Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-13T09:27:10.471Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

African Day–Names in Jamaica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

David DeCamp
David DeCamp*
Affiliation:
University of Texas
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A system of day-names, indicating the sex and the day of the week on which a child was born, was carried from Africa to Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As personal names, they are now obsolete and almost extinct. All fourteen, however, survive as pejorative common nouns, retaining certain syntactic features (e.g. gender), but losing the purely semantic week-day feature. The series of historical changes, conditioned both by social influences and by the syntactic and semantic structure of the system, gives support to the subordination of semantic features to syntactic ones in modern linguistic theory.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1967, pp. 139 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Beckwith, Martha Warren. 1929. Black roadways. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. 1849. Occasional discourse on the nigger question. Fraser's Magazine, December, 1849. Reprinted in vol. 8 of the Boston edition.Google Scholar
Cassidy, Frederic G. 1961. Jamaica Talk. London, Macmillan.Google Scholar
Christaller, Rev. J. G. 1933. Dictionary of the Asante and Fante language called Tshi (Twi). 2nd ed. Basel, Basel Evangelical Missionary Society.Google Scholar
DeCamp, David. 1961. Social and geographical factors in Jamaican dialects. Creole language studies II, ed. by Le Page, R. B., 61–84. London, Macmillan.Google Scholar
Edwards, Bryan. 1793. The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. London, Stockdale.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
deed, Estate. 1796. Thomas John Parker of Vere, Jamaica, to James Bowes. Release of plantations named Hillside, Brazaletto, Chesterfield in the parish of Vere, Jamaica. Library of the University of the West Indies.Google Scholar
Gosse, Philip Henry. 1851. A naturalist's sojourn in Jamaica. London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.Google Scholar
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (‘Monk‘). 1845. Journal of a residence among the negroes in the West Indies. London, John Murray.Google Scholar
Long, Edward. 1774. The history of Jamaica. London, T. Lowndes.Google Scholar
Moreton, J. B. 1790. Manners and customs in the West India islands. London, Richardson, Gardner, & Walker.Google Scholar
Rampini, Charles. 1873. Letters from Jamaica. Edinburgh, Edmonston and Douglas.Google Scholar
Scott, Michael. 1833. Tom Cringle's log. Edinburgh, Blackwood.Google Scholar
Stewart, James. 1808. An account of Jamaica and its inhabitants. London, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.Google Scholar
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Cynric R. 1826. A tour through the island of Jamaica in the year 1823. London, Hunt & Clark.Google Scholar
Williams, Joseph J. 1934. Psychic phenomena of Jamaica. New York, Dial.Google Scholar