Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 14:08:59 -0500

From: Grant Barrett gbarrett[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]JERRYNET.COM

Subject: RE Re: dey teef meh quats dem



Ditra Henry said, in response to my "new subscriber requirements" asking for a translation of

"Dey teef meh quats dem":



First of all, are you sure the word is quats (kwats) and not kwati?

And the translation would be in American English ( somebody stole my last

little thing). The word kwati is in a old Jamaican Folk song however mi

nuh nua i naim.



The way I learned it from Crucians, the translation would be "They stole my quarters." I never

actually heard anybody use this sentence, but put it together out of phrases and words I picked

up. The kids hanging around the Scale House near King and Church Streets in Christianstead

would sometimes ask for "quats" so they could go play video games at the Pizza Hut.



I understand now, having done a bit of poking around here in NYC, "teef" as a verb is common

across many Caribbean islands to mean "stole." The most interesting Crucian usage, to me, is the

word "dem" which often appears after plurals, even if the plural is already indicated, such as in

"deh potholes dem", although I infrequently did hear "dem" used after a singular noun to indicate

its plurality. I'm still kind of fooling around looking this stuff up, besides being an dilettante

dialectician, so I have no idea how widespread this is across the region.



I spent six months down there a year ago and found it to be a dialectical gold mine. A large part

of the population comes from down-island or Puerto Rico, so you get a weird amalgam of

accents and variations. You've never really been stymied until you've been given directions by a

St. Lucian taxi driver (part of the problem is the loud country music).



At some point I want to go back and transcribe the Crucian Spanish. It is, if possible, even more

corrupt and free-wheeling than Puerto Rican Spanish, when compared to textbook Spanish.