6658: Creole-related FAQ (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Michel DeGraff <degraff@MIT.EDU>


Dear all,

Happy New Year and Happy New Millennium!

After a very busy semester-end and turn-of-the-millennium (c)rush, I am now
catching up with a long e-mail backlog (including a hefty stack of Corbett
messages).

As usual, the year-end seems to have brought the perennial questions about
Haitian Creole.  Fortunately, this time around one can take a much-needed
short-cut in providing answers to (some of) these familiar questions:

Thanks to Fedo Boyer's CREOLETRANS ( http://www.creoletrans.com ),
Professor Yves Dejean has made conveniently-accessible a useful set of
ready-made answers regarding our favorite Creole-related questions.

These answers can be read at 

           http://www.creoletrans.com/faq.htm 

NB: Professor Dejean does not subscribe to this list.  But, if this is
unfortunate for some of us, this is certainly _fortunate_ for Dejean and
those he's serving and learning from: Dejean, unlike many of us armchair
and/or expatriate creolists, is quite busy _in_Haiti_ putting his
money---and his deeds---where his mouth is, running an all-Creole school in
Fort-Royal (a small, rural and totally monolingual Haitian community of
about 300 households, near Ti-Gwav, 70 kilometers West of Port-au-Prince).

With his clear and concise answers on the CREOLETRANS web site, Dejean does
a wonderful job addressing the Corbett-land year-end FAQ on Haitian Creole.

Enjoy!

                                 -michel.

P.S.  Some of you may also relish the news that Dejean recently and
single-handedly translated Jean-Robert Cadet's _Restavec: From Haitian
Slave Child to Middle-Class American_ from English to Haitian Creole.  This
is a superb translation.  It adds poignancy to Cadet's text given that the
sad events recounted by Cadet in the initial English version were
originally experienced in Haitian Creole.  The Creole version should
(soon?) be available via the Institute of Haitian Studies at the University
of Kansas.  As far as I can tell, this is the second-longest translation
into Haitian Creole (after the Bible).  Please correct me if I am wrong.

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