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There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the Portuguese word "gente", which has about the same meaning, as most words in Cape Verdean Creole come from Portuguese. However, the Portuguese "gente" (along with the Barlavento Creole dialects' "gente" /'ʒɛnt(ɨ)/) has a soft g [ʒ] instead of a hard g [g].

This mirrors the history of these sounds, as in Classical Latin "ge" was pronounced with a hard "g", but the timing is wrong for this to be related to its Latin roots. From what I could find, this sound change happened long before Portuguese was proclaimed as a distinct language in 1290, while Cape Verde was first inhabited in 1462.

Is anything known about where the hard "g" sound came from in gúenti? It's easy to speculate, but I wonder if anything is known more definitely. Cape Verdean Creole, while increasingly written, has in years past been mainly used orally, with the education system focused on European Portuguese instead. In most words in the Santiago dialect which have cognates with the [ʒ] sound, [dʒ] or [ʒ] are the sounds used. This is the only one I've come across with [g] instead.

Dan Getz
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    What about Spanish “gente”? – Yellow Sky Aug 28 '20 at 16:43
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    @YellowSky that's the Spanish cognate, and it too has a soft g ([x] or [h]). There's a long list of Romance language family cognates. I haven't found any yet with a hard g. – Dan Getz Aug 28 '20 at 16:46
  • (OK Wiktionary is telling me that a number of Latin-inspired constructed languages do, but I don't believe they're much used on the island of Santiago.) – Dan Getz Aug 28 '20 at 18:22
  • Doesn't development [x]/[ɣ] > [g] seem plausible and possible? – Yellow Sky Aug 28 '20 at 20:41
  • @YellowSky seems like a long shot to me, for a number of reasons, but I'm no expert. Have you found information that makes it likely? – Dan Getz Aug 28 '20 at 21:13
  • I just cannot see any other way to explain that [g]. The original Latin [g] first palatalized into [j] and then this [j] turned into [x] in Spanish, and into [ʒ/dʒ] in Portuguese. Cape Verdean Creole appeared too long ago, in the 15th century, and every word of it cannot be reliably traced back to its origin. – Yellow Sky Aug 28 '20 at 22:56
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    @YellowSky Why would Cape Verdean Creole borrow à Spanish word, though? Apart from the time when it was a colony of the Iberian Union for a couple of generations and thus technically under a Spanish monarch, Cape Verde has never, as far as I know, had much contact with Spain. Plus, close and obvious cognates from neighbouring languages often tend to be borrowed by ‘fixing’ non-existing phonemes back into their local cognate value, so if Spanish gente were borrowed, it would likely end up as /ˈʒɛntɛ/ or /ˈʒɛnti/ anyway. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 29 '20 at 08:32
  • I guess I should spell out that for me the obvious explanation is that someone with limited knowledge of written Portuguese read it incorrectly, said it a lot, and other people picked it up from them. But it's 100% speculation on my part, was hoping to find if anyone had information that points towards this or any other explanation. – Dan Getz Aug 29 '20 at 17:25
  • @YellowSky the Creole has been a creole of Portuguese for its entire existence, meaning there has been continual Portuguese influence on it. You can see that in different dialects and registers: some versions of words match modern Portuguese sounds more, others less. To your point about [x], I thought Portuguese was already using [ʒ/dʒ] before Cape Verde was a thing? If there are similar sound changes in other words in Cape Verde, that might help support that idea. – Dan Getz Aug 29 '20 at 17:32
  • The people of Cap Verde aren't of Portuguese descent but from continental Africa. Is an African etymology for this specific word possible? – Sir Cornflakes Aug 31 '20 at 13:02
  • Interestingly, I found a 2010 paper which says [dʒenti] is used in Santiago (comparing it to the [dʒinti] in Guinea-Bissau Creole). I'm quite certain that [genti] (modulo pronunciation of the "e"s) is what I've heard in Praia, so now I wonder if there's variation across the island, or what. – Dan Getz Aug 31 '20 at 14:05

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