Language Hat has inspired another long and fascinating comment thread by asking his multilingual lay and linguist readers to weigh in on the question of whether the label “native speaker” describes primarily one’s linguistic competence or one’s biography. Responses come from all over the sociolinguosphere.
Author Archives: Joel
Language Hat on Native Speakers
Filed under language
Pitcairn Events, 1860s to 1960s
In 1856, all 187 inhabitants of Pitcairn were resettled on Norfolk Island after the latter had ceased to be a penal colony. During the 1860s, however, some families began to return to Pitcairn, where life remained rather tranquil.
The one noteworthy event of the era was the conversion of the entire island, in 1887, to the Seventh Day Adventist faith, as the result of the visit of an American missionary of that persuasion. Otherwise, it is interesting to note that a form of parliamentary government, with seven members elected to an executive, was introduced in 1893. Yet this was a token of the changed society’s needs, for the reports of the naval officers who visited Pitcairn towards the end of the nineteenth century all spoke of the community’s deterioration, of lawlessness and lack of unity–even, in 1897, of murder!
The man who stemmed the tide of degeneration was James Russell McCoy, a great-grandson of the mutineer. The direction and purpose he gave the community, as Chief Magistrate and Chief Executive, on and off for thirty-seven years, earned the mutineer’s great-grandson an honoured and secure place in Pitcairn’s history.
In 1904 the British Consul at Tahiti, Mr R. T. Simons, visited Pitcairn and, abolishing the parliamentary system as too cumbersome for the tiny community, reintroduced the time-honoured office of Chief Magistrate, with two small committees to assist the appointees. The system, with some expansion and consolidation of judicial powers and definitions has existed until today.
By then, the only vessels calling at Pitcairn were the Seventh Day Adventist mission ship, Pitcairn, and an occasional merchantman.
Pitcairn was once more a forlorn and forgotten outpost in the Pacific, a curio of history, a small dot–two miles long and a mile wide–midway between New Zealand and Central America.
The sundering of Central America in 1914 by the Panama Canal, however, meant the end of isolation for Pitcairn. The opening of the canal placed Pitcairn on the direct shipping route to New Zealand, and brought a ship a week–many of them liners carrying hundreds of passengers.
Pitcairn was ushered back into the world, and the twentieth century.
In 1938 two Americans gave the island [reliable] radio equipment, and for the first time the Pitcairn community was in direct and permanent contact with the outside world….
Two customs both remarkable and peculiar to Pitcairn are the islanders’ style of cricket, and their public feasts.
The cricket games are spontaneous affairs. Often the morning of the match has to be spent by the younger men in cutting and chopping undergrowth to clear the “pitch” and “outfield”. Once the game is ready to start there is no limit to the number of players and no batting order. In a day, each side may bat up to seven times and by nightfall eight hundred runs will have been scored. In all probability a return match will be staged the next day, with a public dinner as the stake.
While not all may have played cricket, the whole island will be involved in preparing the feast. The Pitcairners’ gusto for eating is hearty , not to say enormous. Held generally out of doors, the feast always begins with a simple grace, round a long table laden with dishes….
The feast progresses to a quiet chorus of appreciative belching, as a complement to the hosts, while digestion is aided by steaming cups of cocoa and bran tea.
For all it is a lively and convivial time, none the less so for the absence of liquor. For Pitcairn has been dry almost since its conversion to Seventh Day Adventism.
When the guests have had their fill the party breaks up slowly. Acknowledgements are few. In such a close-knit community, much is taken for granted–in the best possible sense. “‘So long as you get enough’ is the host’s farewell and no Pitcairner would be so churlish as not to have eaten up to it.”
The last remark is pure Pitcairnese–the island dialect which is spoken by all in a rapid, almost singsong fashion. The idiom is a mixture of English and Tahitian. To visitors, the islanders speak English, softly and slightly slurred, but perfectly understandable. Among themselves, they generally speak the dialect. The same is true of Norfolk Island, where, despite the greater intrusion of outsiders in the community, the dialect has persisted, or been preserved.
In the dialect, one doesn’t say, “Good day”; one says, “Wut-a-way you.” “Goodbye” is “Toby”. “I am pleased to meet you”–“I glaid fo see you.” “How often do ships calls?”–“Now-Humuch shep corl ya?” “What food grows on Pitcairn?”-“Wut wekle groos ana Pitkern?”
“Humuch sullun levan on Pitkern?” This last, “translated”, means “How many people live on Pitcairn?”
In March 1964 there were eighty-five Pitcairners on the island, and ten “strangers”.
There can be few groups anywhere in the world living as tranquilly as the Pitcairn Islanders (except possibly their cousins on Norfolk Island), but five years ago there were 150 souls on the island.
And this today seems to be the final point in the story of Pitcairn Island: the population is gradually declining.
SOURCE: The Pitcairners, by Robert Nicolson (Pasifika Press, 1997), pp. 207-214 (originally published in 1965)
Filed under Pacific
Naipaul on Intuition vs. Ideology
Both fiction and the travel-book form have given me my way of looking; and you will understand why for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It came to me, for instance, when I set out to write my third book about India–twenty-six years after the first–that what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling. And it was the very method I used later when I went, for the second time, into the Muslim world.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry. The Indian writer R. K. Narayan, who died this year, had no political idea. My father, who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and for no reward, had no political idea. Perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humour and pity of things.
Nearly thirty years ago I went to Argentina. It was at the time of the guerrilla crisis. People were waiting for the old dictator Peron to come back from exile. The country was full of hate. Peronists were waiting to settle old scores. One such man said to me, “There is good torture and bad torture.” Good torture was what you did to the enemies of the people. Bad torture was what the enemies of the people did to you. People on the other side were saying the same thing. There was no true debate about anything. There was only passion and the borrowed political jargon of Europe. I wrote, “Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don’t have causes. They only have enemies.”
SOURCE: “Postscript: Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture [2001])” in Literary Occasions: Essays, by V. S. Naipaul (Vintage, 2003), p. 194
Filed under philosophy, travel
The Saga of Asian Language Study in Australia
Macam-Macam has posted a lengthy update on the demise of Asian language study in Australia.
When the Howard Government scrapped the highly-regarded National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy initiative (NALSAS) in mid-2002, the news received international attention. The CNN:
The Australian government has scrapped a $130 million (Aust. $240 million) 10-year funding program for teaching Asian languages in schools, four years before it was originally intended to end.
The program, introduced to Australian schools in 1996, was designed to promote the teaching of four key Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia/Bahasa Malaysia and Korean.
How bloody short-sighted. Five months later, the Bali bombings happened and South East Asia suddenly moved front-and-centre in the Australian political psyche.
The decision was especially mystifying as it came from the self-professed masters of Australian economic management – could there be anything more valuable in clinching deals and strengthening ties than the ability to speak to East Asians in their own languages?
“How bloody short-sighted” indeed! Fortunately, the program seems to have become an election issue.
Both the Federal Government and the Opposition have promised money specifically to encourage the study of foreign languages at school. The Government has budgeted $110 million for all foreign languages, while the ALP has slated $64 million for Asian language studies.
Macam-macam concludes:
The Howard Government may have done much to tackle terrorism in South East Asia since the Bali bombings of October 2002, but nevertheless I can’t stop feeling that a grave mistake in the war on terror was made 5 months earlier when funding for NALSAS was terminated. The full repercussions of that decision may not be felt for some years yet.
Let’s hope the newly returned Howard Government wastes no time before reversing this grave mistake.
Filed under Indonesia
Environmentally Determined Deforestation
UCLA biogeographer Jared Diamond and U. of Hawai‘i anthropologist Barry Rolett have published an article in Nature (23 September 2004) about pre-European deforestation on Pacific Islands. Those familiar with Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1996) will not be surprised that environmental determinism plays a major role.
The pair, whose collaboration started after Diamond visited Hawai‘i as part of UH’s Distinguished Lecture Series in 2000, coded Pacific islands for the amount of deforestation and forest replacement based on the observations of early European visitors. They used four types of statistical analysis to weigh nine variables. Predisposing islands to deforestation are
- low rainfall (which slows plant growth and increases risk from fire)
- higher latitudes (where cooler temperatures slow plant growth)
- age (because soil nutrients are lost over time)
- distance from sources of material that replenish soil nutrients (volcanic ash fallout and Central Asians dust)
- low elevation (mountains rains provide water and capture atmospheric dust, and streams carry nutrients to the lowlands)
- small and isolated [Arrgh! They mean “small size and isolation”!] (limiting diversity of tree species and inaccessible areas and reducing trading and raiding as options for obtaining resources)
While they don’t dismiss the impact of Polynesian societal practices on deforestation, Rolett and Diamond conclude that Easter Island’s collapse had less to do with improvident actions than the fragile environment. They hope to see their analysis further refined and extended to other societies and locations.
Pitcairn Marriage Practices, 1838-39
After a period of too many unruly visits by Pacific whalers, the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island became a British Crown Colony on 29 November 1838. Captain Elliott of the HMS Fly drew up a few “hasty regulations” and oversaw the election of a magistrate. (All inhabitants 18 or older could vote, women as well as men!)
The regulatory titles are interesting.
- Laws and Regulations of Pitcairn Island
- Laws for Dogs
- Law for Cats
- Law Regarding the School
- Miscellaneous
- Laws for Wood
- Laws Respecting Landmarks
- Laws for Trading with Ships
- Law for the Public Anvil &c.
But perhaps more interesting in light of Pitcairn’s current trials for sex abuse of young girls is an account of Pitcairn marriage practices when it first became a Crown Colony.
Captain Elliott had proposed that a British ship-of-war should visit the colony at least each twelve months. HMS Sparrowhawk, under the command of Captain H. Shepherd, arrived at Pitcairn Island on 9th November 1839….
At the time of the Sparrowhawk’s visit, Lieutenant James Lowry recorded that the population was then 51 males and 51 females, and that “Some of the girls and young women were very pretty, and would be considered beauties in Old England, and all were good-looking”.
Of Fletcher Christian’s only daughter, Mary Ann, he wrote: “There has been only one old maid on the island, and she is now nearly fifty, and is as cross and crabbed as any old maid need be; she rails against the early marriages most heartily.”
The last five marriages before the arrival of the Sparrowhawk show that the Pitcairners of the second generation were indeed marrying young. On 30th October 1836 there had been two marriages. Charles Christian III, aged 18, married Charlotte Quintal, aged 14, and Matthew McCoy, aged 17, married Margaret Christian, also aged 14.
In 1837 Arthur Quintal II, at the age of 21, married his fifteen-year-old cousin, Martha Quintal, on 22nd October. And on 5th November John Quintal, at 17, married Dinah Young eleven days before her thirteenth birthday. Dinah was still attending school when the warship called at Pitcairn, though by then she had a son, John Quintal III, who was born on 23rd December 1838.
There were no marriages in 1838, and the only marriage in 1839 was on 24th March, between Thursday October Christian II, aged 19, and Mary (Polly) Young, who was then only 14.
The average age of the first generation at marriage was 22 for the males and 21 for the females. However, up to this period, the average age of marriage partners of the second generation was 18 for the males and only 14 for the females.
The community was divided into thirteen family groups at the end of 1839.
After Captain Shepherd had decided several cases submitted to him for decision by the Chief Magistrate, Edward Quintal, the Sparrowhawk sailed for Tahiti on 12th November.
SOURCE: The Pitcairners, by Robert Nicolson (Pasifika Press, 1997), pp. 161-169.
The Head Heeb has been most assiduous in tracking this story. His latest post ends thus:
In the meantime, Kathy Marks looks into the roots of the scandal and argues that Pitcairn shares the oppressiveness of many small isolated communities. For better or worse, the society that Marks describes is now being shaken to the core.
The Head Heeb also notes the Pitcairn News blog by Chris Double, a Pitcairner descendent.
UPDATE: In the comments, the Swanker
Poses the question: where does one draw the line between what is culturally acceptable and what is abhorrent, no matter what the culture?”
A second draft of my reply follows:
There are both costs and benefits to being a remote British Crown Colony on the edges of a huge anglospheric Kulturkreis, but those who pay and those who benefit have been shifting as new moral standards filter out to the peripheries, along with arbitrary and erratic attempts at enforcement.
The primary early benefit of being a Crown Colony was to protect the island, and especially the women, from unruly outsiders on visiting ships. But the Crown has until now done little to protect insiders from other insiders. Pitcairn’s current travails illustrate–in nanocosm!–the dilemma of national sovereignty (or local autonomy) in the postmodern world. Is joining the UN today’s equivalent of becoming a Crown Colony?
Filed under Pacific
Good Soldier Outlier: Dregs in the Military
I entered the Army during the era of Project 100,000 (1966-1971), an attempt to enlist the military as a tool of President Johnson’s War on Poverty–and vice versa. I would call it Project Cannonfodder, but the number 1 Google hit for that term bears the discouraging subtitle, Preparing Teachers for Public Schools. (Does that mean that our nation’s public school systems now offer less opportunity for personal growth and career advancement than our nation’s military? I can believe it.)
Under Project 100,000, entrance standards were lowered in order to enable more people to qualify for the military. As Secretary of Defense McNamara declared in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1966:
The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this Nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their Country’s defense, and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.
As a result,
By [1971], 354,000 L/A [“Low Aptitude”] men had entered the Services under the program. Of these, 54% were volunteers and 46% were draftees. The men who entered under P/100000 were on average 20 years of age, about half came from the South, and a substantial proportion (about 41%) were minorities. The average reading ability of these men was at the 6th grade level with 13% reading below the 4th grade level.
In my Basic Training squad in 1969, there was a trucker from Richmond named Bragg who was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, but nevertheless a good, responsible soldier. Another soldier whose name I’ve forgotten was so exceedingly dimwitted that he had to be reminded to shower and change his clothes.
In the 95th Civil Affairs Group at Ft. Gordon, GA, two New Yorkers back from Vietnam had been juvenile delinquents. At age 17, they were each given the choice between the Army or Riker’s Island. They chose the Army, and they both ended up in Vietnam, where they discovered the dope to be far superior to what they could get in the States. O’Neill, from Queen’s, hoped to join New York’s finest, but Carter chose to go back to Vietnam’s finer grade of heroin.
A follow-up program, Project Transition, was founded in late 1967 in order to help the survivors of Project 100,000 make a transition back into the civilian workforce. I signed up for Cement Masonry under Project Transition when I was getting close to the end of my term of service (ETS date) toward the end of 1971. I picked Cement Masonry because it lasted the longest, 6 weeks (if I remember correctly). One of my fellow cement masonry classmates was a Nicaraguan journalist who spent his time in the U.S. Army as a cook because his English was so limited. Unfortunately, neither of us stood much chance of qualifying for membership in any construction union.
By that time, my Civil Affairs unit had moved to Ft. Bragg, and I was transferred to Ft. Gordon’s Personnel Control Facility (PCF), where I met a different class of Project 100,000 alumni. My job was to escort soldiers in penal custody to the mess hall, to the clinic, or to military courts. Most had just come back from being AWOL, and some had been turned in by their local sheriffs, who were said to collect a bounty from the military. If you went AWOL 3 times for a period of at least 30 days each, you could qualify for a dishonorable discharge for desertion–a surprisingly popular goal. It might take longer than getting three purple hearts to get out of a combat zone, but it was a safer alternative.
I was generally the last of those on duty to volunteer to escort prisoners because I was usually engrossed in a book. My comrades were bored and eager to take a walk. But I remember once accompanying a prisoner to face an officer who tried to convince him that, no matter how much he hated the Army, he would do better to finish his term of service than to keep going AWOL. To make his point, the officer turned to me and asked, “Outlier, do you like the Army?” I replied, “Not at all, sir!” Whereupon he turned to my prisoner, “See? Outlier hates the Army as much as you do, but he’s done his duty and will get out sooner than you will.” Somehow, I doubt my example impressed him all that much.
Naipaul on East Indians, 1965
TO BE a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metropolitan country. All immigrants and their descendants are colonials of one sort or another, and between the colonial and what one might call the metropolitan there always exists a muted mutual distrust. In England the image of the American is fixed. In Spain, where imperial glory has been dead for so long, they still whisper to you, an impartial outsider, about the loudness of americanos–to them people from Argentina and Uruguay. In an Athens hotel you can distinguish the Greek Americans, back for a holiday (special words in the vocabulary of immigrants), from the natives. The visitors speak with loud, exaggerated American accents, occasionally slightly flawed; the stances of the women are daring and self-conscious. The natives, overdoing the quiet culture and feminine modesty, appear to cringe with offence.
Yet to be Latin American or Greek American is to be known, to be a type, and therefore in some way to be established. To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region. When you think of the West Indies you think of Columbus and the Spanish galleons, slavery and the naval rivalries of the eighteenth century. You might, more probably, think of calypsos and the Trinidad carnival and expensive sun and sand. When you think of the East you think of the Taj Mahal at the end of a cypress-lined vista and you think of holy men. You don’t go to Trinidad, then, expecting to find Hindu pundits scuttling about country roads on motorcycles; to see pennants with ancient devices fluttering from temples; to see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against the usual Caribbean buildings of concrete and corrugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street names of one whole district of Port of Spain; to see the Hindu festival of lights or the Muslim mourning ceremony for Husein, the Prophet’s descendant, killed at the Battle of Kerbela in Arabia thirteen hundred years ago.
To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It is, in addition to everything else, to be the embodiment of an old verbal ambiguity. For this word “Indian” has been abused as no other word in the language; almost every time it is used it has to be qualified. There was a time in Europe when everything Oriental or everything a little unusual was judged to come from Turkey or India. So Indian ink is really Chinese ink and India paper first came from China. When in 1492 Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through the Indian corn. And so, too, that American bird which to English-speaking people is the turkey is to the French le dindon, the bird of India.
SO LONG as the real Indians remained on the other side of the world, there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over to some of the islands Columbus had called the Indies, confusion became total. Slavery had been abolished in the British islands; the negroes refused to work for a master, and many plantations were faced with ruin. Indentured labourers were brought in from China, Portugal and India. The Indians fitted. More and more came. They were good agriculturalists and were encouraged to settle after their indentures had expired. Instead of a passage home they could take land. Many did. The indenture system lasted, with breaks, from 1845 until 1917, and in Trinidad alone the descendants of those immigrants who stayed number over a quarter of a million.
But what were these immigrants to be called? Their name had been appropriated three hundred and fifty years before. “Hindu” was a useful word, but it had religious connotations and would have offended the many Muslims among the immigrants. In the British territories the immigrants were called East Indians. In this way they were distinguished from the two other types of Indians in the islands: the American Indians and the West Indians. After a generation or two, the East Indians were regarded as settled inhabitants of the West Indies and were thought of as West Indian East Indians. Then a national feeling grew up. There was a cry for integration, and the West Indian East Indians became East Indian West Indians.
This didn’t suit the Dutch. They had a colony called Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, on the north coast of South America. They also owned a good deal of the East Indies, and to them an East Indian was someone who came from the East Indies and was of Malay stock. (When you go to an Indian restaurant in Holland you don’t go to an Indian restaurant; you go to an East Indian or Javanese restaurant.) In Surinam there were many genuine East Indians from the East Indies. So another name had to be found for the Indians from India who came to Surinam. The Dutch called them British Indians. Then, with the Indian nationalist agitation in India, the British Indians began to resent being called British Indians. The Dutch compromised by calling them Hindustanis.
East Indians, British Indians, Hindustanis. But the West Indies are part of the New World and these Indians of Trinidad are no longer of Asia. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. The rituals have altered. Since open-air cremation is forbidden by the health authorities, Hindus are buried, not cremated. Their ashes are not taken down holy rivers into the ocean to become again part of the Absolute. There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. And the water that the Hindu priest sprinkles with a mango leaf around the sacrificial fire is not Ganges water but simple tap water. The holy city of Benares is far away, but the young Hindu at his initiation ceremony in Port of Spain will still take up his staff and beggar’s bowl and say that he is off to Benares to study. His relatives will plead with him, and in the end he will lay down his staff, and there will be a ritual expression of relief.*
*Cremation is now permitted; ashes are scattered in the Caroni; and Ganges water is now imported.
SOURCE: “East Indian” [1965] in Literary Occasions: Essays, by V. S. Naipaul (Vintage, 2003), pp. 38-41
UPDATE: Andrés Gentry responds with a rumination about “the fantastic effects the British Empire had on the movement of people within it.” See also Global Migration, 1846-1940.
Filed under China
Mission to Siam: Animal Tricks
On thing I love to watch in Lampang is the elephants of the teak firms working the huge teak logs that are floated down the river. At times the logs get into a jam and only the elephants are able to break up these jams. They seem to know which is the key log holding the jam in place. They work around the pile and concentrate on this one log, protesting loudly all the time. When they get to the log, they put their tusks under it and their trunks over it until it is shoved loose. Then the mahouts, or riders, bring in one or two more elephants, and the log is pulled and pushed until it is free and floated down the river. The rest of the pile is easy for these wonderful animals to handle. They work hard, and at the end of the job the skin on their foreheads is almost raw.
Charlie Munro, one of our British friends, told us about an elephant belonging to the herd he has for his work. This elephant was a female, old and clever, and was used for carrying the cook’s outfit–pots, pans, pails, et cetera. She had no rider; she was a trained animal and would follow the others. One day she apparently tired of her clattering cargo, for she arrived at the camp without a single pot or pan and with a most indifferent look. Another elephant and rider were sent back to see what had happened. All along the trail, at intervals, the man found pots and pails and baskets of provisions. She had taken these off with her trunk and deposited them on the ground. Nothing was destroyed, just junked. I think Mr. Munro said they used this elephant for other duty after that.
Another interesting thing to watch, though not as nice as the elephants, is the buzzards. In this country, buzzards are our health department. They take care of all carrion and things that, if left, would make life unbearable. They are as hideous as their jobs, but to kill them is strictly forbidden.
We also have crows, and they love to annoy the buzzards. When the buzzards have picked some piece of carrion clean and are sitting along a sandbar resting and digesting, with their wings spread out, the crows come in flocks and fly just low enough so that their feet, like landing gear, are dropped down and dragged over the heads of the buzzards. Back and forth they go, making the big garbage disposals hop out of the way. Finally the buzzards are forced to fly away. The crows then gather in a circle, with much cawing and fluttering about. They seem to congratulate each other on the routing of their enemies.
We have a pet gibbon that was given to us by some native friends. Gibbons are very near to being human, and this one, even as a baby, looked so much like a wise old lady that we named her Mae Tao, or Grandmother. I had a little house built for her on top of four ten-foot posts. To keep her close to home, we outfitted her with a harness attached to a chain about fifty feet long. This was enough to stretch to the top of the tallest tree around her house, and the chain links were small enough that they wouldn’t catch in the branches. When we installed her in her house, she stayed there for a number of days, pulling on the chain and getting her bearings, as it seemed. Then one day she went out hand over hand, exploring. From then on, there has been no end to her antics. She loves to tease one of the coolies, Ai Noi, a stolid, quiet man who puts up with a great deal from her. She also likes to harass the dog, Sen. He has learned never to come too close, or she will be on his back in a second, holding onto his long hair, and only Ai Noi can rescue him. She loves bananas, which she peels daintily and stuffs into her mouth, storing the fruit in the pouches on the sides of her jaws for future eating. She drinks water by dipping her paw–or her hand, I should rather call it–into the water and then sucking the wet paw.
Our other pets include two parrots, one small one, with a pink breast, and the other a larger bird with green and yellow feathers. Both talk well, in Lao, of course. I have never seen the big one at rest. Either he is trying to reach the small one’s roost, or he is climbing around on his own roost, talking, swinging upside down, or imitating some noise he has heard. He gives such a realistic imitation of a dog fight that one day I called to the coolie to drive away the dogs. These birds rule the back porch leading to the kitchen, and they delight in yelling the cook’s name in a fairly good imitation of my voice. One day, Lott took both birds down and let them walk around on the floor. The big one immediately went after the small one, saying, “Please just let me touch you” in a wheedling voice. But the other bird had no confidence in him and scurried across the floor to me. He climbed up into my lap and then up to my shoulder, saying all the time, “I’ll die, I’ll die.” But when he peeked safely out from under my chin, he yelled, “Nok kao, nuu ka bo’ dai,” or “you can’t catch me, old bird.”
SOURCE: Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell [1884-1968], edited with a biographical essay by Joan Acocella (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 56-58
Filed under Thailand
Mission to Siam: The Ants Come Marching …
The rains have begun. We watched the thunder storms in the valley this afternoon. It is so strange to see isolated storms dotting the country, with bright sunshine in between. Tonight, after the first rains, we saw a spectacular sight. We were watching the moonlight over the ranges when we noticed dots of light, like fireflies, here and there all over the valley. Eventually the whole valley was filled with moving points of light. We called our servants, and to them this was no mystery. After the first rains, the frogs come out by the millions, and the natives turn out by the hundreds to catch them. They use a spear made of bamboo, sharpened to a needle point, and to guide their way in the dark, they carry lanterns–the lights we saw. Frogs are a great delicacy to these people. They probably ate frog legs before the French even thought of it.
We came down from the heights this morning. Toward the end, we had to hurry, as a thunderstorm was building. We just made it to the house as the first raindrops fell. That wonderful smell of the first rains, of dust being dampened, of dry leaves plumping up with moisture–everything combined makes a wonderful odor in the air. Even the ponies rejoice. They want to run.
But the rainy season is also the season of ants, ants of every size and description. Some bite, some only crawl, but all make for the food storage closet–all except the “army ants.” The army ants are a real army, with officers and also a huge “elephant ant,” who acts as an ambulance for those with sore feet or exhaustion. These pile aboard him, sometimes three or four at a time, and off he goes, alongside the regular line. This army on the march is about six inches across the column and several yards long. It goes through the house as if the house did not exist. The ants seem oblivious to obstacles and never go around anything. Over or under is the order. If the obstacle happens to be a desk, over they go, leaving a black smudge behind them almost as if their feet were covered with tar, and this mark is as difficult to remove as if it were tar. After suffering with the army ants several times, I found that a kettle of hot water can cause them to change their route. The officer ants are amusing to watch. They tear up and down the column, shoving any stragglers back into line and probably reprimanding them too, if one could understand their language. It is a great waste of my time to have these ants march through my house, but they fascinate me.
Then there are the small biting ants that crawl into our beds in the quiet night. It takes time and a lot of activity to get them out. Another kind of ant one could almost class with scorpions. This is the mot daeng, or red ant, named after its fiery color. The natives put it in their curry; they like its sour taste. When it bites, it stands on its head, to make a greater impression, I guess. It is the most belligerent of all ants except the mot tin, or tongue ant, which is about an inch long and shaped like a tongue. The people tell me six of them can kill a man.
These visitors teach us new habits. We have learned to keep our clothes not in drawers but in closets with open shelves. That way, if a snake or scorpion or centipede has decided to make a home in your clothing, you are likely to see him before he gets to you. Also, we always shake out our clothes before we put them on. In walking around the compound, we have learned to watch our step. The other morning we heard the servants talking excitedly, and we went out to see what was going on. Two snakes were trying to swallow each other, tail first, and had formed a complete circle. The coolie solved their problem. He killed them both.
SOURCE: Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell [1884-1968], edited with a biographical essay by Joan Acocella (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 43-45
Filed under Thailand
Far Outliers 