Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalofstrait121878roya).pdf/230

 "PIDGIN" ENGLISH.

Read at a Meeting of the Society held on the 9th Dec. 1878.

Most visitors to the Far East have heard of Pidgin English, though its use is principally confined to Hongkong and the "Treaty" or open ports of China. How and when it took its origin is an unsolved mystery. The oldest living foreign resident in China recollects it as the standard means of communication, not merely between foreign masters and their domestic servants. but between the once fabulously rich members of the Congsee or "Thirteen Hongs." who, up to 1859, were alone permitted to transact business at Canton withoutside barbarians." But we fail to find any authentic record as to when it first assumed the dignity of a language or when proficiency in its phraseology was an object of ambition to dapper young Chinese clerks to enable them to fill the posts of interpreters aud squeeze-collectors. It appears to have been in common use when Dr. Morrison was achieving the herculean task of compiling the first Anglo-Chinese dictionary, some sixty or more years ago, and was probably current shortly after the East India Company's factory was first established at the City of Rams. I propose to occupy a few minutes of your time in briefly describing this latest addition to the philological family, and, it may be, to vindicate its claims to passing attention as illustrating under our own eyes a process which many tongues now ranking as important must have undergone in their earlier stages. There is a strong flavour of "Pidgin" in a good deal of the Law Latin and French of the 11th and 12th centuries. Pidgin English therefore, uncouth as it is, aids us in recalling how languistic [sic] changes were brought about in our own and kindred languages.

Speculation, however, as I have said, is woefully adrift in tracing its origin, and even its name has puzzled the brains of clever etymologists. The most popular and probably the most correct derivation is from the word "business" which