Seven newly discovered 18th and 19th century Virgin Islands Dutch Creole texts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC), the extinct Dutch-lexifier creole of the former Danish West Indies and current US Virgin Islands, is among the most extensively early documented creole languages of the circum-Caribbean region, having been described first by missionaries and later by fieldworkers for a period of around 250 years.However, although sources containing textual evidence on the structural history of VIDC abound, some historical stages of the language are better documented than others, and some outstanding issues remain in the study of the language.There are relatively few texts available from the earliest period of documentation (roughly, the 1730s-1750s) and from the 19 th century compared with the latter part of the 18 th century and the 20 th century.In this article, we present and discuss a set of newly discovered short VIDC texts from archival sources, recorded on St. Croix and St. Thomas, the earliest from 1757 and the latest from 1818, which, we argue, add to our knowledge of the historical sociolinguistic situation in the territory.The study illustrates some ways in which examination of archival material can shed new light on topics in Virgin Islands language history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.239 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".