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Bonus installment of “Random Jamaican Creole Lessons”.
Ok, here goes…
In Jamaican Creole, the following words/ terms are all homonyms:
“Mercy”
“Must be”
“Must have”
^^^Everything you see there is pronounced “mussi“.
Mercy can also be pronounced “massi”.
Explanation:
Mercy = The “r” sound is usually not pronounced in Jamaican Creole if it’s at the end of words or preceding a consonant. Just as African-Americans turned “burst” into “buss”, “curse” into “cuss” & church into chuch, we generally do that with every word like that. So, all of those words just mentioned for African-Americans are pronounced the same in JC, but generally so is every other word like that as well. Mercy is mussi or massi, work is wok, first is fuss, bird is bud, word is wud etc.,
For “Must be”…
Whenever there are two consonants such as “st” or “nd” at the end of a word, the last letter is not pronounced, so “must” is “mus”. With the word “be”, in this particular phrase, the “b” is simply deleted.
For “Must have”…
Same explanation as above for the word “must”. The word “have” in this particular example is covered by the JC word “fi”. Fi, in most use cases, means “for” or “to”. In this particular case, it’s not the ‘have’ indicating possession, but rather the ‘have’ indicating that one is engaged in something.
english Example: “He must have heard them”/ “they must have seen it”/ “she must have eaten already” etc., Instead of “must have“, it would be rendered as either just “mus” or “mus ah“(ah being have with everything deleted except the “ah” sound) or “mussi“(must fi) with the “f” in “fi” deleted.
Have a good night.
