Linguistics

The forty-fourth entry is o crioulo, and it is one of the few words on this page that English did not lend to Portuguese but took from it. « Creole » reached us through French créole and, before that, Spanish criollo; behind criollo stands, on the usual account, Portuguese crioulo, a noun built on the plainest of verbs, criar — to raise, to bring up, to rear. In the colonial centuries the word marked where somebody had been brought up rather than where their parents had come from: the one raised on the spot, as against the one carried there. English kept the noun and left the verb behind, so « creole » now stands alone, useful and opaque, attached to a set of languages, to a cuisine and to a few communities, with nothing beside it to explain it. In Portuguese the family is still standing in daylight. Criar raises children and animals alike, a criação is the raising, a cria is the young of a beast, and o criado, the servant, is literally the one brought up in the household. Set crioulo beside those and the whole idea arrives for nothing: born here, reared here, and therefore not fetched from anywhere.