"Bon dia"

I introduce myself: I´m a french student in Translation Studies from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain.

I grew up in the French West Indies (French Guyana) and I always heard about Papiamentu.

I would love to learn the language and then write my Ph.D thesis relative to the culture-bound problematic rendering Papiamentu into european languages and vice versa.

So, could you tell me if I could have a scholarship in due to learn Papiamentu, and, if it does exist any grant that could help me during the research period?

As it concerns the main subject of application I don´t know if I will focuse it about Audiovisual Translation or Litterature, but in any case I hope it could help the diffusion of Papiamentu.

The subject interest would depend on the real life facts (does it exist channels in Papamientu, do you have editorial houses in the island, etc.).

"Pasa un bon dia"

Best regards,

Adrien BAGARRY

You give us to much credit! Our language, based in Portuguese, is from the Cape Vere Islands of West Africa. We have a small amount of tomes written by local historians, etc. and a dictionary which just was released in its third edition and that is about it. You may want to consider doing a joint study as related to former and current Dutch possessions and their languages, ie. Bonaire, Aruba and Curacao for papiamentu, Saba, Statia, St. Marteen for their English patois and Surinam (you former neighbor) for taki taki. I am sure there is a lot of material but I doubt there is any money to support research.

Adrien,

You may want to contact Hélène Garrett at the University of Alberta, Canada (if she's still there). She received her PhD for her work in papiamentu funded by a grant from the dutch government. You can find more information in the book "Haiku in Papiamentu", by Elis Juliana and Hélène Garrett. Good luck.

Adrien-
I see similarities between Catalan and Papiamentu, do you? Now that would be an interesting doctoral thesis! See if the Erasmus Project might help pay for your studies being that Bonaire is a Dutch protectorate. Keep us posted. I attended the University of Barcelona but had never heard of Pompeu Fabra until recently, and now I hear of it a lot. Good luck.

Papiamentu has a lot of Portuguese in it since it had a root in Cape Verde.

Thank you for answering me. The references could help me a lot.
Linguists cannot say if Papiamentu has roots in Cape Verde but the only thing that is sure is that Papiamentu is the only language based on iberic languages (catalan, galician/portuguese, spanish) and not a koiné of those languages. And of course its construction with the Dutch descriollization that makes a real mixed language.
It´s nice to you to try to help me. I have already done an Erasmus so I can´t do another one, furthermore it´s reserved for ungraduated students...
Pompeu Fabra University is quite "new" it can be the reason why you haven´t heard about it when you attended classes at the UB...but this university tries to be innovator as much as possible and impulses contacts overseas that´s why I decided to be part of it.
If you are interested in language history I could send you a great powerpoint from a German Professor that did a conference trying to explain all the theories and giving an approach to the "TAM" Languages.

Adrien-
I'd love to see the PowerPoint! You can send it (please) to my school email: hicksonk@nps.k12.ma.us. I just got back from BCN one week ago today. So happy I was there for Dia de San Jordi. Love that city. When I was there in 79-80, everything was just changing over from Castellano to Catalan. I'd love to study catalan here, but it's hard to take a NON-on line class when you live on an island! Sigo buscando...

how do you say "i love bonaire" in papiamentu ?

Mi stima boneiru

is Mi stima boneiru the correct spelling and everything? are there any tone marks?

mi ta stima boneiru

sorry Pietri, but most Bonarieans leave out the ta..I checked before I made my commitment.

further clarification if you will: In Curacao, the would say Mi ta..in Bonaire they leave it out. Either way, the sentiment is the same..

i checked it out too .. so both are correct ..just depends...sometimes there is a variation between Playa and rincon ...it's all in the fun of learning the language .. i must be influenced by korsow/curacao ..