Lesson 18 of 48 · St. Ann
Report speech and thought with seh: Im tell mi seh..., Mi hear seh...
Seh is the little word that carries all reported speech and thought — it works like English 'that', and it follows verbs of saying, hearing, thinking, knowing and seeing. Rule one: after tell, hear, know, tink, see, believe, use seh: Im tell mi seh im bex (he told me that he's angry). Mi hear seh di dance cancel (I hear the dance is cancelled). Rule two: questions love seh too: Yuh tink seh mi a idiot? (do you think I'm an idiot?) A true seh Miss P a go a foreign? (is it true that Miss P is going abroad?) A wa yuh tell har seh? (what did you tell her?) Rule three: dem seh means 'people say' — the engine of labrish, good gossip: Dem seh di road block a Fern Gully. Examples: (1) Im tell wi seh im naa come. (2) Mi hear seh yuh did sick — yuh betta now? (3) Mi know seh yuh coulda do i (I knew you could do it). (4) Yuh no see seh a lie im a tell? (can't you see he's telling a lie?) (5) Granny seh fi tell yuh howdy (granny says to tell you hello). (6) Mi believe seh rain a go fall. (7) Dem seh Nine Mile road wind op like snake. Watch the double use: seh alone means 'say' — Im seh im tiyad (he says he's tired) — and after another verb it means 'that'. Both can appear together naturally in a report chain. Common errors to recast: substituting 'that' (im tell mi that im bex — recast with seh); dropping the connector entirely; and slipping into English question order when reporting. Recast gently and have the learner replay the line. Finish with a labrish chain: you tell a two-line story, the learner passes it on — Miss Claudette tell mi seh... — keeping every seh in place. Wile wi a talk bout joining clause dem: Patois can join two clause wid notn at all inna di middle. English need 'who', 'that' or 'which' — Patois can jus set di two side by side an let dem lean pon one anodda: Di man come yeside a mi uncle (the man who came yesterday is my uncle); Mi have a fren live a Portmore; Di food yu cook nice. Weh a available fi yu use, an yu wi hear i plenty — Di man weh come yeside — but di bare version a no sloppy speech, a di older an di tighter pattern. Learn fi hear i, or yu wi mis-parse di sentence an tink two sentence run inna one.
| Patois | Cassidy-JLU | English |
|---|---|---|
| seh | se | that (after say/hear/think verbs) |
| tell | tel | tell |
| yeri | yeri | hear (older form) |
| tink | tingk | think |
| nuo | nuo | know (deep form) |
| believe | biliiv | believe |
| labrish | labrish | gossip, juicy news |
| su-su | su-su | whisper, gossip |
| pop 'tory | pap tuori | tell the story, catch up |
| a true? | a chuu? | is it true? |
| lie | lai | lie |
| dem seh | dem se | people say |
He treats se as a special case following any verb of speaking, thinking or wondering, notes that it loses full verb force and becomes tantamount to a conjunctive relative — i.e. a complementiser — and insists the pronunciation /se/ points to Akan se rather than to English 'say'.
Cassidy describes relative clauses formed by parataxis — the two clauses simply juxtaposed with no relative pronoun at all — as a regular feature of folk syntax.
The description of the grammar is checked against the published work above. The lesson, the examples and the wording are mine.
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