Today’s class was in . . . well, it was fifty minutes of conversation about whatever my instructor wanted to ask me about. What did I have for lunch & how did I make it? Why did I like that meal so much? What does my wife like to eat? Does she cook what I like? Then we talked about my day. What was the most interesting thing at work? Because I’m an editor, I talked about my job of editing documents and working with writers to write more clearly. Why do I do that, and why do writers need to write more clearly? Because our customers don’t want to read long documents: they prefer shorter works with short words and sentences. Why is that important? Because many of our customers have English as their second language, so writing complicated English makes it harder to read. And so on . . .
I have just enough of the vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammar/syntax to be able to speak in active present or active participle voice. (He runs; he is running.) And simple future and past tense (He will run/will be running; he ran/he was running.) And even conditional and negative (He might run. He doesn’t run.) But I am speaking simply and I have to work hard to remember words I learned six weeks ago, or figure out if I once saw a word in what I was reading elsewhere, or whatever. I do what I can not to look up a word until I’m just stumped. (Talking about computer hardware, software, networking, applications, and the like was where I was drowning: I know so very few of the words!)
But then when we were done with the conversation, we went to my “lessons” (the part where we use a curriculum). For the past two weeks, we’ve been talking about the singular “the” used for kreyòl words. For example, the apple, the cow, the yacht, the wool. For English, there is just one “the.”
Not Haitian Creole. Fie on that! Kreyòl has five ways to say the singular “the.” (There’s only one form for the plural “the”: “yo,” which also doubles as “they.” Kaye yo. Bwat yo. Rad yo. Elatriye. And of course only the singular “a” or “an,” which is “yon.” Yon kay. Yon pye bwa. Yon zòrèy. Elatriye.)
The five forms of “the” are: a, an, la, lan, and nan.
The rules are sound based as far as I can tell, even though the descriptions/prescriptions are more rule-based:
- If the final vowel is one of the open (“oral”) vowels, you use “A”: a, e, è, i, o, ò, ou, and ui. Kaye a. Lò a. Elatriye.
- If the final vowel is nasal, you use “AN”: an, en, on. Lajan an. Pen an. Sitwon an. Elatriye.
OR
If the final syllable is one of four sounds, you use “AN”: mi, mou, ni, nou. Fanmi an. Joumou an. Elatriye. - If the final consonant is nasal, you use “NAN”: m, n, ng. Gòm nan. Lang lan. Elatriye.
- If the final consonant is open (“oral”), you use “LA”: b, ch, d, f, g, j, k, l, p, s, t, v, and z. Kaz la. Pòch la. Laptòp la. Elatriye.
- If the final sound is a nasal vowel (see #2) AND with a final oral consonant OR with a final demi-consonant (y or w), you use “LAN”: Lanp lan. Dans lan. Beny lan. Elatriye.
Reader, I have been working for about three weeks on my own to understand this because it was maddening to not understand it. AND ALSO (epitou!) Duolingo sometimes gets it wrong, or is inconsistent.
I’m told that “it kinda doesn’t matter because you’ll be understood,” but I want to get it right. So I’ve been hammering on it for a while to understand, writing out examples, writing out sentences in kreyòl explaining it.
And in my pop quiz tonight I got them all right. Every single word!
As I’ve been seeing inconsistencies or wrong values in Duolingo, I’ve been calling them out as “mistakes.” Which is a hard word for kreyòl, because to be fair to the people who speak the language and are inventing daily, there isn’t as much concern about spelling or use as we have in English with our hyper attention to misspellings and “that’s the wrong word.”
Still, when I see both “Dam nan” (the lady) and “Dam lan” (the lady, but the wrong “the”) or “segonn nan” and “seconn lan,” I am miffed. Miffed, I tell you!
We’ll talk another time about how the sound of “onn” and “òn” are about the same, as is “ann” and “àn,” and “enn” and “èn,” so words are spelled both ways. (They all use “nan,” because of rule 3. The nasal form “an, en, on” doesn’t count because the last letter is a nasal consonant “n.”)
And fun fact: which letter of the kreyòl alphabet doesn’t occur in these rules? It’s because that letter never appears in any position where it could affect the form of “the”!