The World Cup is always a privileged window into the reality of corners that we don’t always have the opportunity to see represented. Which are not always the object of the “media’s” interest or penetrate our bubbles.
The beautiful trajectory of the Cape Verde team and the success of goalkeeper Vozinha, for example, served to introduce many Brazilians to the fact that that country is Portuguese-speaking and has old and permanent connections with Brazil.
Another interesting fact that has come to light now in the group stage of the World Cup is the link between the official language of Curaçao, Papiamento (or Papiamentu), and Portuguese.
To begin with, let’s get straight to the point with the name of the language. Because papiamento is a direct derivative of our verb papear, with the meaning of “to chat”, “to talk”.
And this is not a mere coincidence.
The fact is that this language used in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (the ABC islands) is what linguistic theory calls creole: a language that arises from contact between different languages, typically during the colonial process, but is not purely and simply a mixture of them, or the result of the influence of one over another.
Creoles are small wonders of linguistics, in which communities normally deprived of formal access to education end up forging their own linguistic structure, based, yes, on other languages, but which in a very special sense is less “derivation” than “creation”.
Hence, even, the use of a term like “creole”, linked, way back, to our verb “create”.
Papiamento has bases in Portuguese, Spanish (sometimes it is even difficult to determine whether something comes from one or another of these languages) and also in the Dutch of the colonial administrators of that region.
The exact process of the historical formation of the language is still unclear. It appears to have emerged from an ancient Portuguese-based creole formed on the coast of Guinea, but it would also have been influenced by the Portuguese of enslaved people taken to sugar production in the region.
Perhaps it was the result of a triangular movement, in which enslaved Brazilians who returned to Africa took their version of the language there, which in the 18th century ended up reaching the Caribbean.
To this base are also added influences from English, local languages, such as Taíno, and African ones, such as those from the Quicongo group or Uólofe.
The history of Portuguese-based creoles (such as Cape Verdean, the first language of almost all inhabitants of the Cape Verde archipelago, typically bilingual, therefore) is infinitely rich, and much of it remains to be understood.
But, from our point of view, the wonder remains of knowing that, even though we cannot fully understand a conversation in Papiamento, or in any Portuguese-based creole still spoken around the world, we are capable of realizing that the second-person pronoun “bo” is derived from our “vós”, just as “mi” (equivalent to our “I”) arises from “me”.
Furthermore, we can see that in “mi ta stima bo” these two pronouns appear (without distinction of subject and object forms, as almost always in these creoles and, often, in Brazilian Portuguese), with the verb “estimar” duly syncopated there in the middle and that wonderful “ta” (almost certainly an abbreviated form of the verb estar, exactly as we use it), almost omnipresent in Portuguese-based creoles, as a particle that marks the imperfect or habitual present.
In other words: me + esteeming + you. In other words: I love you.
