# Paquito D'Rivera and his apostrophe **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Tags:** music\ **Created:** [March 21, 2025, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paquito-drivera-and-his-apostrophe/1015912 "2025-03-21T15:05:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2025, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paquito-drivera-and-his-apostrophe/1015912/21 "2025-03-23T14:13:11Z")
In the film _Daughters of the Dust_ is a scene listing vocabulary of Gullah Geechee words derived from African languages that had been collected by Lorenzo Dow Turner. Among the Africanisms, however, were _deloe_ ‘water’ and _diffy_ ‘fire’, which are disguised French: _de l’eau_ and _du feu_. Must have gotten there from the French Caribbean somehow. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2025, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paquito-drivera-and-his-apostrophe/1015912/22 "2025-03-23T15:20:56Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > In proper French it would be _de l’eau_ And this is not coming from proper French but from some names in the U.S. and from the apparent origin of a town name in Mississippi. There are also Americans with the name D’Lo. Lots of words have changed from their French origins, including a vast number of words in English which come from Norman French. 60% of English words come originally from some French source. Despite that, we still think of English as being in the Germanic branch of Indo-European, since the most common words are from that source. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paquito-drivera-and-his-apostrophe/1015912.md?page=1)