Lesson 29 of 48 · Westmoreland
Chain bare verbs together for direction, purpose and result — no 'to', no 'and', no '-ing'.
In Patois, verbs chain together directly — no 'to', no 'and', nothing in between. Each verb in the chain adds one piece of the action, like beads on a string. This is one of the deepest African features of the language (the serial verb construction). The motion verbs 'come' and 'go' work like direction markers: come = toward the speaker, go = away from the speaker. Rule 1 — chain bare verbs: Run come ya! (run come here — hurry over!); Go look fi yuh aunty (go and visit your aunty); Come nyam! (come and eat). Rule 2 — kyai or tek plus the object plus a direction verb: Kyai di basket go a maakit (carry the basket to market); Tek dis go gi yuh grani (take this and give it to your grandmother); Dem sen go call di docta (they sent for the doctor). Rule 3 — mek adds purpose or result: Tek di paki mek cup (take the calabash and make a cup); Put di pot pon di fire mek i bwile (put the pot on the fire so it boils). Rule 4 — gaan lef means went off and left: Im run gaan lef ar (he ran off and left her). And the famous four-verb chain: kyai go bring come — carry-go-bring-come — is what Jamaicans call news-carrying: Shi love kyai go bring come (she loves carrying gossip back and forth). One more: Gwaan go bade (go on and bathe); Gwaan go heat done (heat = h-eat, so: nyam done) (go on and finish eating). Common learner errors to recast: saying 'run an come' or 'tek it to go' — drop the 'an' and the 'to', it is Run come! and Tek i go. Saying 'Im run and lef har' — recast as Im run gaan lef ar. Adding -ing anywhere in the chain — never; every verb stays bare. Watch the order too: the direction verb follows the action verb — bring come when the thing moves toward you, kyai go when it moves away. Drill the chains until they feel like single words — that is how fluent speakers store them.
| Patois | Cassidy-JLU | English |
|---|---|---|
| run come | ron kom | come running, hurry over |
| bring come | bring kom | bring (here, toward me) |
| kyai go | kyai go | carry (away, to somewhere) |
| kyai go bring come | kyai go bring kom | carry-go-bring-come; carrying gossip |
| tek ... go gi | tek ... go gi | take ... and give to |
| run gaan lef | ron gaan lef | ran off and left (behind) |
| gwaan go | gwaan go | go on and (do something) |
| go look fi | go luk fi | go and visit |
| come tell | kom tel | come and tell |
| sen go call | sen go kaal | send for (someone) |
| mek | mek | make, let, so that (purpose) |
| dweet | dwiit | do it |
He calls the paratactic piling-up of verbs a characteristic Niger-Congo inheritance, names bring-come, carry-come, walk-go, send-go and run-gone as the commonest sense-groups, and gives a further-compounded chain ('You carry any more bring come?') — the lesson's kyai go bring come.
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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