Empty bag cyaan tan up.

Traditional Jamaican proverb · taught in Westmoreland

Written in Cassidy-JLU

Emti bag kyaahn tan op.

Word for word

An empty bag can't stand up.

What it actually means

A hungry person cannot hold themselves up or do the work — feed people first.

How it is built

single-clause indicative, metaphor

The bag stands in for the person and is never explained as one; cyaan carries the whole of cannot in a single syllable.

Where it comes up

This one is taught in Westmoreland.

More proverbs

Young cock crow after ole cock.The young one crows in imitation of the old: children copy what they see their elders do, so mind what you do in front of them.

Wata more dan flour.Too much water and not enough flour, so the dumplings cannot be made — times are hard and what you have is stretched too thin.

Yu neva miss di wata til di well run dry.You don't value what you have until it's gone.

Belly full, potato hab kin.The satisfied become choosy and ungrateful — full people find fault with food.

Sources

Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (1961), p. 83 [fieldwork 1952–59]
Quoted here for its pronunciation: Cassidy gives 'Empty bige cyan 'tan' up' as evidence of the older /baig/ for bag. This entry uses the everyday spelling.
Peter Unseth, Proverb Studies: A Practical Manual (2025, version 1.0), p. 82 [CC BY-NC]
The grammatical categories this description uses — clause type, mood, and the sound patterning noted where it carries the proverb — follow Unseth's framework for describing a proverb rather than only translating it.

The proverb is folk material. The description of how it is put together follows the framework in the work above; the translation and the commentary are mine.

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