Haitian Creole

[magid]

I'm proofing a document in Haitian Creole, which somehow doesn't look like a language, quite. Too many k's while looking a bit like French, or something.

Entertaining translation of the day: "geometric" is "jewometrik".
*giggle*

Comments

[yagagriswold.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Kreyol's a trip. To me, it looks doesn't know how to spell French. (Which sort of makes sense, given its history.)

I just finished reading "Mama Lola," which is an ethnography of a Vodou practitioner living in Brooklyn in the 1980s. It contains lots of Kreyol, of course, and is really fascinating, if one has any interest in either Haiti or Vodou.

In what context were you proofing this document?

[magid.livejournal.com]

A math glossary translated into a number of languages. So far, Kreyol has been the only one that looks 'odd', though for the ones in non-Roman alphabets, I'd be hard pressed to tell anything.

Oh, and

[magid.livejournal.com]

Almost all I know about Haiti comes from a kid book, Marassa and Midnight, about twins separated around the time of the slave revolt in the late 1700s (I think? maybe 1800s?). Plus a mention in Bury the Chains, a history of the abolition movement in Britain, which turned out to be much more interesting than I'd hoped.

[yagagriswold.livejournal.com]

Hrm. What I meant to say in that second sentence was "To me, it looks like French heard and written down by someone who doesn't know how to spell French." Not sure what happened there.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that does make more sense :-).

I agree mostly, though there are some differences.