1. For a transcription of the surviving one-page fragment of the letter, an English translation and linguistic analysis, see Efraim Frank Martinus,The Kiss of a Slave: Papiamentu's West-African Connections(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1996), pp.9–10. For analysis of the letter in the context of the development of Papiamentu, see Richard Wood, ‘New Light on the Origins of Papiamentu: An Eighteenth-Century Letter’,Neophilologus56 (1972), 18–29. The attribution of the author and recipient of the unsigned letter is by Eva Martha Eckkrammer, ‘The Standardisation of Papiamentu: New Trends, Problems, and Perspectives’,Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliqueacute;e69.1 (1999), 61 n.2. There is a photograph of the letter in Isaac and Suzanne Emmanuel,A History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles(Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), plate 78, following p.256. The original has disappeared from the archives.
2. Papiamentu also is spoken by a fluctuating Antillean diaspora group in the Netherlands of at least 70,000, and by increasing numbers of people on the Dutch—owned, English-speaking islands of St Maarten, Saba and St Eustatius. See J. C. Birmingham, Jr. ‘Lexical Decreolization in Papiamentu’,KristòfIV.2 (1977?), 49; and Eva Martha Eckkrammer (note 1), p.59.
3. There are different conventions regarding the capitalisation of the word creole. I use lowercase except when it is the name of a specific language or proto—language, such as Spanish Creole.