74 Books and arts The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
2 another of her points of reference.
This is an enlightening method. It pun-
gently conveys the ecstasy of collective ac-
tion, the experience of violence, as both
victim and perpetrator, and the way ordin-
ary people can find themselves in wild pre-
dicaments. The second half of the book
portrays businessmen, historians and
physicists who headed east to combat the
Russian-backed separatists. This war, Ms
Shore writes, was a “theatre of the absurd”.
She recountsa typically bizarre scene, on
Lenin Square in Donetsk, in which an Or-
thodox pensionerchristens a Muslim Che-
chen mercenary, “to aid his battle againstUkrainian Nazis...who did not exist.” The
fight is as much over time as space, the re-
bels evincing a “cocktail of nostalgias” for
“saints and tsars and Bolshevik leaders”.
The timelines, however, are scrambled,
“the pre-modern intersected surreally
with the post-modern: warlords were us-
ing Twitter.”
Ms Shore identifies the surrealism ex-
emplified in the war as an enduring cultur-
al divide. In the West people tended to be-
lieve that “there were constraints on
reality”, whereas “eastern Europeans
knew that anything waspossible.” One
fear that stalks this short, powerful book isthat this distinction is breaking down, and
not as the revolutionaries intended—that
Ukraine, with its saturating propaganda
and warped identity politics, might be a vi-
sion of the West’s future rather than the
other way round.
Ms Shore notes that Ukraine’s far right,
the focus of so much external angst, per-
forms worse in elections than its counter-
parts in France or Austria. “It was as if
Freud’s ghost were haunting Europe,” she
observes, with other nations “gazing at Uk-
raine through the lens of projection, attrib-
uting to others what they could not accept
in themselves.” 7I
N AN airy first-floor study, Eldred Jones,
who is 93, takes a break from his Braille
Bible to talk about how he first left Sierra
Leone to study at Oxford. Later he became
principal of west Africa’s oldest universi-
ty, Fourah Bay College in Freetown. Dur-
ing a long, donnish life he also found time
to co-write the only dictionary for Krio,
the lingua franca of Sierra Leone.
Krio can sound like broken English.
Aw de bodi?, the most common greeting,
literally means “How’s the body?” Other
popular questions are Aw yu slip?(“How
did you sleep?”), and Aw de wok?(“How’s
the work?”). But Krio is not broken any-
thing. It is a fascinating mix of English, Af-
rican, Portuguese, French and other influ-
ences, reflecting a unique history of
imperialism, slavery and migration.
Sierra Leone’s Creoles, who created
the language named after them, came to
the country in three main waves. Former
slaves in America arrived via Nova Scotia,
free Jamaican “Maroons” were descend-
ed from slaves, and west Africans were
freed on the high seas after Britain
banned the international slave trade in- The proto-Krio mix thus combined
early African-American English, Jamai-
can Patois and west African languages
such as Yoruba. Other languages contrib-
uted, too. Pikin, meaning “child”, comes
from the Portuguese pequeninofor “very
small”, and goes back to the Portuguese
role in the early slave trade.
Creoles are the world’s newest lan-
guages. Instead of evolving over many
centuries, most emerged in a relative
heartbeat. On slave plantations, speakers
of different languages came together in
the harshest possible conditions. In the
traditional account of this process, a cre-
ole most often arose from a pidgin: a sim-
ple, improvised argot drawing most of its
words from the (usually European) lan-
guages of the masters. As children learned
the pidgin as a native language, it became a
creole—stabler and more grammatically
elaborate than the pidgin.
But some challenge this account. A sta-
tistical study of creolespublished last year
in Natureconcludes that they are really just
blends of their parent languages. It ques-
tions the existence of the pidgin stage, a
break in language transmission before re-
building into the creole. Since “ordinary”
languages also blend (English owes much
to its conquerors’ Old Norse and French),
this makes creoles unexceptional.
There is more to the argument. The tra-
ditional idea that creoles come from pid-
gins may be fascinating, but it risks seem-
ing condescending—by positing that
creoles have simpler grammars as a result.
In fact, they often contain complex fea-
tures. Krio, like Yoruba, is tonal. In high
tones, koko means a hard lump of flesh.
Said in low tones, it is a small hut or hidingplace. Such tones are hard to learn, sug-
gesting Krio was not merely an emergen-
cy language cobbled together in adversity.
Still, John McWhorterof Columbia
University, a defender of the traditional
pidgin-to-creole hypothesis, argues that
by and large, creole grammars really are
the world’s simplest. Theyusually lack
the many word-endings that make Latin
or Russian tricky, and often dispense with
French-style grammatical genders, even
when their parent languages have them.
He points to a creole called Palenquero
that melds Spanish and Kikongo and is
spoken by Afro-Colombians. Both parent
languages require lots of words to agree in
gender and number—but Palenquero
does not. Both distinguish between an
animate direct object and an inanimate
one. Palenquero does not. Mr McWhorter
argues that in this simplicity Palenquero
is a typical creole, not an outlier.
Whoever is right, neither side believes
that creoles are rudimentary languages
for simple-minded people. All grammars
have more complexity than they need;
creoles merely dispense with some of it,
while still being perfectly usable to say
anything that needs saying. Who could
resist the charming ways in which Krio
uses old-fashioned words little heard to-
day in English? A lovers’ quarrel is a pa-
lava (palaver), and a common expression
isAh de vex buku pan yu, meaning “I’m
very angry [vexed] with you.” The buku is
from French beaucoup.
Mr Jones’s dictionary, “a labour of
love”, took 30 years to write. It was one of
the first works dedicated to his country’s
de facto national language. Those unfa-
miliar with creoles, thinking them mere
patois, argot or vernacular, are missing a
glorious display ofthe ingenuity of those
speakers who turned old languages into
something brilliantly new.Johnson High tones
A debate about the origins of creoles stretches back to slavery