Pidgin Grammar 101 available in new book

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Postmodifiers, multifunctionals. Sound like pitfalls on that English test you flunked, right? Not elements from pidgin grammar.

Wat, yu neva know dat pidgin get wan grammah? Shoots, brah, get!

Kent Sakoda and Jeff Siegel knew that all along, but now they've written the book, "Pidgin Grammar" (Bess Press, paper, $11.95) to prove it to the world.

And it's out just in time for the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics conference that opened Thursday at the University of Hawai'i Imin International Conference Center.

Of course, those in attendance are schooled enough to know that what we call pidgin here is not a true pidgin but a creole, officially dubbed Hawai'i Creole English.

The public is invited to lap up some of the tastier fruits of the grammar today at Creole Literature Day events, including 1 p.m. readings of pidgin poetry and such.

Authors Siegel and Sakoda — who are with the UH Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies, sponsors of the conference — said there have been many papers on pidgin grammar but nothing like what's covered in this book.

The only other way to know this is if you learned from small-kid time. (Can you spot the postmodifier in that sentence?) Naturally, small kids know stuffs li'dat. Dey no need learn dat "li'dat" is wan "multifunctional."