Ancestral pidgin

[BURTON John]

Ross

Well that is certainly the view projected in the literature all these years.
However, as you will guess from some earlier postings, I am getting a
feeling that Torres Strait creole exhibited most of the 'old', Pacific
Pidgin English features of TP, Bislama and Solomons Pijin from the start of
interactions between outsiders and islanders. That date is no later that
1864 when an ex-sandalwooder called Banner opened a beche-de-mer station in
the northern Torres Strait with 70 Pacific crewmen. Other stations followed
immediately and switched to pearling in 1869 or 1870, all remaining
deliberately outside the 60 mile limit of Queensland waters.

A fruitful topic for research would be the extent of contact between 1870
and 1900 between the creole of the Torres Strait islanders and that
coalescing on the Queensland plantations for re-export to PNG, the Solomons
and Vanuatu. If it is slight - for this period - then there is a strong
argument that Torres Strait creole is a direct descendant of PPE. On the
other hand, if TSI lugger crews were mixing socially with plantation workers
or did plantation work themselves, the argument is weaker. At the moment,
all the evidence points towards the exclusive involvement of TS islanders on
pearling luggers at this time, and not plantations.

John Burton
 
> (Incidentally "early Melanesian Pidgin" would be a misnomer, 
> would it not,
> because most of its speakers were in fact from the central Pacific.)

Yes, I guess so. When I have used the term, it has been for a slightly later
period, roughly 1870 to the mid 1880s, when the plantation workers in
Queensland, Fiji and Samoa were mainly Melanesians, speaking a language
directly ancestral to TP, Bislama and Solomons Pijin. 

Ross Clark