Steve: ...we're only interested in how it might have started using the English language and how it might have evolved.

By studying African-American slave culture and West African religion? Why? Neither you nor English are West African.

Assume Melville read the Prophet Jeremiah and the works of Jean Calvin. Capt. Forrest certainly knew his Martial.

Your religious, maritime and classical arts literature all use one and the same word to describe it for the last 2500 years. Phoenician-Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian nautical work songs were being chanted in African ears, and by African voices, two millennia before the Middle Passage.


And Shanties?

You know what the most popular Protestant music form was for most of the 19th century.

You know the day, month and year the so-called "bulgines" were patented and the years the songbooks were published. In some cases you know individual artist and performance dates. Documented with a high degree of assurance, validated.

Those English lyrics were written by White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male "Ethiopians" not "African-Americans" or "Caribbeans."

An exceptional or unique way to address static and dynamic friction on a hoist? Need your data not Yoruba.