinui ‘very large, very great, very much, very many, extremely, very’ in (11), (14), (15), (17), (18), (33), and (40); nuinuinui ‘infinitesimally extensive’ in (32); paepae ‘platform’ in (32); paipai ‘very good’ in (3); palapala ‘to write; document’ in (19) and (21); panipani ‘sexual intercourse’ in (19); patu(patu) ‘to be (repeatedly) struck/killed’ in (1); pauloapauloa ‘very all’ in (27); pipi ‘bead’ in (16) and ‘cattle’ (Botta Reference Botta1831: 141); pīpī ‘to sprinkle’ in (27); poipoi ‘staple food…manufactured from the produce of the breadfruit tree’ in (32) and (40); ponapona ‘joints’ in (14); pulupulu ‘cotton’ (Botta Reference Botta1831: 140); punipuni ‘to lie, to tell lies’ in (26) and Botta (Reference Botta1831: 141); kariri ‘to be angry’ in (17); taitai ‘to carry’ in (16); taŋitaŋi ‘to cry’ in (17); taputapu ‘tabooed, forbidden, sacred’ in (17) and (32); tūfititūfiti ‘to stretch’ in (14); vitiviti/wikiwiki ‘quick, quickly, fast’ in (13) and (19); waiwai ‘to sleep (?)’ in Choris (Reference Choris1812: Section “Iles Sandwich,” 17); Wiwi ‘French people’ in (32); and workiworki ‘work’ in (18).

Reduplication also applied to intermissions and question words: ‘ae, ‘ae ‘Yes, yes’ in (32), ‘aita, ‘aita ‘No, no’ in (35), auē! auē! ‘Alas, alas’ in (33), and pehea? pehea? ‘What? What?’ in (27). Speakers of MPP even reduplicated entire phrases, as evident especially in invitations and commands: Haere mai, haere mai…‘Come in! come in…!’ in (39), Haramai, haramai ‘Welcome, welcome’ in (1), He, pi mai/pi‘i mai…pi mai/pi‘i mai ‘Hey, come here…come here!’ in (41), and ta‘ata ‘ino…ta‘ata ‘ino ‘bad men…bad men’ in (4). The crowning examples are double reduplications in constructions of sequential linking: Itiiti workiworki, itiiti kaikai ‘[If/When] very-little work, [then] very-little food’ and No toki, no toki, no porki, no porki. ‘[If] really no hatchets, [then] really no pork’ in (18). By these attestations, reduplication was a fairly productive, innovative morphological process that in MPP extended even to words and phrases of European origin, but focused primarily on single- or bimoraic words, as already suggested by Roberts (Reference Roberts and Kouwenberg2003: 316) for Pidgin Hawaiian.

Beyond reduplication, MPP exhibited little inflectional machinery compared to even its Polynesian source languages, which already were structurally rather analytic, unlike the synthetic or polysynthetic source languages of other non-European pidgins. Much of the Pidgin's grammatical appraisal therefore must necessarily focus on its lexicon and syntax.

Lexically, MPP, too, was thoroughly Polynesian, as it drew on a large Eastern Polynesian or even wider Polynesian lexical base common to Tahitian, Māori, Marquesan, and Hawaiian. Out of almost 320 entries in the accompanying vocabulary, the Pidgin shares more than 147 phonologically identical or close equivalencies in all four Eastern Polynesian source languages, and 36 more with at least three out of Tahitian, Māori, Marquesan, and Hawaiian. Some 40 entries currently derive from only two source languages, and 91 words have only one source, but include more than 30 foreign, non-Polynesian loans, ethnonyms and place names (see Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014). Better comparative data (including new historical dictionaries) undoubtedly will further lower the number of remaining single or dual equivalencies. Some of these single-source entries may yet prove to be no more than variations of other, more commonly used terms such as Marquesan-derived motaki ‘good’ in place of more common maita‘i.

If the currently accumulated vocabulary is a fairly representative inventory of MPP's lexicon at large, this analysis, although subject to revision with new data becoming available, demonstrates unequivocally that much of the vocabulary was intelligible to Tahitians, Māori, Marquesans, and Hawaiians or at least among three of these groups of Eastern Polynesians as part of the Pidgin's speech community. Ultimately, only a rather small number of words would have remained intelligible solely to two groups or possibly even a single speech community without active second-language learning efforts by members of another group.

In contrast, words of a non-Polynesian origin remained few in MPP: anda ‘to go’ (< Spanish “anda” ‘he/she/it walks/goes’), he ‘hey’ (< French “hé”), kapitan ‘captain’ (< Spanish “capitán”), kaukau ‘to eat, food’ (< Chinese Pidgin English “chow-chow,” if not derived from Hawaiian), mi ‘I’ (< English “me”), mikanele ‘missionary’ (< English), milamila ∼ milemile ‘to see, to look at’ (< Spanish “mirar”), moni ‘money’ (< English), naipa ‘knife’ (< English), no ‘no’ (< English), padre ‘priest’ (< Spanish “padre”), pihi ‘fish’ (< English “fish”), pikinini ‘child, small’ (< Portuguese “pequenino,” Spanish “pequeño,” used in reference to children of color and in a prejudicial, derogatory fashion), pipi ‘beef, cattle’ (< English “beef”), porki ‘pork’ (< English), potato/poteito ‘potato’ (< English “potato” < Spanish “patata”), sabe/sawe ‘to know’ (< Spanish/Portuguese “saber”), tobako ‘tobacco’ (< English), vete ‘away, free’ (< Spanish “vete” ‘[that] he/she bug off’ [subjunctive]), Wiwi ‘French people’ (< reduplicated French “oui” ‘yes’), workiworki ‘work’ (< reduplicated English “work”), and iū (< English “you”). These “loanwords” applied primarily to phenomena foreign to Pacific Islanders; still others served as the ethnonyms and place names of newcomers such as Bikar ‘Bikar (Island)’ (< Marshallese place name), Ferani ‘French people’ (< French “France” [?]), Iuropi ‘Europe, European’ (< English “Europe, European”), Peletane ∼ Peretane (< English “(Great) Britain”), and Pranse ‘French people’ (< French “Français”), or occasionally as Europeans’ names of Pacific localities such as Niu Tīrani ‘New Zealand’ (< English). However, the present list is still proportionally much smaller than the inventory of almost 250 European entries that Terry Crowley (Reference Crowley1993: 156–161) has proposed for South Seas Jargon before 1860, and overlaps with it only for a few entries, significantly: ‘America(n)’, ‘Britain’, ‘French’, ‘missionary’, ’money’, ‘potato’, ‘tobacco’, and ‘work’. The single borrowings above reflect a growing influence by the British and Americans in the early colonial Pacific, but do not yet document their dominance, to emerge only with a concurrent replacement of MPP's lexicon with an expanding English vocabulary during the second half of the nineteenth century (see 7.3 and 7.4 below).

Beyond our recognition of MPP's Eastern Polynesian core or of a numerically minimal number of non-Polynesian borrowings, the available lexicographical data for MPP have so far not sustained earlier claims of any “promiscuous” mixing originally reported by Ross Clark (Reference Clark1977: 31, 36; Reference Clark1979: 33) for its southern variety or South Seas Jargon. With most of the vocabulary originating in a single, well-defined subfamily, MPP remained lexically far less mixed than, for instance, Chinook Jargon (see various online dictionaries with accompanying notes at www.rjholton.com/cj/dictnote.htm, 29 March 2012) or Mobilian Jargon (Drechsel Reference Drechsel1996b), which drew their lexical materials from multiple, even unrelated families of Native American languages. MPP developed a more heterogeneous lexicon only after extended contact with English (see 7.3 and 7.4 below).

At present, any other assessments of the etymological composition of the MPP lexicon do not permit further lexicostatistical inferences and bear few descriptive or methodological-theoretical benefits. For one reason, the available Pidgin's vocabulary does not constitute a cohesive body of lexicographical data comparable to that made of a single speech community at a particular point in time. Instead, they comprise entries from many diverse speech communities over a period of more than a century, and by all indications do not reflect the full range of actual variations that existed in the Pidgin's lexicon at large. Nor are these lexicographical data sufficiently diversified at this time to permit recognition of distinct vocabularies within their larger body, which would then allow us to make comparisons among them for variations and possibly to determine trends in changes. In contrast, modern field recordings and a large historical vocabulary of Mobilian Jargon as compared to other historical data permitted the demonstration of temporal-spatial variations in its lexicon (see Drechsel Reference Drechsel1996b; Reference Drechsel1997: 34–51). At this time, we cannot even consider the current set of some 320 MPP entries (Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014) as a reliable measure of its true size. Rather, we should probably expect the size of this lexicon to grow with the reconstitution of additional historical attestations, perhaps as much as four times if the vocabulary of other non-European pidgins lends any comparable measure.

The available vocabulary of MPP (Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014), however, exhibits considerable diversity in its semantic domains, among which we can distinguish at least the following:

1. early colonial contact by Europeans and Americans in the eastern Pacific, including the delineation of ethnic boundaries between Pacific Islanders and newcomers and differences in their identity

2. negotiation, trade, and occasional hostilities between colonists and eastern Polynesians

3. engagement by Pacific Islanders on European and American ships as interpreters, crew members, and passengers

4. interactions by foreign beachcombers with Pacific Islanders as go-betweens and negotiators; and

5. early attempts by Europeans and Americans at converting eastern Polynesians to Christianity.

While rather arbitrary, these semantic fields confirm the Pidgin's multiple usages and manifold sociolinguistic contexts. They are consistent with the available extralinguistic sociohistorical evidence (see Chapter 8) except that, to date, the accompanying vocabulary has not yet included reconstituted entries for ‘fur’/‘hide’, ‘sandalwood’, ‘trepang’/‘sea cucumber/slug’, ‘trade’, or ‘whale’. What might first appear as a shortage in the Pidgin's lexicon, however, need not suggest a deficiency in the historical record; it is only that the accompanying vocabulary does not constitute a fully representative lexical inventory. Early observers could have omitted these words for no other reason than mere historical accident. To expand their vocabulary, Pidgin speakers simply drew on their first languages such as Hawaiian-derived hulu ‘feather, quill, plumage’ or its reduplication, huluhulu, to refer to even more “exotic” items such as ‘fur’ (Pukui and Elbert Reference Pukui and Elbert1986: 89–90).

Notwithstanding its incomplete nature, the accompanying vocabulary of MPP is sufficiently rich to permit the identification of several grammatical categories:

1. verbs, adjectives (alternatively interpretable as stative verbs), and adverbs

2. nouns, including compounds in reference to new phenomena in early colonial encounters, a few non-Polynesian loanwords, and the occasional use of the definite article te or ke/ka, not limited to locative phrases, as maintained by Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a: 6, fn. 4) for Pidgin Hawaiian

3. quantifiers such as iti ‘small, little, few’, itiiti ‘very small, very little, very few’, karua/katoa ‘all, both’, li‘ili‘i ‘little, small’, nui ‘big, much, many, very’, nuinui ‘very large, very great; very much, very many’, and nuinuinui ‘infinitesimally extensive’

4. personal pronouns such as vau ∼ wau ‘I’, ‘oe ∼ koe ‘you’, ‘oia ala ‘he/she/it there’, and ia ‘him’, plus corresponding possessive pronouns

5. tense-aspect markers of mamua as a past-tense adverb and mamuli or mahope as future-tense adverbs

6. locatives such as i ‘to’, ki ‘on, with’, mai ‘here, towards the speaker, hither’, maloko ‘within’ as well as other grammatical particles such as na ‘for’, and nō ‘for, of’

7. the negative ‘aima ∼ ‘aina, ‘aipa, and ‘aita, ‘a‘ole and kāore

8. question words such as ‘auhea ‘Where?’, ma hea ‘Where? Which way?’, and pehea ‘What?’

9. various interjections

10. numerous ethnonyms and place names.

What remains missing from the above list, thus, no more reflects MPP’s intrinsic lexical shortcomings than it echoes the piecemeal documentation of the Pidgin.

Syntactically, MPP displayed Pacific roots like its phonology, morphology, and lexicon, but did so most visibly at the level of phrases rather than that of sentences. By this measure, we should consider both shorter and longer constructions, although two-word phrases are difficult to identify in the Pidgin because of little or no structural contrast with corresponding vernacular forms, which already are morphologically quite transparent.

Short, two-word expressions in MPP as part of longer texts or extralinguistic cues comprised a verb and some modifier, as was the case for invitations and commands. Alternatively, two-word phrases consisted of a noun plus a modifier such as a verb or predicate. What to speakers of a Polynesian language was a sequence of a noun, and a stative verb could then emerge as a noun and a predicate with a zero copula to Europeans, eventually to pass as a noun and an adjective in postnominal position, which Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a: 6) already described as “postnominal position of adjectives” and “zero-marked clause embedding” or “clausal juxtaposition” for Pidgin Hawaiian. MPP also exhibited the reverse order of a modifier and a noun, which speakers of Polynesian languages interpreted as sequences of stative verbs and nouns following the verb-initial word-order patterns of their languages, but which to Europeans would come across as a sequence of a modifier and modified part – some instances are kore ‘useless’ or pai ana ‘good’ plus a noun in (14), phrases with nuinui ‘very large, very great, very much, very many, extremely, very’ and iti ‘small, little, few’ or itiiti ‘very small, very little, very few’ as prenominal modifiers in (17), (18), and (31) above (see 5.3 and 6.4). Perhaps the most illustrative example of this pattern is the already cited example by Nicholas in New Zealand of 1814 or 1815 in (18):

The same flip-flop derivational analysis applies to nominal compounds with a modifier in initial position. It furthermore extends to what a speaker of a Polynesian language would understand as a sequence of a stative verb plus a multifunctional word operating as either noun or verb and what an English speaker would interpret as an infinitive construction in English, as illustrated by two examples from (21) and (29) in 5.5 and 6.2:

Characteristically, initial modifiers other than perhaps kore demonstrated frequent use, which, however, did not preclude alternative, quite frequent postnominal occurrences. The distributional pattern of prenominal and postnominal modifiers in MPP brings to mind the use of prenominal bon or bonne ‘good’ in French in contrast to other adjectives in postnominal position, which in reality serves as no more than a superficial, partial structural analogy for comparison and does not suggest any superstrate influence from French in the Pidgin.

The first examples exhibiting any true internal hierarchies of grammar and requiring no fewer than three constituents appeared in Sydney Parkinson's recording of mortally ill Taiata, Tupai‘a's adolescent servant, in Batavia as early as 1770. They also appeared in Tahitian-inspired historical records by Marion du Fresne's lieutenants Jean Roux, Paul Chevillard de Montesson, and Julien Crozet among Māori in New Zealand in 1772. Rather than exhibiting the characteristic VSO word order of Polynesian languages, these constructions already reveal an unmistakable SVO pattern, as is evident from the earliest records of currently known MPP in (2) and (3) above (see 4.2 and 4.3):

The same word-order pattern is evident in several constructions attested later in MPP's history, as illustrated throughout Part II:

Other than a thoroughly analytic pattern, SVO appears to be more typical of MPP than any other grammatical feature.

The cooccurrence of both prenominal and postnominal modifiers in MPP as well as their different interpretations by speakers of Polynesian and European languages evidently did not create a major communicative problem. Their distinct underlying word-order patterns – VSO versus SVO respectively – and the grammatical differences in the functions of the Polynesian stative verbs and those of European predicates or adjectives as their closest grammatical counterparts permitted Polynesians and Europeans to arrive at similar interpretations in MPP, while drawing on the different grammars of their first languages. What speakers of Polynesian languages interpreted as the sequence of a stative verb and a noun would then emerge as an adjective preceding a noun to Europeans; conversely, what speakers of a Polynesian language construed as the sequence of a noun and a stative verb transpired as a noun and an adjective or predicate with a zero copula to Europeans. Paradoxically, grammatical differences between Polynesian and European languages converged superficially in MPP without causing its speakers much if any mutual loss in meaning or comprehension. This analysis reflects in part what Michael Silverstein (Reference Silverstein1972) proposed for Chinook Jargon in arguing that different underlying grammatical patterns of the speakers’ first languages were associated with the Pidgin's surface structure. However, unlike grammatical variations among the first languages of Chinook Jargon speakers, VSO and SVO were already within the range of experience of speakers of Austronesian languages (Keesing Reference Keesing1988: 77–132). The occurrence of SVO in MPP thus did not depend on external input such as contact with European visitors except as a sociolinguistic trigger. Significantly, SVO in MPP was not exclusive to speakers of European languages, but prevailed also among Polynesians, including Tahitians, Māori, and Hawaiians. This fact precludes any rationalization in terms of a European superstrate, specifically English word order as suggested by Clark (Reference Clark1977: 30; Reference Clark1979: 26). Instead, it favors a universalist explanation, as already envisioned by George Forster with his universal grammar, although in a fashion that he did not predict.

Nonetheless, the historical record displays occasional exceptions to the SVO word-order pattern. A few appear fortuitous and difficult to explain for lack of any obvious models (such as the second example by Captain Esteban José Martínez in (9) with the apparent order of SOV or the second example by Captain Urey Lisiansky with the apparent sentence pattern of (V)OS in (12) above (see 4.6 and 4.8)). One or the other example reflects superstrate influences from English, as was apparently the case with Mr. Nicholas nuinui haŋareka ‘Mr. Nicholas fools/jokes very much’ in (18). Still others, by all indications, reveal clearly identifiable substratum influences from Polynesian languages and were hypercorrections towards these languages as a result of secondary interference, as was evidently the case with data by Archibald Campbell in 1809 in (15), Jacobus Boelen in 1828 in (26), and John Slade in 1830 in (27). A few single examples lack a manifest or previously expressed subject, as evident in recordings by Lisiansky in (12), by Campbell in (15), by Slade in (27), possibly by Melville for a “Wh”-question in (37), and by Herbert H. Gowen in (45) and (46). Such zero-subject cases, however, raise fundamental questions of grammatical analysis that must go unanswered because of insufficient historical information. In the end, most of these variable instances did not appear until the early nineteenth century, that is at least two decades after MPP had already stabilized as a pidgin, and thus give a clear indication for depidginization rather than the original variation of MPP. Significantly, the examples by Campbell, Boelen, and Slade also constitute greater problems for etymological, semantic, and syntactic analysis than regular Pidgin data inasmuch as they frequently confound standards of two or more languages and have made identifications all the more problematic.

Like a modifier leading its affected part, negation in MPP usually preceded the word or phrase that it negated. Following the Polynesian convention, negatives occurred in sentence-initial position, as already observed for the Pidgin Hawaiian negative ‘a‘ole in preverbal position (Roberts Reference Roberts1995a: 7). Whereas many attestations for MPP also demonstrated this pattern, a few other constructions displayed negation in a preverbal position as consistently confirmed by various constructions in Part II:

The occurrence of preverbal negation closer to the beginning and end of the Pidgin's attested history might raise the question of whether this syntactic feature was the result of the Pidgin's development and decline. However, speakers of the Pidgin applied negation not only to entire phrases or sentences but also to single nouns, adjectives, and verbs within larger constructions, just as they extended its use productively to the construction of antonyms, of which the most widely used one probably was ‘a‘ole maita‘i and its variations for ‘not good, bad’ (see, e.g., (41) and (45) in 6.6 and 6.12). The range and diversity of negation in the Pidgin is also evident from the miscellaneous terms in use for ‘no’ or ‘not’: Tahitian-derived ‘aima ∼ ‘aina, ‘aipa, and ‘aita, Māori-derived kāore and Hawaiian-derived ‘a‘ole, interspersed by single attestations of Hawaiian- or Marshallese-derived ‘emo/emo, and English “no” (Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014).

In comparison, the structure of questions in MPP remains more obscure. On the one hand, the exemplary set of uniform questions by the British fur trader James Colnett to his Tahitian server-sailor Matatore in (10) suggests no fundamental structural differences from statements for questions that demand a positive or negative answer. The same pattern emerges – or at least finds no contradiction – in other reliable examples of documented yes–no questions of MPP, foremost:

This pattern is most obvious for answers with structurally corresponding, juxtaposed questions for which the final question mark by the recorder remains the only clue for any difference and suggests a distinct intonation, as illustrated by the English missionaries Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet in (23) in 5.6. Because early observers did not offer further information on modulation, any such differences in intonation, however, remain inaccessibly lost for reconstitution.

If we also consider less certain or even dubious instances (such as the second example by Lisiansky in (12) or instances by Campbell, Boelen, and Slade in (15), (26), and (27) in Chapter 5), we would find considerable variations in word order for questions just as for statements without any predictable order. In (38) of 6.5, Melville, too, offered an example that with an inverse copular order does not match the standard word-order pattern of questions proposed here, but that in this case apparently reflected superstrate interference from English.

For so-called “Wh”-questions, the evidence has remained even scantier. Melville provided a single reliable instance in (37):

This example did not include any subject, unless one were to recognize Tomo ‘Tom’ as such. In (42) of 6.6, the French colonial official Max Radiguet provided two other examples from the Marquesas:

These few instances suggest the following word order: “Wh” word + Verb or a zero copula + Subject. If we are again to allow for problematic instances such as “Heire awaya” ‘Where is she bound to?’ (Campbell Reference Campbell1816: 254) or Hele ‘auhea ‘Goes where?’, any such regularity would seem lost and raises the question of whether Campbell projected VSO of Polynesian languages onto “Wh”-questions.

Beyond zero-marked clause embeddings, MPP did not ordinarily produce complex constructions; but Pidgin speakers easily made up for this structural deficiency by sequential linking or parataxis, that is by coordinating two phrases or sentences to express a close semantic relationship such as a sequence of action, a reason, a comparison, a condition or time, and a clarification:

1. a sequence of action:

1. causation:

1. comparison, contrast, and exception by juxtaposition (conjoined comparative):

1. condition or time:

1. a reason or clarification:

Most examples of sequential linking evidently expressed causative relationships, as documented primarily by John Savage in (14) in 4.9 and Melville in (35) and (40) in 6.5. However, several instances conveyed simple sequences of action without clear causative implications; many others suggest comparative, contrastive-exceptional, and conditional or temporal relations. Significantly, the first occurrences of sequential linking appeared already during Cook's first and second voyages to the Pacific in the late 1760s and early 1770s (see (1), (4), and (5) in 4.2 and 4.4); but the crowning instance remains a case of double, comparative-conditional sequential linking in the recent example of (45) in 6.12:

Among cases of sequential linking, comparisons by juxtaposition or so-called conjoined comparatives enjoy a special position in that, as Albert J. Schütz (personal communication, 20 August 2012) has reminded me, they reflect grammatical characteristics of many languages of the South Pacific, including Māori and Samoan (Stassen Reference Stassen, Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil and Comrie2005).

There remain only a few, single instances interpretable as true subordinate constructions: Nicholas’ last example, Mi tiketike/kitekite…taŋata tāhae ‘I saw [that]…[the] man steals’ in (18) in 5.3 and Slade's fifth example, Keoki Malina ‘ōlelo iū mālama na po‘e molulo ‘George Marin says [that] you keep some hog for people’ in (27) in 5.11. Nicholas presented his attestations with greater English influences than was apparently warranted (see the discussion following (18) in 5.3). Moreover, Slade's syntactic data prove inconsistent with other major contemporaneous attestations of the Pidgin (see the discussion following (27) in 5.11). Neither set of examples would then count as part of a representative data set for MPP, a fact that raises further questions about the accuracy of either source. If true grammatical subordination occurred in the Pidgin, it did so most sparingly.

Ultimately, the historical documentation for MPP does not yield any generalizations about longer, cohesive discourse. This limitation does not reflect on the structure of the Pidgin per se, but rather is an indication of the fragmentary nature of the Pidgin's recordings, which do not include any continuous, extended texts.

7.3 Linguistic variation

The preceding discussion has already left various hints for linguistic variation, whose extent and nature remains a major concern for any description and analysis of MPP – to the degree that we can determine it from the available historical documentation. Were we to follow the macrolinguistic perspective of Johann Reinhold Forster (Reference Forster, Thomas, Guest and Dettelbach1996 [1778]: 249), official naturalist on Cook's second voyage to the Pacific, “Tahitian” or MPP exhibited little variation; but his son George already recognized that Māori spoke a more guttural variety with a greater harshness, whence they had some difficulty in understanding the European newcomers speaking “Tahitian” (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 88, 120, 176). Initial reviews of historical attestations would also suggest but a limited range of linguistic variations in MPP; yet a closer examination reveals bits and pieces that actually reflect a broader range at work. Repeated reports of Pacific Islanders adjusting their speech to that of Europeans and even adopting their mistakes (Burney n.d. [Reference Burney1779]: 102; Cook Reference Cook1784: II 250) indeed indicate a latitude for grammatical variation beyond expectation.

At a phonological level, many variations in MPP simply reflected the linguistic differences of the speakers’ first languages, as was especially the case for words of Polynesian origin:

1. t ∼ k: matapō ∼ makapō ‘blind’; mate ∼ make ‘dead, to die, to kill’; matau ∼ makau ‘fishhook’; maita‘i ∼ maika‘i ‘good’; ‘aitola ∼ ‘aikola ‘indeed’; lite ∼ likelike ‘like (comparative), just as’; taŋata ∼ tanata ∼ kanaka ‘person, people, native person, native people’; motu ∼ moku ‘ship’; tapa ∼ kapa ‘tapa’; and talo ∼ kalo ‘taro’

2. k ∼ ‘: kino ∼ ‘ino ‘bad, immoral’; kaikai ∼ ‘ai ‘to eat, food’; puaka ∼ pua‘a ‘pig, hog’; and koe ∼ ‘oe ‘you’

3. f ∼ h: fare ∼ hale ‘house’

4. n ∼ ŋ: taŋata ∼ tanata ‘person, people, native person, native people’

5. l ∼ r: ali‘i ∼ ari‘i ‘chief’; aloha ∼ ‘arofa greeting; and fare ∼ hale ‘house’

6. v ∼ w: vau ∼ wau ‘I’; possibly vitiviti ∼ witiwiti ‘quick, quickly, fast’; and vai ∼ wai ‘water’ (see Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014).

William H. Wilson (personal communication, 29 April 2012) considers the common occurrence of t in the MPP variety of the Hawaiian Islands (as in maita‘i ‘good’ and mate ‘dead, killed, sick, ill; sickness, illness; to kill, to die, to beat’) or even in Polynesian words in subsequent Hawai‘i Creole English (as in tapa and ti leaf) as a linguistic reflection of the early influence of the Tahitian language. Other alterations such as the voiced counterparts of voiceless bilabial and alveodental stops and the occasional appearance of the alveodental fricative s indicated a distinctive if minimal influence of European borrowings. Speakers of Polynesian languages still pronounced any “intrusive” consonants as their closest counterparts of /p/, /t/, and /k/ respectively, and regularly inserted epenthetic vowels to break up consonant clusters, unless they had earlier learned the phonological distinctions of a European language. Conversely, Europeans and other foreigners expectedly exhibited a “coloring” from their own languages in their articulations of MPP.

Historical documents give incidental indications for other phonological and morphophonological variations. Phonologically most interesting is the velar nasal ŋ in five words, some with alveodental variants, which Anderson and Burney recorded on Kaua‘i, Hawaiian Islands, on Cook's third voyage to the Pacific in the late 1770s and which strongly suggest a Māori provenance for these words rather than a Hawaiian-derived vocabulary (see (8) in 4.5). For 1812 to 1814, David Porter then again treated Pidgin verbs and nouns following English grammar by adding English “s”-endings for the third-person singular present-tense verbal and plural nominal inflections in “Opotee, ti ties, peepees, &c.” ‘Porter presents beads, &c.’, reconstituted above as Opoti taitai pipi ‘Porter carries beads’ instead of Opoti taitais pipis (see (16) in 5.2). Porter's “s”-endings appear to be singular cases of English hypercorrections, possibly inspired by the structural parallels in the word order of MPP and English and excluded from the reconstitution in (16). In 1828, the Italian-born French naturalist-surgeon Botta already confirmed the stops k and t, the bilabials p and f as well as v and w, and the liquids l and r as variable sounds, and also noticed variable articulations for h (Botta Reference Botta1831: 140–141; Botta in Knowlton Reference Knowlton1984: 30). Phonologically most interesting remains Herman Melville's r-coloring of low central vowels in Polynesian words where there was none in the speech by Pacific Islanders, as is evident in “arva” for ‘ava ‘kava’, “Arware” for ‘Auhea ‘where’, “Happar” for Hapa‘a ‘Hapa‘a people’, “mortarkee” for motaki ‘good’, and “puarkee” for puaka ‘pig’ among numerous other instances, in fact in almost all of his examples (see (33) through (40) except (38) in 6.5). Such r-coloring apparently characterized the MPP speech of those who spoke English as their first language. It even applied to speakers of non-rhotic English dialects originating either from New York or New England (as Melville did), and probably extended to speakers of r-less dialects in England (such as James Burney, first lieutenant on Cook's third voyage to the Pacific, and the whaler Robert Jarman; see (8) and (28) in 4.5 and 5.12). These English speakers apparently perceived words with a low central vowel or even diphthongs beginning with a low central vowel as equivalent to a low central vowel plus an “r,” as observed in hypercorrections by modern speakers of non-rhotic English dialects with their characteristic broad Boston-like “a” (see Labov Reference Labov1972b).

Lexically, MPP likewise exhibited some variations, as is already evident from multiple historical instances of lexical variation and replacement:

1. five words of evidently Māori origin in (8), as indicated by their distinctive velar nasal in the transcriptions by Anderson and Burney on Kaua‘i, Hawaiian Islands, in 1778 (see 4.5)

2. Spanish-derived anda ‘go[es]’, kapitan ‘captain’, padre ‘priest’, and vete ‘away, free’, plus Tahitian-derived teni noni/tini noni ‘small chief’ as an apparent synonym of kapitan in (9) and (10), as documented as part of the Nootka Sound Controversy in Mexico in 1789 and 1790 (see 4.6)

3. a description of great semantic elasticity for the lexicon, including considerable variations in the interpretation of words in terms of both their meanings and grammatical functions, as offered by Porter (Reference Porter1822: II.45–46) for the Marquesas between 1812 and 1814 (see 5.2)

4. a Māori-colored variety as recorded by the British military surgeon Savage of Moehanga in 1805 (see (14) in 4.9) and by Nicholas in 1814 and 1815 (see (17) and (18) in 5.3)

5. the attestation of Spanish-derived milemile ∼ milamila (< Spanish mirar ‘to see, to look at’) and Portuguese-derived pikinini ‘child, small’ (< Portuguese pequenino ‘child’) by Adelbert von Chamisso in (19), with pikinini repeatedly confirmed in various other sources of the period (see 5.4)

6. a Marquesan- or Māori-derived variety of koti ‘to cut’ in place of its Tahitian counterpart ‘oti in (25), as recorded by Jules S. C. Dumont d’Urville in Tahiti in the mid-1820s (see 5.8)

7. examples by the American seaman-clerk John Slade with a few words of East Uvean origin such as ‘aliki ‘chief’, ‘alofa ‘greeting’, and koe ‘you’ and the single English loan iū ‘you’ in (27), when sailing to ‘Uvea Island and Fiji in 1830 (see 5.11)

8. a mixed jargon of Marquesan, Spanish, and English on Hiva ‘Oa, Marquesas, in 1838, as reported by the French explorer Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1841–1846: III.225; see 6.3)

9. an apparently Hawaiianized vocabulary of MPP in Melville's semi-autobiographical novels of the Pacific Typee and Omoo, depicting the life of a beachcomber on Nuku Hiva (Marquesas) and the Society Islands respectively and suggesting that he learned the Pidgin on board from a Hawaiian or a crew member speaking Pidgin Hawaiian or possibly even on the Hawaiian Islands after his visit to the South Pacific (see (32) through (40) in 6.5)

10. the concurrent use of the synonyms maita‘i ‘good’ (< Eastern Polynesian) and motaki ‘good’ (< Marquesan) in (41), as documented by Max Radiguet for the Marquesas Islands from 1842 to 1845 (see 6.6).

A comprehensive account of MPP would unquestionably demonstrate additional instances of regular lexical variation and replacement.

A better assessment of MPP's lexical variations emerges from a listing of synonyms: mahope ∼ muli ‘afterwards’, future marker; kariri ∼ ‘iriā ‘angry’; aku ∼ vete ‘away’; ‘ino ∼ (ka)kino ∼ hewa ‘bad’; pipi ∼ poe ‘bead’; ali‘i te motu (?) ∼ kapitan ‘captain’; ari‘i ∼ ali‘i ∼ ‘aliki ∼ haka‘iki ∼ pēhi ∼ raŋatira ‘chief’; haere mai ∼ pi mai ∼ pi‘i mai ‘to come’; ‘ai ∼ kaikai ∼ kaukau ‘to eat’; kaua ∼ mokomoko ‘fight, war’; ika ∼ pihi ‘fish’; ‘ai ∼ kaikai ∼ kaukau ∼ mā‘a ‘food’; na ∼ nō ‘for’; Pranse ∼ Ferani ∼ Wiwi ‘French people’; anda ∼ haere ∼ hele ‘to go’; maita‘i ∼ maika‘i ∼ motaki ∼ (ka)pai ∼ pai ana ‘good’; ‘oia ∼ ‘oia ala ‘he, she, it’; inei ∼ mai ‘here’; fare ∼ hale ‘house’; mi ∼ vau ∼ wau ‘I’; ‘aitola/‘aikola ∼ nō ‘indeed’; ‘ite ∼ sabe/sawe ‘to know’; lite ∼ likelike ∼ like pū ‘like (comparative), just as’; ‘aima ∼ ‘aina ∼ ‘aipa ∼ ‘aita ∼ ‘a‘ole ∼ no ‘no’; ‘aima ∼ ‘aina ∼ ‘aipa ∼ ‘aita ∼ ‘a‘ole ∼ emo/‘emo (?) ∼ kāore ‘not’; ‘aita maita‘i ∼ ‘a‘ole maita‘i ∼ ‘a‘ole maika‘i ∼ ‘a‘ole motaki ‘not good’; momi ∼ poe ‘pearl’; po‘e ∼ ta‘ata ∼ tanata ∼ kanaka ‘people’; manu ∼ mea ∼ taŋata ‘person’; molulo ∼ pua‘a ∼ puaka ‘pig, hog’; padre ∼ tahuna ‘priest’; ‘ōlelo ∼ naminami/namunamu ‘to say, to speak’; ‘ite ∼ kitekite/tiketike ∼ milamila ∼ milemile ∼ nānā ‘to see’; kaipuke ∼ motu ∼ moku ∼ pahī ‘ship’; moe(moe) ∼ waiwai (?) ‘to sleep’; (i)ti ∼ li‘ili‘i ∼ pikini ‘small’; haole ∼ taŋata kē ‘stranger, foreigner’; koko ∼ kūmara ‘sweet potato’; lawe ∼ pi mai ∼ pi‘i mai ‘to take’; moheu ∼ taŋata tāhae ‘thief’; loa ∼ nui ∼ nuinui ‘very’; ‘auhea ∼ ma hea ‘where’; haole ∼ pākehā ‘white man’; hanahana ∼ workiworki ‘to work’; and iū ∼ ‘oe ∼ koe ‘you’ (see Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014).

These synonymous alternations apply primarily (if not exclusively) to widely used key vocabulary and reflect unmarked–marked distinctions, as illustrated most clearly by such basic forms as ‘ino ‘bad’, ari‘i ∼ ali‘i ∼ ‘aliki ‘chief’, pi mai ∼ pi‘i mai ‘to come, to take’, kaikai ‘to eat; food’, haere ‘to go’, maita‘i ‘good’, pua‘a ∼ puaka ‘pig, hog’, motu ∼ noku ‘ship’, nui ‘big, much, many, very’, hanahana ‘to work’, ‘oe ∼ koe ‘you’ and their socio-linguistically or culturally marked variants. If unmarked maita‘i ‘good’ (< Eastern Polynesian) was the area-wide modifier to express positive qualities, the use of motaki ‘good’ (< Marquesan) marked Marquesan identity with a limited distribution and a clearly indexical function, as evident most clearly from Radiguet's concurrent attestation of both modifiers next to each other in (41). Counter to expectations, several European synonyms, other than the rather dubious instance of iū ‘you’ by Slade in (27), were not recent historical attestations. This finding excludes these samples from any consideration of MPP's recent relexification from European languages. Such synonymous lexical variation in the Pidgin was therefore perfectly within acceptable limits, for its speakers regularly drew on their own languages as primary resources such that a speaker of Tahitian used a variety with a more distinct Tahitian lexicon than a Māori, Marquesan, or Hawaiian would, and vice versa.

On the other hand, the historical record occasionally reveals the reverse phenomenon of similar forms with otherwise different etymologies, although by all indications they occurred less often. According to Chamisso (Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 228), his Micronesian travel companion Kadu, a resident of Ratak in the Marshall Islands and originally a native of Woleai Atoll in the Western Carolines, reportedly said “Emo Bigar!” ‘Kein Bigar!’, reconstitutable as Emo Bikar or ‘Emo Bikar! ‘Not/Absent Bikar [name of one of the Marshall Islands]’. In this case, emo could derive from the Marshallese negative marker meaning ‘forbidden’, and possibly from the Hawaiian word for ‘waiting, delay; to wait, to delay’ (see (20) in 5.4). Irrespective of what interpretation the speakers and the audience chose, they would still have arrived at similar, convergent interpretations of Kadu's message.

Syntactically, MPP exhibited sentence patterns occasionally at variance or outright incompatible with what evidently was its predominant SVO word order. In 1789, the Spanish captain Martínez thus quoted the Tahitian Matatore as having uttered one sentence in (9) with the SOV word order, an obvious exception in need of some explanation (see 4.6). This variation is, perhaps, best understood in terms of interference from Latin, which served as a model to the Franciscan custodians of Matatore in their studies of Native American and other exotic languages and which they apparently applied in recording Matatore's samples. In contrast, Lisiansky, commander of the Neva on the Krusenstern expedition from 1803 through 1806, documented, for the Hawaiian Islands, not only a characteristic sample with SVO order in (13), but also several instances without much of an obvious word order in (12), which may simply reflect the first stages of second-language learning. For 1809 to 1810, Campbell reported constructions most of which exhibited a variable word order with a clear preference for verb-initial constructions at large or a VSO pattern following, in particular, the grammars of Polynesian languages, but also revealed indications for apparently fossilized versions of a singular article and aspect marker (see (15) in 5.1). However, there remain serious doubts about Campbell's “Dialogues” as a representative historical document of MPP; rather, they reflect data by a former MPP speaker who had hypercorrected his data toward Hawaiian in a second-language learning process of vernacular Hawaiian as judged by the complexity of some of his constructions (including subordination) rather than standards of Pidgin Hawaiian. For 1814 and 1815, Nicholas reported an instance of MPP with the adverb occurring between the subject and verb, that is “Mr. Nicholas nuee nuee henerecka” for Mr. Nicholas nuinui haŋareka ‘Mr. Nicholas fools/jokes very much’. In that example, nuinui apparently functioned as an intrusive adverb similarly to English adverbs, and perhaps reflects either interference from Nicholas’ first language or the influence from English at large as indicated by other English loans (see (18) in 5.3).

Similarly to Campbell, Boelen, captain of a Dutch maritime and commercial exploration of the eastern Pacific, reported in 1828 multiple examples of MPP with a distinctly verb-initial pattern, including three instances with a word order of VSO characteristic of Polynesian vernaculars (see (26) in 5.9). In 1830, the American seaman-clerk Slade likewise documented a set of MPP expressions most of which followed the verb-initial pattern of Polynesian languages. Only a few of his sentences exhibit a word order of subject-verb, displaying the grammatical standards of either MPP or English (see (27) in 5.11). Like Campbell's highly questionable attestations, Slade's recordings are not beyond doubt; but Boelen's contemporary documents of the Pidgin do not reveal any unusual inconsistencies in their linguistic recordings. Were we still to accept Campbell's and Slade's records based on Boelen's, they do not permit an explanation in terms of a pre-pidgin jargon, considering that the Pidgin already had a history of some sixty years or so and of half a century in the Hawaiian Islands. These sociolinguistic circumstances permit only one reasonable explanation: Campbell, Boelen, and Slade recorded some speakers of Hawaiian at an early stage of learning MPP or perhaps a foreigner who had already acquired a better understanding of Hawaiian than Pidgin speakers (such as a missionary). Either type of speaker would have hypercorrected the Pidgin grammar to the standards of the vernacular. Such comparatively recent word-order variations therefore indicate second-language interference that occurred several decades after pidginization; they were historically irrelevant to the development of MPP in that it did not depend on their continued occurrence. In short, Cambell's, Boelen's, and Slade's data instead describe the reversal of pidginization, namely, depidginization. Ignoring the attestations by Campbell, Boelen, and Slade as part of MPP per se, a long-term, regional analysis, then, presents MPP as a fairly stable Polynesian-based pidgin.

This assessment agrees with the earlier and latest suggestions by Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a, Reference Roberts1995b, Reference Burney2013) of a rather stable Hawaiian Pidgin, but fundamentally disagrees with her recent arguments for a highly variable Hawaiian Jargon until the 1890s (Roberts Reference Roberts and Kouwenberg2003: 307–309; Reference Roberts2005: 51–128). In particular, Roberts (Reference Roberts2005: 112) reports a greater range in word-order variation between SVO and VSO and in the occurrence of particular grammatical particles. Neither grammatical feature, however, constitutes a safe and sound argument for MPP at large. Whereas we can simply associate much of the later documented VSO word order variant with depidginization, attestations of variations in individual particles neither appear sufficiently rich to reveal long-term developments or trends for the entire century or longer, nor even constitute convincing primary evidence for systemic variation. At this time, it is not even evident that Pidgin speakers recognized most of these particles as grammatically significant. However, much of the discussion on variation in Pidgin Hawaiian has remained short of historical depth. Significantly, Roberts has not acknowledged the service by Hawaiian or other Polynesian sailors on European or American ships since the late eighteenth century beyond an incidental reference to the maritime fur trade; nor does she recognize any South Pacific origins of Pidgin Hawaiian, as I have argued here. Much less does she explain her changes in interpretation from a rather stable pidgin to a highly variable jargon and back.

7.4 Maritime Polynesian Pidgin and Pidgin English

The subject of linguistic variation in MPP inadvertently raises the question of competing Pidgin English or English, its emergence in the Pacific, and its impact on MPP. When and how did MPP come under the influence of the English language, whether in reduced or standard form? In disagreement with her own negative findings about Pidgin English (see Roberts Reference Roberts1995a: 46), Roberts has recently accepted evidence for Pidgin English or, rather, Jargon English. She believes that Hawaiian Jargon reflected but a small number of horizontalinteractions among non-native speakers before 1876, while Hawaiian or English was the primary medium between Hawaiians and Europeans or Americans in vertical relationships (Roberts Reference Roberts2005: 107).

Roberts’ model, however, does not hold up at closer inspection, in light of the historical evidence. The distinction between horizontal and vertical interactions raises serious doubts about its applicability to the sociolinguistics of the Hawaiian Islands in any simplistic or reduced form through much of the nineteenth century, for the simple reason that diverse engagements over the decades rendered native–newcomer relationships sociologically more complex in the colonial Hawaiian Islands (see Thomas Reference Thomas2010) than reducible to horizontal and vertical interactions. Surprisingly, Roberts did not even take into consideration questions of stereotypical renditions, Europhone–Europhile hypercorrections, or early observers’ poetic license such as the use of Pidgin English as a literary medium. Had she done so, Pidgin English would lose some of its historical significance in favor of Pidgin Hawaiian or MPP. Analogous arguments can be made for other parts of the eastern Pacific.

On Cook's first visit to the Pacific, Parkinson (Reference Parkinson1773: 182, fn.) reported “great progress in the English tongue” by his two on-board Tahitian companions, Tupai‘a and especially his adolescent servant, Taiata, who on his deathbed spoke MPP to the exclusion of English (see (2) in 4.2). On his second voyage to the Pacific, Cook reported an example of MPP that apparently included one instance of the negative “no,” which is probably a short form of Pidgin ‘ino ‘bad’ (see (4) in 4.4). If a Tahitian passenger by the name of Purea gave any indication, he made first attempts at learning English in an extraordinary instance; yet his success remained limited (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 204), just as Ahutoru on Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's voyage had reportedly failed to learn French earlier. Evidently, there was no real need or pressure for Pacific Islanders to learn the newcomers’ languages, whether in reduced or standard form. Indeed, the American sailor and fur trader Joseph Ingraham (Reference Ingraham and Kaplanoff1971 [1791]: 66–67) reported that in speaking Pidgin English, the Hawaiian servant-sailor Opai was not intelligible to his own people or to Marquesans in the early 1790s. The English beachcomber Edward Robarts (Reference Robarts and Dening1974: 124) similarly reported little use of English on the Marquesas at the end of the eighteenth century. The Russian explorer Adam Johann von Krusenstern (Reference Krusenstern1813: I.195) confirmed much the same for the Hawaiian Islands a few years later.

On the other hand, Lisiansky (Reference Lisiansky1814: 98, 128), captain of the accompanying vessel Neva, believed English to be growing in the Hawaiian Islands day by day – only to fail to substantiate his claim in any fashion. Some subordinate constructions by Campbell are reminiscent of corresponding English constructions, evoking secondary superstrate influences between 1806 and 1812, when in fact English had not yet become established in the Hawaiian Islands; but Campbell's data have never remained beyond doubt for their accuracy. Another contemporary, the Irish fur trader Ross Cox (Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831]: 30, 45, 198), similarly included suggestions of the use of “broken English” on board ships, in the Hawaiian Islands, or elsewhere in the Pacific; however, he lent no linguistic support except a brief utterance by Hawaiians in the Columbia River drainage in northwestern North America: “Missi Keit [Mister Keith], we kill every man you bid us” (Cox Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831]: 198). This example exhibited what apparently was a partially Hawaiianized appellation with the characteristic consonant-vowel pattern of Polynesian languages, which then switched to a fairly complex and standard construction with grammatical subordination in the form of a relative clause in English. The switch suggests a translation of the main part from MPP or possibly Hawaiian rather than an actual historical recording. On another occasion, Cox (Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831]: 247) indeed thought even English to lose to “Bad French and worse Indian [i.e. Chinook Jargon],” although that observation applied to the Columbia River in northwestern North America area rather than to the Pacific Islands. Yet one of the most perceptive observers of the period was unquestionably the linguist Chamisso, whose summary observation on English in the Hawaiian Islands later in the second decade of the nineteenth century deserves repeating in full: “Many O-Waihians [Hawaiians] understand some English, but none of them is a competent master of the language, not even those who have served on American ships, as very many have done” (Chamisso Reference Chamisso and Kratz1986: 313). The lack of information on the use of English as a lingua franca in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century appears by itself to be indicative of its minimal use.

Whereas originally MPP in New Zealand also drew predominantly on indigenous resources (as evident from the first reliable attestations by the Māori chief Moehanga on a voyage to England in 1805; see (14) in 4.9), it already exhibited some early signs of the linguistic changes to come. Nicholas’ attestations of some ten years later incorporated the negative no, a first personal pronoun mi ‘I’, loanwords for ‘pork’ and ‘work’, and perhaps even the intrusion of the adverb nuinui ‘very much’ between the subject and the verb from English, suggesting early instances of English relexification (see (18) in 5.3). The author also had his characters often speak in Pidgin English supplemented by single words of Māori or possibly other Polynesian languages or by short phrases of Pidgin Māori (see Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.46, 64, 85, 88, 91, 107, 145, 166, 243, 274, 281, 287, 421–424; II.17, 33, 38, 40, 52, 104, 107, 116, 171, 172, 173, 222). Moreover, Nicholas reported the use of Pidgin English or English by some Māori chiefs and, in one instance, the wife of a Māori chief by the name of Mrs. Goshore (Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.11, 12, 25, 136–137, 149, 210, 263; II.198). Then again, examples of extended indirect speech (see, e.g., Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.65; II.87) suggest that these and perhaps other examples of Pidgin English similarly are no more than translations of Pidgin Māori or vernacular Māori. In his ignorance of the Māori language, Nicholas (Reference Nicholas1817: I.56, 82, 119, 142, 263, 369; II.4, 6, 42, 189) still depended on explanations by interpreters such as Savage's very own companion Moehanga. Any reverse prevalence of Pidgin English over Pidgin Māori would not bear out well with a characteristic list of passengers with four-fifths consisting of Māori and other Pacific Islanders such as Tahitians and with only one-fifth consisting of Europeans (Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.371–373).

What lends even stronger support to an interpretation favoring MPP over Pidgin English is the fact that, although the first is often difficult to sort out from the latter in short quotations, Clark (Reference Clark, Bell and Holms1990: 103) has found Pidgin Māori “rarely [to] extend beyond three or four words at a time.” In contrast, quotes in Pidgin English could reach the length of entire paragraphs (Clark Reference Clark, Bell and Holms1990: 104). In reality, we would expect the very reverse relationship to apply to the historical record of any Māori speakers absorbing (Pidgin) English into their “foreigner talk”: MPP would have occurred in longer constructions, and Pidgin English or English would have predominated in shorter utterances. Obviously, Nicholas could not expect his European audience to recognize Pākehā Māori beyond single words or short phrases, even if supplemented with translations; his readers would have taken any extended quotes in another language, whether or not enriched with translations, as a major imposition. Inevitably, this sociolinguistic situation then favored a translation of longer Māori or Pidgin Māori texts into Pidgin English as the next best thing. While presumably still conveying some of the local flavor, any such translation can therefore hardly stand as an unblemished historical record.

This interpretation receives support from Nicholas’ contemporary, Richard A. Cruise in his Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand of 1819, although his focus increasingly switches from Pidgin English to English. Cruise (Reference Cruise1824: 70, 84–85, 165) cited a few short samples of Pidgin English like Nicholas; he then had Māori use a highly formal, standard English, as would have been characteristic only of somebody with a secondary or college education in England (Cruise Reference Cruise1824: 8–11, 13, 15–16, 20, 34, 37, 116, 121, 152, 154, 158, 178, 182, 187, 203, 222, 226, 236, 248, 249, 257, 258, 261, 264, 265). In particular, a Māori by the name of Tetoro reportedly said: “when the ship arrived, the canoes would crowd around her, but…if the natives saw sentinels with arms at the gangways they would immediately go away” (Cruise Reference Cruise1824: 10–11). Elsewhere, Cruise (Reference Cruise1824: 9, 34–35, 36, 50, 51, 67, 132, 160) explicitly recognized that Tetoro, like most other Māori, evidently did not know much, if any, English and that only a few Māori on board of ships learned to speak more or less fluent English. In another instance, Cruise (Reference Cruise1824: 258) cited a Māori chief by the name of George, allegedly speaking “broken English,” again in standard English, and thus suggested another instance of discrepancy between the description of Māori competence in English and linguistic reality. Most English quotes of Māori by Cruise thus cannot qualify as accurate historical attestations of what they spoke; rather, we must take these quotes as English translations of Pidgin English, Pidgin Māori, or even vernacular Māori. Thus, the full extent of English influences in Pidgin Māori remains elusive and in doubt.

This finding is consistent with Cruise's observation that Christian missionaries had a minimal impact on the Māori even after a residence of six years among them and that the English visitors depended on native interpreters in their interactions with the native population (Cruise Reference Cruise1824: 55, 71, 78, 161). Some five years later in 1824, two representatives of the London Missionary Society, Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet (Reference Tyerman, Bennet and Montgomery1832: II.249–251), confirmed their continued use of Pidgin Māori in New Zealand with a single borrowing from English: Niu Tīrani (< English “New Zealand”) in the compound Taŋata Niu Tīrani ‘New Zealander, Māori’ (see (23) in 5.6), which John Savage, however, had already attested for 1805 (see (14) in 4.9). Bennet's concurrent questions in English are obvious translations from MPP. It was inopportune for the English visitors, concerned about avoiding any provocations, to speak English in contact with Māori, who retained the upper hand or who might even constitute an imminent danger to the missionaries’ safety. Tyerman and Bennet (Reference Tyerman, Bennet and Montgomery1832: I.11–12, 61; II.46) indeed reported but a few Pacific Islanders to have spoken some English; they included a Tahitian sailor, another old Tahitian man, and Kaumuali‘i, paramount chief of Kaua‘i, Hawaiian Islands. In contrast, Tyerman and Bennet (Reference Tyerman, Bennet and Montgomery1832: I.30) curiously thought Pacific Islanders capable of learning languages of South American Indians more easily and better than European languages (including English), but did not offer any explanation for the Islanders’ contacts with the South American continent, much less their linguistic preference for these languages.

If the French explorer Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1830–1833: II.97, 146, 242) mentioned a mixture of Māori and English for New Zealand in 1827, such a claim receives no confirmation in his own linguistic evidence for MPP (see (24) in 5.7) or other observations. Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1830–1833: I.99, II.200, fn.) only identified two Māori expatriates: on the one hand, Moehanga, who had developed a special emotional relationship to England on his visit to that country and who reportedly spoke English in contact with foreigners, and on the other, a young disenfranchised Māori, who had grown up in an English-speaking colony outside of New Zealand. Dumont d’Urville's observations should prove reliable, as they were made by a Frenchman without some of the Anglophile biases of his English-speaking contemporaries; however, his remarks do not apply to the entire community of Pidgin Māori speakers, who did not share the same experiences as Moehanga or the displaced Māori of Sidney.

The Dutch merchant captain Boelen reported “verstaandbaar Engelsch” (Boelen Reference Boelen1835–1836: III.35, 84, 108) or “intelligible” or “passable English” by two Hawaiians (Boelen Reference Boelen and Broeze1988: 18, 53, 65) in the Hawaiian Islands in 1828. The same year, the perceptive Botta observed that Pidgin Hawaiian daily absorbed English words, “which the islanders deform so as to render them almost beyond recognition” (Botta in Knowlton Reference Knowlton1984: 30). Unlike some earlier observers and contemporaries, Botta did not think this linguistic phenomenon to be due to any articulatory difficulties by Hawaiians, for most of those who learned to speak English apparently did so with little difficulty (Botta in Knowlton Reference Knowlton1984: 30). That English still underwent restructuring “almost beyond recognition” indicates that it played a secondary or even tertiary role in the interactions between Pacific Islanders and foreigners. By all available measures, incidental references to English suggest occasional, still limited use; they give no indication that a Pidgin English had developed already. If it had, it was not yet functioning as the primary or established lingua franca of the Pacific.

On a trading venture to ‘Uvea Island and Fiji in 1830, the American seaman-clerk Slade (Reference Slade and Denison1844: 37–39, 42–44) used a variety of MPP in interactions with his crew with an apparent borrowing from English: iū ‘you’ (< English “you”; see (27) in 5.11). Slade did not offer any explanation for the linguistic variation in his data; but the translations of a few MPP samples in Pidgin English rather than English suggest as one source “a black man” who served as an interpreter and orator and whom the author cited as speaking Pidgin English (Slade Reference Slade and Denison1844: 59, 76–77). These instances, then, illustrate a particular historical context for the association of MPP with Pidgin English – specifically speakers of Pidgin English who were also competent in non-European contact media and who likely used one as a resource for the other. However, Slade's examples also illustrate how Pidgin English came to serve as a potential paradigm for the translation of MPP by mere association with the latter.

In 1832, Jarman (Reference Jarman1838: 134, 163, 181, 242) offered what apparently was an English translation of native speech in either vernacular or reduced Tongan, and also recognized Pidgin English on Rotuma, the source of which was sailors and beachcombers. In contrast, the English whaler revealed no comparable observations for English influences, whether real or imagined, in eastern Polynesia at large or in MPP in particular. In 1835 and 1836, the literary sailor Dana (Reference Dana1911 [1840]: 181–182) had an older Hawaiian, named Mr. Bingham and said to have almost no knowledge of English, respond mostly in Pidgin English in the San Diego region. Although Dana explicitly did not grant the knowledge of any “broken” or pidginized English to Bingham, his quote has frequently served as prime evidence of Pidgin English in the early nineteenth-century Pacific to several creolists in a prime instance of cultural blinders (see, e.g., Clark Reference Clark1979: 29, Goodman Reference Goodman and Bickerton1985: 11, and Keesing Reference Keesing1988: 14). Significantly, Dana's samples of Pidgin English do not even match historical samples of later Hawai‘i Pidgin and Creole English in any fashion, as already recognized by Roberts (Reference Roberts1998: 14). In other words, Dana's attestations of Pidgin English disagree with available historical data and would suggest a distinct Pidgin English for Hawaiians in California. Such a proposition seems far-fetched in light of Bingham's Spanish-speaking sociolinguistic environment at a time when southern California was still part of Alta California, a northern province of Mexico – if anything, we should expect Bingham's sample to have been linguistically closer to Matatore's some forty-five years earlier. Dana's example from Mr. Bingham therefore illustrates, perhaps more to the point than any previous instance of translation, how the author employed Pidgin English to represent speech in another language, in this case Hawaiian or possibly Pidgin Hawaiian. In other words, Pidgin English was no more than a literary medium for Dana to represent the Hawaiian's speech in the closest possible English form and thus cannot serve as an accurate historical rendition of what Bingham actually said.

In 1838, the French explorer Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1841–1846: III.225) reported a Marquesan sailor to have spoken a mixed Marquesan-Spanish-English jargon with the French; yet he offered no supporting linguistic documentation. For New Zealand in 1840 and 1841, the English pearl trader Edward Lucett (Reference Lucett1851: I.74, 75, 80, 85, 101, 103, 133) recognized a “broken Maori” that embraced elements of “broken English,” and included select English words and phrases: “dinner,” “supper,” “kyrak” [i.e. “Sky-larking” or indulging in hilarious or boisterous frolic], “makee carry,” and “poys no goodee? Tam te poys’ proory eyes” [“Boys no good? Damn the boys’ blurry eyes”]. If the speech of a Māori guide was representative for his entire community, they “could make use of one or two English words, but did not understand any sentence, and our intercourse was managed by signs, with a word dropped now and then” (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: I.74); sporadically, English nouns occurred in Māori constructions such as (31) in 6.4 above. For other occasions, the English pearl trader described several incidents of Māori–English encounters in what obviously is an English translation rather than an actual rendition in Pidgin Māori, Pidgin English, or a mixture of both (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: I.97, 101, 102, 111, 114–115, 134–135), a telling example of which is the following:

If the owner of the canoe was familiar with the language, he would hardly have said “Yes, I’ll give you payment” or “Here, give me some wood” in response to Homai te/(i)ti utu; instead, the answer would have been one in MPP, perhaps interspersed with occasional English vocabulary. For Tahiti or other neighboring South Pacific islands of the early 1840s, Lucett similarly cited an incident by “[o]ne of our divers who could talk a little English” and who warned him in Pidgin English about an imminent attack by “Angatans” or Easter Islanders (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: I.249–251). He also recognized Marquesan Islanders who had sailed on whalers to speak “in perfectly intelligible English” (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: II.195). Still, many of his Pidgin English incidents again raise the question of translations because of multiple discrepancies with extralinguistic historical information. Lucett relied regularly on native interpreters in contact with Pacific Islanders (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: I.237, 250, 252, 255, 305; II.129), one of whom apparently was a Hawaiian who understood no more than a few words of English, although he had reportedly served on European or American whalers since his childhood (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: I.325, 327).

A special case for the investigation of the influence of English in MPP constitutes the semi-autobiographical novels Typee and Omoo by Melville (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968a [1846], Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968b [1847]). Consistent with other ethnohistorical information, the American beachcomber-novelist did not confirm many English influences in MPP of the Marquesas in 1842. Influenced by his native English dialect of northeastern North America, Melville, however, heard – and presumably used in his own articulation of the Pidgin – r-coloring with the low central vowel and possibly with diphthongs beginning with the low central vowel, as other Pidgin speakers of similar linguistic backgrounds had done before him (see footnote 9 in Chapter 6). Barely more idiosyncratic would appear the writer's incidental use of the plural “-s” ending as attested for “Wee-Wees” ‘French [people]’ or Wiwi (< reduplicated French oui ‘yes’) and for “Peehee Lee Lees” ‘small fish’ (with the English plural “-s” marking the modifier rather than the preceding noun) or pihi li‘ili‘i (see (32) and (33) in 6.5). That, in reverse, Melville failed to interpret such constructions as a result of interference from his first language, English, however, lends no more support to overall English influences in MPP than the fact that he did not record any sentence-initial negative constructions in accordance with Pidgin Hawaiian grammar.

Better evidence of English influence in MPP is the fairly regular use of several loanwords from English, although still with a distinctive Polynesian phonological-phonotactic structure, such as pihi ‘fish’, mikanele ‘missionary’, and potato ‘potato’ (see (33), (35), (36), (38), and (40) in 6.5). Melville may even have displayed incidental influence from English grammar in the compound of pihi kanaka ‘fisherman’ (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968b [1847]: 214) with its order of modifier and head, an apparent loan translation from English, and in a question with an inverse copular order, which marked the predicate with syntactic prominence and possibly even focus in an obvious expression of surprise by Melville (see (38) above). In this case, indirect superstrate influences from English in the American novelist's MPP raise the problem of inadvertent convergence with Polynesian grammatical patterns, whether directly or indirectly by way of Pidgin English.

Whereas most Pacific Islanders still appear as speaking MPP in Melville's first semi-autobiographical novel Typee, the novelist had only a few native characters speak in Pidgin English: Manu, a neutral intermediary and interpreter protected in his interactions with foreigners and known as a “tabooed kanaka” (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968a [1846]: 74, 139, 140, 241), and another “tabooed kanaka” by the name of “Karakoee” or Kealakaʻi (?), who had originally come from O‘ahu (Hawaiian Islands) and who together with Manu would eventually help the novelist escape from his Taipi captors (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968a [1846]: 249). In his sequel novel Omoo, Melville (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968b [1847]) has Society Islanders of a year later speak predominantly in Pidgin English – for no obvious linguistic or sociohistorical reason. While Melville's attestations of MPP turn out to be unexpectedly accurate, as long as one keeps in mind the peculiarities of his English transcriptions (Drechsel Reference Drechsel2007a and 6.5 above), his sudden, major change in register to Pidgin English raises fundamental questions as to its historical accuracy in these two novels, especially Omoo: Are his written recordings of Pidgin English historically representative of any substantial speech community in the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century? How do these attestations of Pidgin English relate to records of MPP linguistically, socially, or historically? How should readers of these novels, who desire a historically more accurate picture of the place and period, interpret most renditions of Pidgin English by indigenous Pacific Islanders?

Similar sociolinguistic and political conditions of Tahiti and the Marquesas in the 1840s would in fact not warrant a second, European-based medium and specifically Pidgin English. Except for English missionaries, who had established themselves in the Society Islands, Europeans were only about to consolidate their power over the native population, and the principal colonial power to emerge in the area was France rather than Great Britain or the United States (Newbury Reference Newbury1980; Howe Reference Howe1984: 109–151). In other words, there existed no major sociolinguistic gap between the Marquesas and Tahiti to warrant a radical, rapid switch from MPP to Pidgin English. Indeed, Melville's attestations of MPP cast doubts on the quality of his recordings in Pidgin English, interspersed with occasional Tahitian and other Polynesian “borrowings.” Upon closer inspection, his attestations of Pidgin English themselves prove suspect as accurate documentation of how Pacific Islanders communicated with newcomers in Tahiti at the time, and suggest little more than stereotypical renditions of native speech.

Melville gave some linguistic clues of his own that Pidgin English of Tahiti may not have been so English after all. The pronunciation of various English words actually revealed a distinct Polynesian consonant–vowel alternation with an added final vowel: “piratee” [pairəti], “olee” [oli], “Tootee” [tuti] (for Cook's name), “shippy” [šipi], “manee” [mani] (for ‘man’), “ready” [ridi] (for ‘to read’), and “goody” [gudi]. Pacific Islanders who reportedly spoke Pidgin English also extended a Polynesian articulation to obvious foreign names such as “Beretanee” or Beretania/Pelekane ‘Britain’ and distinctive loans such as “mickonaree” or mikanele ‘missionary’. Not only did this Pidgin English and MPP share Polynesianized loans from other languages, such as kaukau ‘to eat, food’, mikanele ‘missionary’, pihi ‘fish’, and Wiwi ‘French people’, but they also had several Polynesian words in common: ‘ā ‘ah’, ‘aita maita‘i ‘not good, bad’, aloha ‘farewell’, ‘ava ‘kava’, haere (mai) ‘to come’, hanahana ‘to make’, kaikai ‘to eat’, kalo ‘taro’, kanaka ‘Pacific Islander’, maita‘i ‘good’, moemoe ‘to sleep’, nui ‘very’, ‘oe ‘you’, paepae ‘pile of stones, platform’, pi mai/pi‘i mai ‘to come’, puaka ‘pig, hog’, tapa ‘tapa’, tapu ‘forbidden’, and wahine ‘woman’. These very linguistic features in fact appear to be a direct measure of influence from MPP on Pidgin English to the extent that we can determine the latter to be historically real in light of the hypercorrected, stereotypical interpretations of Europhone–Europhile historical documentation not usually met with in non-European instances (Drechsel Reference Drechsel, Barnum, Kelley and Sten2007b: 55–58; see also 3.3).

Ultimately, these parallels do not resolve any fundamental sociolinguistic differences that remain between MPP and Pidgin English in two neighboring archipelagos with two closely related linguistic traditions, with similar colonial histories, and with only one year separating Melville's two accounts. In other words, the close sociolinguistic-sociohistorical similarities between the Marquesas and Society Islands still demand an explanation for the supposed radical switch from MPP to Pidgin English. If we take into consideration broader sociolinguistic and sociohistorical issues, two possible explanations emerge: (i) As suggested by some linguistic data, Melville's attestations of MPP in Typee actually referred to Pidgin Hawaiian rather than some related variety in the Marquesas or the Society Islands, and the prime interlingual medium in those islands was Pidgin English, as described in Omoo. This explanation immediately runs afoul of the overall sociolinguistic history of French Polynesia by the fact that, notwithstanding the influence of English-speaking missionaries, these islands experienced less exposure to the English language than the Hawaiian Islands, where Pidgin Hawaiian was still in use. Nor does this argument match the available sociolinguistic-sociohistorical evidence for eastern Polynesia of the period. Even if we argued that Melville projected Pidgin Hawaiian onto the scene of Typee (as considered in 6.5 above), his attestations are fundamentally consistent with other contemporaneous historical accounts of eastern Polynesia, and would differ in no more than comparatively minor lexical variations between Hawaiian and Marquesan. This fact, then, leaves only one other option for consideration: (ii) Taking extra literary license in Omoo for dramatic effects, Melville put Pidgin English, spiked with some Polynesian terms for dramatic effects and fictional embellishment, into his characters’ mouths in place of MPP. After Typee with its abundance of MPP terms and expressions, the American beachcomber-novelist had good reasons to reduce the number of Polynesian words and phrases in Omoo. In anticipation of a desire, whether real or imagined, by his English and American audiences for fewer foreign terms and under pressure by his editor or publisher, Melville apparently made his second semi-autobiographical novel easier reading with stereotypical Anglophone–Anglophile translations in Pidgin English. Readers of the two major semi-autobiographical novels who desire a historically more accurate picture of the place and period should probably understand most of his renditions of Pidgin English put in the mouths of Pacific Islanders as standing for MPP, even if we now can no longer reconstruct the latter in these instances.

By substituting Pidgin English for MPP, Melville did not necessarily require an understanding of the true structure and functions of the latter in relation to their native languages. Such an appreciation indeed remains very much in doubt for most of the nineteenth century. By inserting Pidgin English as samples of Pacific Islanders’ speech, Melville probably did not even recognize any structural-functional analogy between MPP and Pidgin English in their relationships to their respective source languages, much less a mutual relationship by means of relexification. It would have been sufficient for Melville simply to espouse the belief, widely held at the time, that indigenous languages of the Pacific were “primitive” like other non-European vernaculars, and he could best represent them by Pidgin English for literary purposes, as already illustrated by numerous authors before him. If these arguments do not necessarily question the existence of Pidgin English as such, they certainly raise serious doubts about the authenticity of its attestations in Omoo, its geographic distribution, and its sociohistorical significance in relation to other, non-European, contact media. This conclusion therefore proves all the more ironic, as Charles Roberts Anderson (Reference Anderson1966 [1939]: 199) considered Omoo “perhaps the most strictly autobiographical of all Melville's works” and thus presumably the most accurate by historical and ethnographic standards (for an extended discussion, see Drechsel Reference Drechsel, Barnum, Kelley and Sten2007b).

The above arguments about Melville's two semi-autobiographical novels Typee and Omoo endure also in light of subsequent historical documentation of Pidgin English in relation to MPP. From 1842 to 1845, Max Radiguet, secretary to staff headquarters of the French colonial expansion in the Pacific, recorded tobako ‘tobacco’ and moni ‘money’ in reduced Marquesan (see (41) in 6.6). Because the first language of Radiguet and his prime source was French, these English loanwords are less suspect than if they had appeared in a document by an English or American observer, although their ultimate source, too, was probably English-speaking traders and sailors such as the Americans Joseph Ingraham and David Porter on the Marquesas. Still, Radiguet gave no indication for the wide spread of English in any form in the Marquesas or the Society Islands when these archipelagos came under French administration.

Similarly, on the fast topsail schooner Wanderer on its way from California to the South Pacific in 1851, a crew of Pacific Islanders, among whom were a Hawaiian guide and some Gilbert Islanders, apparently spoke Pidgin English mixed with some Polynesian vocabulary or rather MPP with several English words, when interacting with the ship's officers. The captain of the accompanying supply vessel, John Webster (Reference Webster1863: 23, 26–27, 35), presumably witnessed a process by which a Polynesian medium was replaced by English, albeit in reduced form. However, the Polynesian vocabulary, the predominance of Pacific Islanders on the crew, and a dramatic rescue of the author's main source, a Gilbertese sailor-interpreter by the name of Timarare, suggest even less of an Anglicized version than attested by the actual historical record: “Te Manu (bird) he speakee me, he say me no mate, (drown). In my country manu plenty speak to man” (Webster Reference Webster1863: 23). This argument would be consistent with the reinterpretation of Pidgin English in Dana's Two Years before the Mast (Reference Dana1911 [1840]), Melville's second autobiographical novel Omoo (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968b [1847]), and other contemporary writings in terms of MPP.

Whereas some historical references in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (such as by Artemas Bishop) still recognized MPP, although in rather vague terms, contemporaneous sources made Pacific Islanders speak Pidgin English in the 1870s – a feature of perhaps as much a literary license as an accurate historical record. For outlying areas such as Lāna‘i or on board an interisland vessel from Kō-‘ele on that island to Lahaina on Maui, the Anglican missionary Herbert H. Gowen still found little English spoken and relied on MPP as recently as 1887 (see (45) and (46) in 6.12).

On the surface, the historical attestations after Melville's would suggest a gradual replacement by relexification of MPP with Pidgin English in the second half of the nineteenth century similarly to what John Reinecke (Reference Reinecke and Tsuzaki1969: 34–35, 87–92, 102, fn. 20, 109–110, 144, 194) described as hapa haole (‘half foreigner’) speech for the Hawaiian Islands. On the other hand, instances such as Gowen's also indicate the persistence of MPP together with any vernaculars on outer islands and in rural areas. There are even linguistic hints that MPP affected Melanesian Pidgin English in the second half of the nineteenth century, as suggested by such obvious Polynesian loans as kaikai ‘to eat, food’, kanaka ‘Pacific Islander’, mat(/e) ‘to kill, to die’, ta(m)bu ‘taboo, sacred’, and tayo ‘friend’ (Baker Reference Baker1993: 26–27, 47, 54). Ultimately, the available historical documentation remains too little and too thin to support a conclusion of English relexification on any large scale at this time. Many records of the period reflect the same problems of earlier documents with an Anglophile–Anglophone bias by presenting MPP as Pidgin English rather than for what it really was. Quite possibly, this conclusion applies also to the Māori variety of MPP, for which early historical documentation in English translation occasionally suggests an earlier English relexification than for the other three varieties. By this reasoning, even claims to any such large-scale replacement of Pidgin Māori appear suspect in light of the sociolinguistic imbalance between the immigrant and native population and the lack of political control by the English-speaking minority over the Polynesian-speaking majority until the mid-nineteenth century.