Word: gullah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even this seems futile. Language is the greatest smuggling operation in the world. When the French blast juke-box as an American atrocity, for example, they might better blame West Africans for the original Bambara word, dzugu (wicked), which evolved into joog (disorderly) in the Gullah language of sea-island Negroes living off Georgia and South Carolina. It is virtually impossible to keep a language "pure." Mustafa Kemal tried it in Turkey, failed for the simple reason that half the Turkish language is borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Mussolini purged Italian of such "foreign" French (but Latin-derived) words...
...dark suit and vest walked into the main rotunda of the city's Old Courthouse. For 30 minutes, he stood there and told TV viewers the story of the slave Sam Blow who picked up the nickname Great Scott-pronounced Dred Scott in Sam Blow's Gullah accent-whose suit was tried twice in that courthouse...
Charlestonese is not an intelligible distortion of the American language in the sense that the dialects of Boston, Brooklyn and Davenport, Iowa are. It pays the merest thank-you-ma'am to Webster's English, draws a lot of its vigor and flavor from Gullah, an African slave dialect still spoken by the white and Negro populations of the rice islands along the South Atlantic littoral, adds a touch of Huguenot French and a dash of regional accent that is as deep-rooted and mysterious as the brooding cypresses. Confronted with Charlestonese, philologists tremble...