Buckaroo: supposed African origin

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 04:01 PM 3/13/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>>On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>>>
>>>       Holloway and Vass almost certainly relied on some earlier source
>>>  for their African origin of "buckaroo/buckra." One possibility is
>>>  David Dalby's "Black through White: Patterns of Communication in
>>>  African and the New World (Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture, 1969). I'll
>>>  check this in the next day or two.
>>
>>The original source apppears to be the AS article _The Etymology of
>>'Buckaroo'_ by Julian Mason (American Speech, Feb 1960, pp. 51-55) which
>>derives the word from the Gullah word buckra (white man).
>But would Gullah count as an African source?
>
>L

No, of course not.  But you might check Lorenzo Dow Turner's _Africanisms
in the Gullah Dialect_ (1949) to see if the word is cited there as having
been derived from an African language by slaves in the Sea Island area.