TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS
•Single or several X indicate portion not readily identifiable
•Ellipses (…) indicate pauses
•Parenthetical remarks indicate:
••Discourse features such as long pauses (silence), lips smacking, laughter, external noises,
etc.,
••Variants that differ markedly from canonical forms: those that may not be readily
recognized, e.g., rimen (renmen) ‘to like’, zèv (zèb) ‘grass’, and reduced variants, e.g. s (se)
on. Note, however, that there is a general tendency toward apocope (the deletion of the final
vowel before a vowel): peye on > pey on, as well as to assimilation, in the case of front
vowels before w and back vowels. e.g. avè ou > avò w ‘with you’, santi w > santou w ‘your
scent’. For these two phenomena, full forms are not generally indicated in parentheses.
•Code switches to French are indicated in upper case letters and in bold face type: CULTURE
DE... DE... LA TERRE
• The interviewer is identified by K, and her/his questions or comments appear in italics.
• Consultant names have been deleted.
IDENTIFICATION OF CAPOIS VARIANTS
Capois variants of the following variables appear in dark red and are underlined. Their
corresponding Standard Haitian Creole (SHC) for variants 1-6 are indicated in dark red but
without underlining.
1. •Third person singular pronoun: i, y vs, SHC l, li, ni
2. •Possessive constructions
••Noun + a + noun: kanèr a malere vs. SHC kanè malere ‘poor people’s bank
account’
••Noun + a + pronoun: janm vs. SHC je m(wen) ‘my eye’
Because the presence of the preposition a may results in various phonological phenomena:
(apocope, vowel assimilation), we have chosen to represent these forms as single words. To
isolate the constituent elements would result in problems of segmentation. For example, janm
whose full form (seldom occurring) is je a mwen; if segmented, it would be j an m, that of
men a w ‘your hand’, occurring as monw, would be mon w or m on w. In nouns that end in an
and are followed by the 1st person singular pronoun m, one cannot differentiate between the
Capois and the CHS variants of the possessive, e.g., paranm vs. paran m. These cases are left
unmarked.
3.•with: ake vs. SHC avèk, avè, ak
4.•to go’: ay/èy, (a)pray/(a) prèy vs. SHC ale/al, (a)prale/(a)pral
5. •vowel raising, a > è before y: bagèy vs. SHC bagay
Note that Capois ay, apray occur in both raised (èy, aprèy) and unraised (ay, apray) variants
6. •replacement of r by w after labial consonants, p, b, f, v: pwan, kabwit, fwè, vwè vs.
SHC pran, kabrit, frè, vrè.
7. •For the following Capois particularities, corresponding SHC features are not identified by the
use of dark red:
••front rounded vowel: u vs. i, kultive vs. SHC kiltive ‘to cultivate’; eu vs. e, zyeu vs.
SHC je (also Capois zye) ‘eye’; eù vs. è: dokteù vs. SHC doktè ‘doctor’
••rounded semivowel: u vs. w, epui vs. SHC epwi ‘and then’
••syllable-final r: sèrkle vs. SHC sèkle ‘to hoe’; sometimes we represent this
consonant as a superscript to indicate very slight friction and lengthening of the
preceding vowel, perdi vs. SHC pèdi