- Citations in this and the following paragraphs are taken from Raymond Breton, Grammaire Caraibe, (Auxerre, 1667), nouvelle édition, collection linguistique américaine, tome III, Paris, 1877; and, by the same author, Dictionnaire Caraibe-François, (Auxerre, 1665), édition fac-similé Jules Platzmann, Leipzig, 1892. For the most recent stage of the Dominican dialect, I have relied mainly on Joseph Numa Rat, 'The Carib Language as now spoken in Dominica, West Indies, in JRAI, vol. XXVII (1898), pp. 293–315; but I have also taken into consideration such material as I was able to collect myself from the Creole-speaking children of Carib-speaking parents. Island-Carib forms belonging to the Central American dialect are taken from my own field-notes made in 1947–48 in British Honduras.
- Phonetically, Breton distinguishes the following vowel sounds: [i], [e],]a], [o] [u], [ü], [ȯ] (rounded mean-mid central), (‘tel que l’e feminin au françois; parce qu'il ne se prononce qu'a demy'). Orthographically—and probably phonemically—the last two are undifferentiated as ‘ê’, except that the former, when stressed, is sometimes represented by ‘eu’; (these sounds correspond, in the Central American and recent Dominican dialects, to the phoneme /o/, which is mid to high back UNROUNDED). Breton's (and modern) [ü] (his orthographic ‘u’) is clearly a variant of unstressed /u/ (his 'ou') occurring before /e/ or /i/; and it is also clear that [o] and [u] belong to the same phoneme,' /u/, in all dialects. 'On prononce la consonnante à la fin du mot, lorsqu'il s'en rencontre une autre au commencement de celuy qui suit, comme nitem loária « il s'en est allé sans luy »: on la fait couler par fois plus doucemēt.' Nevertheless, in word-final and pre-consonantal positions he employs ‘m’ and 'n' quite indifferently, so that we must assume that a component of nasalization occurring in connexion with all vowel phonemes already existed, as it certainly does in the modern dialects. Stress, in words of three or more syllables, usually falls on the antepenultimate syllable in the Dominican dialect, on the second syllable in that of Central America; but there are many exceptions, and minimal pairs show this feature to be phonemic for both earlier and later dialects.
- The frequency of /e/ has apparently decreased since Breton's time, /o/ (see footnote 2) or /i/ taking its place in a number of forms. So, Breton's ‘éloua’ ‘three’ corresponds to recent Dominican irua and to Central American órua.
- Nothing has been said here about geminated consonants because, although Breton- frequently writes them, he is quite inconsistent in their employment. So, we find ‘álla’ and ‘ála’, ‘balánna’ and ‘balána’, ‘ouáttou’ and ‘ouátou’, etc., for the same words. In the modern dialect, /tt/ and /nn/ do occur, but only by syncope of an unstressed vowel, which reappears in the same morpheme under other conditions of stress. Breton's ‘geminates’ may probably be explained by the fact that the consonant following a loud-stressed vowel is longer (in the modern dialect) than when it occurs in other environments.
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