Haiti’s founders linguistically reinvented French to assert independence

Evidence

In order to create the new nation of Haiti, Dessalines and his officers invented a new verb. “Le nom français lugubre encore nos contrées,” they declared. This sentence translates roughly as “The French name still haunts our lands.” But it transformed a French adjective, lugubre— “gloomy”—into a verb. The declaration, issued on January 1, 1804, was a furious attack against the brutalities of the French, and a call for the members of the new nation to reject forever the past of empire and slavery. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1050

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the founders coined a new verb from the French adjective lugubre, a neat piece of linguistic invention.
• CANDY: A fun, tweetable shareable: the founders of Haiti grammatically broke French to declare independence.