A very rare offprint of a French-Galibi dictionary, which otherwise appeared at the end of Louis-Marie Prudhomme’s (1752-1830) Voyage a la Guiane et a Cayenne, fait en 1789 et années suivantes. This copy – with the same setting as in Prudhomme’s book but with its own separate pagination (32pp as opposed to 371-400pp) – might have been intended for travellers. The signs of use in this copy certainly suggest so.
De la langue des Indiens qui habitent la Guiane opens with a bold and derogatory assessment of Galibi (also known as Kalina), one of the several languages spoken in the region: “La langue de ces peuples est fort stérile; ils n’ont que les mots qui servent à communiquer entr’eux & à nommer ce qu’ils comprennent par le ministère des sens.” It is unsurprising that the vocabulary considered essential to the Frenchman in Guiana is covered in the space of thirty pages.
The bilingual dictionary often gives an additional explanation and examples of the usage of certain words, for example noting that the pronoun ‘my’ is not necessary when translating the sentence ‘Mon fils donne-moi mon arc.’ (p.5) Many of the words clearly have a particular local relevance, including “babioles de cuivre. Bagatelles. Caracoulis” (copper trinkets, p.7), “boisson faite avec de la patate. Mabi” (a potato-based drink, p.7), “callebasse. Touton”(calabash, p.8), “grenouille bleu. Aimicimy” (blue frog, p.17), and “Simarouba, racine contre la dyssentrie” (a natural cure for dyssentry, p.28).
The journalist and publisher, Prudhomme, was famous for founding the newspaper Les Révolutions de Paris (1789-94) also published the Voyage a la Guiane et a Cayenne in 1798. A compilation of information drawn from other sources, it contained observations on the geography, climate, flora, fauna, and indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean colony which the French had struggled to settle and make profitable over the previous century. The book also addressed the history of the colonisation of Guiana and Cayenne by the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The only copy we can find is at Harvard, where it is appended to the Liste générale des déportés par la loi du 19 fructidor (Hollis number: 990036275960203941). No other copies of the Liste générale … on OCLC mention or suggest it in the pagination.
Losier, Catherine, ‘“L’Exclusif” in Theory and Practice: French Guiana and the Eighteenth Century Atlantic Economy’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 25.2 (2021), 486–514; cf. Sabin, 66412.
