in which ser is equative and estar is locative. Other languages, such as Portuguese and Italian, make a similar distinction. (See Romance Copula.) Negation is used as a present tense negator: ('If the cow knew that his throat wasn't capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it') is used in the same way as English can't ('It is a poor thing that can't mash an ant') is a negative past participle. ('John did not steal the money') Orthography Patois has long been written with various respellings compared to English so that, for example, the word "there" might be written , , or , and the word "three" as , , or . Standard English spelling is often used and a nonstandard spelling sometimes becomes widespread even though it is neither phonetic nor standard (e.g. for , 'child'). In 2002, the Jamaican Language Unit was set up at the University of the West Indies at Mona to begin standardizing the language, with the aim of supporting non-English-speaking Jamaicans according to their constitutional guarantees of equal rights, as services of the state are normally provided in English, which a significant portion of the population cannot speak fluently. The vast majority of such persons are speakers of Jamaican Patois. It was argued that failure to provide services of the state in a language in such general use or discriminatory treatment by officers of the state based on the inability of a citizen to use English violates the rights of citizens. The proposal was made that freedom from discrimination on the ground of language be inserted into the Charter of Rights. They standardized the Jamaican alphabet as follows: Nasal vowels are written with -hn, as in kyaahn (can't) and iihn (isn't it?) h is written according to local pronunciation, so that hen (hen) and en (end) are distinguished in writing for speakers of western Jamaican, but not for those of central Jamaican. Vocabulary Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi (a dialect of Akan). Many loanwords come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak and African languages, as well as Scottish and Irish dialects. Examples from African languages include meaning that (in the sense of "he told me that..." = ), taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning ghost, taken from the Twi word dupon ('cotton tree root'), because