Richard Allsopp

http://www.scl-online.net/srrallsopp.html

http://africanamericanenglish.com/dr-richard-allsopp/
The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
 

Richard Allsopp: lexicographer and teacher
http://caribbeanchronicle.com/Richard_Allsopp.html

Richard Allsopp enjoyed one of the most significant academic and intellectual careers in the Commonwealth Caribbean. He was the leading lexicographer of the English spoken and written in the region and edited the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Though ill for a number of years he managed to finish a supplement which is due for publication soon.

He was born Stanley Reginald Richard Allsopp in 1923, in Georgetown, British Guiana, the eldest of four boys. One brother died in adolescence, the others had long and distinguished careers in public service. He won a scholarship to the leading boys’ school, Queen’s College, in 1936.

This began a long relationship with the school, for he taught there before and after he left to do a degree in England and he became its acting headmaster. There too he met Forbes Burnham, later Prime Minister, then President, of an independent Guyana. Burnham would best Allsopp in the competition for the most prestigious scholarship in 1942.

The region in the 1930s was experiencing political unrest: the Depression had, as with other agricultural economies, started in the 1920s and by the mid-1930s was leading to strikes. The demand for self-government and a federation of the British West Indian territories grew. The intellectual influences were also becoming more favourable to nationalism.

In the first two decades of the 20th century two works had been published locally on English and Creole in British Guiana. Norman E. Cameron, who taught at Queen’s College and was still there when Allsopp became a permanent member of staff, published his Evolution of the Negro (1929 and 1934) examining the African background to the history of British Guiana. A. R. F. Webber published his history of British Guiana in 1931, and West Indians were beginning to publish their writings not only in a growing number of local magazines but also abroad.

Claude McKay from Jamaica, C. L. R. James and Alfred Mendes from Trinidad would all have novels published abroad. From British Guiana, Edgar Mittleholzer would publish his first novel Corentyne Thunder in 1941. Allsopp belonged to a generation shaped and inspired to greater confidence by these events.

After briefly teaching at Queen’s College before going to England to take a degree in French at the University of London he returned to teach there and was also an extramural teacher for the newly founded University College of the West Indies. At Queen’s he was known for his exacting style of teaching. His great ability meant that in 1962, when the last British principal left, he took over the school. Unfortunately, by then British Guiana had descended into a period of violence and unrest, caused by local political rivalries and abetted by outside influences. The ethnic tensions invaded even the school, and the traumas of this period remained with Allsopp as with most Guyanese who had experienced it.

He was relieved to take up an appointment with the University of the West Indies as it had become and could not, a few years later, be tempted by Burnham’s offer to head the University of Guyana, even though several of his Queen’s colleagues had moved there.

Joining the newly established Barbados campus of the University of the West Indies in 1963 as its first lecturer in English, Allsopp was influential in its development, serving as vice-dean and chairing the division of Survey Courses and Social Sciences. The most significant of its survey courses was Use of English, which introduced students on both the other campuses, in Jamaica and Trinidad, to the varieties of Standard English and Creoles of the West Indies. He became the first public orator of the campus and served on its council and senate. In 1971 he started his Caribbean Lexicography Project. By the time he retired he was Reader but was then appointed to an honorary chair and later honoured with a doctor of letters degree.

The seeds of this project lay in a translation from French when he was an undergraduate. Allsopp’s “the rain held up” instead of “it stopped raining” met with no approval from either the lecturer or his fellow students. When he began to teach French on his return to his old school he started to collect evidence of the differences between Standard English and Standard Guianese English to help his pupils. This began his shift from French to English. He published his first articles on the topic in the new local literary journal Kyk-Over-Al, founded and edited by the poet A. J.Seymour. His new interest in language led to further academic work in linguistics: in 1958 he received a distinction for his London MA dissertation; in 1959 he attended the first International Conference on Creole languages at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and received a PhD from the University of London in 1962. All this had been accomplished while he taught full-time.

Ambitious plans to produce a West Indian version of F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage’s Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967) which was based on historical principles, soon disappeared as impracticable. The decision was made to concentrate on contemporary usage. The project, however, was directed not at the Creoles of the West Indies (basilects) but the most prestigious forms of English (acrolect) and the variety intermediate between that and Creole (mesolect).

What it did share in common with the Creole specialists was a recognition that much in the way of grammar and syntax had been inherited from Africa. It was intended to be useful in education at all levels. The collection of data involved workshops in most of the territories and was expensive. The Government of Guyana provided US$100,000 from 1975 when it seemed that the project would founder. Even Allsopp despaired of its ever being finished. Fortunately, with the support of colleagues and his third wife, Jeannette, who contributed a supplement on the French and Spanish names of flora and fauna, it was finally published in 1996.

A supplement, Allsopp’s last academic work, will soon appear. In 2004 he published A Book of Afric Caribbean Proverbs. The Lexicography Project continues under the direction of Jeannette and the French and Spanish supplements continue to appear.

Having contributed much to Caribbean intellectual life Allsopp was honoured by the Barbados Government and received the Guyana Literary Prize and a doctorate of letters from the University of the West Indies.

He is survived by his wife, Jeannette, and his four children.

Richard Allsopp, lexicographer and teacher, was born on January 23, 1923. He died on June 3, 2009, aged 86