Jacques Arends, born in Gendt, the Netherlands, in 1952. Ph.D. from Radboud University Nijmegen. Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam. († 2005)
Fellow (1 September 2001 – 30 June 2002)
During my stay at NIAS I wrote several new chapters for my book on the history of the Creole languages of Suriname (basically Sranan and Saramaccan): an introductory chapter, a chapter on the ‘pre-history’ of the Suriname Creoles (especially, the first half of the seventeenth century), and a long chapter on the formative period of these languages (1651-1690). I also decided to include a substantial chapter on early texts in Sranan and Saramaccan, including the newly discovered Sranan text of the Peace Treaty between the colonial government and the Maroons (1762), as well as the recently published Sranan text of several documents relating to the Declaration of Emancipation (1863). Since much of the remaining text of the book had already been written by the time I came to NIAS, I expect to be able to finish the manuscript in the course of the next academic year.
I also wrote a number of articles, two of which deal with inflectional morphology in the lingua franca (both with Esther Muusse). One of the articles is on the use of court records as a source of authentic Sranan (with Margot van den Berg): one is a survey article on the role of demographic factors in Creole genesis (to appear in a Handbook of Pidgins and Creoles), and another is an essay on the ‘dehistoricization of creolization’ for a special issue of Études Créoles. I also wrote two brief articles for the Encyclopedia of Linguistics, one on pidgins and Creoles in general and one on Saramaccan.
Finally, I continued work on a co-edited Atlas of the languages of Suriname, which will be published later this year (Carlin & Arends, eds, 2002; Leiden, KITLV Press).