Category Archives: language

by Joel | 20 August 2009 · 6:44 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Shiridako, Dani

After arriving at Chubu International Airport and overnighting in a business hotel near Nagoya Station, we initiated our Japan Rail Passes and headed straight for Hiroshima, eating mini ekiben for breakfast. We arrived on the Hikari around 10 am, stashed our bags in a coin locker, and hopped the next local for Miyajimaguchi, where we caught the JR ferry to Itsukushima. After wandering along the waterfront a bit, we took the Miyajima Ropeway up to its terminus, where a sign warned us “Now, monkeys are around here“! And so they were. Most seemed to be on siesta, but that didn’t keep us from indulging in a few linguistic monkeyshines.

尻胼胝 shiridako ‘ischial callosities, butt callus’ – The “Japanese monkey body” chart (at right) taught me yet another homonym for tako, in addition to 蛸 ‘octopus’ and 凧 ‘kite’. The term shiridako ‘ischial callosities’ is written in katakana on the chart, but tako ‘callus’ or ‘callosities’ can also be written with kanji: 胼胝 (Sino-Japanese) hen + chi, each of which means ‘callus, corn’. (When I was a kid, I thought chirigami ‘scrap paper [塵紙], toilet paper’ was shirigami [尻紙] ‘ass paper’.) How many of my readers (apart from Matt of No-sword) knew how to translate ‘ischial callosities’ into Japanese?

ダニ dani ‘tick, mite’ – We saw a monkey extracting a tick from a deer’s ear, and a nearby park employee explained that the monkeys rarely get ticks because they groom each so often (he used the word グルーミング guruumingu), but that the deer can’t keep the ticks off so well. Fortunately, the monkeys are willing to help. We saw the monkey in the photo roll the tick between its palms after extracting it, as if it was cleaning it to eat, but the employee said the monkeys don’t eat the ticks. The word he used for ‘tick’ was dani, which actually covers both ticks and mites (the Acari subclass of Arachnids). It can be written with several different kanji: 蜱, 螕, 壁蝨. The literal meaning of the last combination is ‘wall-lice’ kabe-shirami and the only compound listed under the last kanji in my New Nelson character dictionary is 蝨潰し shiramitsubushi ni (lit. ‘lice-crushingly’) ‘one by one, individually’.

The park employee had been sitting next to a whiteboard on which tourists from various places had written “Do not feed the monkeys” (or some variation thereof) in a score of languages. I asked him whether I could add another couple of languages to the signboard. He said I would first have to write them down in his notebook first, so that he could recreate the corresponding text if it got wiped off the sign. So I wrote two new entries in his notebook, providing rough glosses for each significant morpheme. He said the Romanian should go with the other European languages in the right column, and the Tok Pisin should go with the Asian and other languages on the left column. Here’s what the sign looked like after I finished.

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by Joel | 1 August 2009 · 4:21 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Nisshoku, Shironiji, Tatsumaki

I’ve just returned from Japan, still jet-lagged, with a harvest of about 600 photos to sort through and dozens of new words. The weather was terrible almost the whole time, and so I’ll start with a few of the meteorological terms I gleaned on this trip.

日食 (or 日蝕; see below) nisshoku ‘solar eclipse’ (lit. ‘sun eating’) – We arrived at Kokura station in Kita-Kyushu to find many bystanders glancing up at the solar eclipse in progress, in a cloudy sky between rainstorms (the previous day and the following day). We had arrived there by rail pass via bullet train on a diversionary quest en route from Hiroshima back to Nagoya. Flooding had closed train lines between Hiroshima and Kokura the previous day.

Our quest was first to find the site of my hilltop home and kindergarten 55 years earlier, where my father began his first job after Japanese language school in Tokyo as a missionary chaplain of Seinan Jo Gakuin. His Japanese teacher there was the head of the English Dept., who used to translate my father’s sermon drafts into flowery, archaic Japanese using vocabulary that students would sometimes later ask him to explain. That prompted my father to begin writing his own drafts in Japanese, using a more down-to-earth style that he still employs in both Japanese and English, whether preaching or conversing.

We finally found both sites after talking with a teacher in the current Mt. Zion Kindergarten, which now stands on the site of a once-separate kindergarten for burakumin children in the neighborhood, along the road to Tobata. The kindergarten I attended was for school employees, and has since been replaced by a swimming pool. The teacher’s husband had attended the same kindergarten during the 1950s, and she was the only person I queried who knew anything about the history of the school going that far back.

白虹 hakkou, shironiji ‘corona, fog bow’ (lit. ‘white rainbow’) – We spent the rest of the afternoon sightseeing in quaint old Mojikō (‘Moji Port’), which advertises its Retro attractions. (On the way there, we mistakenly got off at Moji Station, home of the equally retro Beer Masonry Museum.)

In front of well-preserved Mojikō Station is an unusual statue of three boys at work harvesting wakame, with a poem on the pedestal by a writer whose pen name is (横山)白虹 Yokoyama Hakkou (1899–1983). The poem reads 和布刈る / 神の五百段 / ぬれてくらし (wakame karu / kami no ihodan / nurete kurashi), which I suppose one could translate as ‘The 500 steps to the gods of the wakame harvest lead a wet life’. Better suggestions are welcome.

竜巻 tatsumaki ‘waterspout, whirlwind, tornado’ (lit. ‘dragon roll’) – In addition to all the news reports of rainstorms and flooding, we saw one report about a rare tornado cutting a swath through Tatebayashi, a city in the panhandle of Gunma Prefecture just south of where we lived in 2005–2006 in Ashikaga, on the edge of the Kanto Plain outside Tokyo.

UPDATE: Reader Doc Rock notes that the character for ‘eat’ (or ‘food’) that appears in ‘eclipse’ has another possible shape in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: 蝕 ‘eclipse, occultation’, with the phonetic element (Sino-Jp. shoku) on the left and the semantic element (虫, ‘bug’) on the right. (The ‘bug’ radical usually occurs on the left or the bottom of characters containing it.) In native Japanese, the same kanji can be read mushiba(mu) ‘to be wormy, bug-eaten; to gnaw into, undermine’. In Sino-Korean, 日蝕 ‘sun eclipse’ means ‘solar eclipse’, while 日食 ‘[land of the rising] sun food’ means ‘Japanese food’ (Jp. 和食 washoku).

Note that the Chinese character for ‘rainbow’, 虹, also has a ‘bug’ radical. Why would early Chinese scribes have associated such magical meteorological phenomena as eclipses and rainbows with creepy-crawly creatures? (And barbarians: 蛮 Ch. man, Sino-Jp. ban!) Weather phenomena are more typically written with radicals associating them with ‘sun’, ‘rain’, ‘water’, and so on.

I am not at all sure, but there are striking parallels in many Austronesian languages, where certain unusual “prodigies of nature” tend to be marked by prefixes that often have shapes derivable from *qali- or *kali- (although there is much variation and irregularity). Compare three words for ‘butterfly’: Brunei Malay kulimpapat, Tagalog alibangbang, and Gedaged (PNG) kilibob. The same prefix tends not to be found on words for much more common and familiar creatures, such as ‘flies’ (Mal. langau), ‘lice’ (Mal. kutu), or ‘mosquitoes’ (Mal. nyamuk).

Now compare three Austronesian words for ‘whirlwind’: Malay kelembubu, Tagalog alimpuyo, and Lakalai (PNG) kalivuru. The same prefix tends not to be found on words for normal phenomena like ‘fire’ (Mal. api), ‘rain’ (Mal. hujan), or ‘wind’ (Mal. angin).

The Austronesian patterns have been analyzed rather comprehensively by University of Hawai‘i Professor Robert Blust in his (2001) “Historical morphology and the spirit world: the *qali/kali- prefixes in Austronesian languages” in Issues in Austronesian Morphology: A Focusschrift for Byron W. Bender, ed. by J. Bradshaw and K. Rehg, pp. 15-73 (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics).

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, language, travel

by Joel | 7 July 2009 · 9:06 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Teas, A Bug, OMG

Anybody who’s paid attention to my latest batch of Flickr photos will know that I took a short trip to Korea in June. Unfortunately, the rudimentary Korean I had learned before my last visit there on a wonderful junket in 1995 had faded to the point that I felt rather frustrated by my inability to say very much, despite my ability to read and sound out far more words in hangul than I can understand. However, I did manage to pick up a few new Korean words for things I ingested, plus one new Chinese expression that showed up repeatedly in the subtitles of an in-flight movie too silly to listen to.

This time I learned the names for two new Korean teas, one of which I’m sure I sampled during my last visit back in 1995.

오미자차 omija cha (五味子茶) ‘five flavor berry tea’ is made from Schisandra chinensis (Ch. wǔ wèi zi, Jp. gomishi), whose flavor, as its common name implies, is supposed to be sweet, tart, salty, bitter, and aromatic all at once. I found it to very refreshing.

솔잎차 ‘pine leaf (= needle) tea’ (松葉茶) is written sol ip cha but is often romanized solnip cha and it sounded to me like sollip cha (and not sorip, as it would normally be with an /l/ between two vowels). This tea was was also refreshing, mildly aromatic, not sweet, and only slightly bitter. The native Korean root for ‘pine’ is sol- in ‘pine needle’ (솔잎 sol-ip) but is truncated to so- in ‘pine tree’ (소나무 sonamu). The Sino-Korean root is song-, as in ‘pine flower/pollen’ 송화 song-hwa and ‘pine dumplings’ song-pyeon (served at Chuseok). It is cognate with (Mandarin) Chinese sōng and Sino-Japanese shō (as in shōchikubai ‘pine-bamboo-plum’). (I revised this paragraph in response to Doc Rock in the comments.)

번데기 beondegi ‘chrysalis, pupa’ (borrowed into Jp. as ポンテギ pontegi) – In 1995, I got the chance to sample fried grasshoppers, thanks to a little old lady selling them by the parking lot at Sokkuram Grotto in Gyeongju. This year, I came across cooked silkworm pupae on sale by the footpath to Jeondeungsa temple complex on Ganghwa Island. I was surprised that several others in the group I was with sampled them. They’re more chewy than crunchy, high in fat, fiber, and calcium, and not too salty. They used to be a very popular snack in Korea—for kids as well as adults. They were also eaten in China. Nowadays, they’re much more commonly used to feed koi (carp), turtles, lizards, and chickens.

我的天 wǒ de tiān ‘OMG’ (lit. ‘my heaven’) seemed to be a signature opening dialogue tic in the Chinese subtitles of Bride Wars, an in-flight movie I tried hard to sleep through on the long flight back via Narita. (I won’t blog about my trip to Narita-san Temple during my long layover, since I’ve already put so much effort into enhancing its Wikipedia article. Wikipedia and Flickr have been soaking up most of my blogging energy these days.)

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Filed under China, food, Korea, language, travel

by Joel | 21 June 2009 · 8:35 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kawaigaru = Itaburu

In most contexts, Japanese 可愛がる kawaigaru means ‘to dote on, to fondle, to caress’, but for novices in a sumo stable, kawaigaru is a synonym of いたぶる itaburu ‘to torment, to harass, to tease’, as Mongolian ozeki Harumafuji explains in an interview that appeared in the Taipei Times.

Harumafuji, who last month won Japan’s major tournament, recalled the pain and tears that toughened him up in the nine years since he arrived from his native Mongolia with no money and not a word of Japanese….

In sumo, kawaigari means “crying, then being forced to stand, then being beaten again. It’s not simple to express with words because it’s a physical experience,” he said.

But it’s not just the beatings that steel the wrestlers in the quasi-monastic life of the sumo stable, where the fighters forfeit much of their personal liberty and embark on a grueling daily routine.

The younger wrestlers start the day at 3am cleaning the stable, washing their seniors’ loincloths and preparing meals. They are banned from watching television and using cellphones, and receive only modest pocket money.

Harumafuji said he found it toughest to get used to a diet heavy on fish — which has sent some of his mutton-eating compatriots running to the Mongolian embassy to escape Japan — served in huge quantities of 10,000 calories a day.

“Everyone says going on a diet is hard, but I think gaining weight is so many times more difficult,” he said. “Eating was the scariest, and my most painful experience.”

“I’m thin by nature, so I really had a hard time to eat in the beginning. I ate and I vomited. Ate and vomited. Your stomach expands when you do that, so I was forced to eat until I vomited,” Harumafuji said. “When I vomited, there would be someone already waiting with food, and I was forced to eat again.”

The force-feeding helped boost the 1.85m athlete’s weight to 126kg from 86kg — still about 30kg lighter than the average top division wrestler….

As fewer young Japanese sign up for the harsh life of the sumo stable, the sport’s 700-strong elite now include men from China, South Korea, Eastern Europe and as far away as Brazil and the Pacific island state of Tonga.

Geez. That seems to shed new light on the after-sumo career of another diminutive rikishi, Mainoumi, which included a stint as a traveling gourmet as well as general TV personality.

(I hope the Brazilian and the Tongan make it to the upper ranks soon! Surely the Tongan won’t have to get used to eating fish.)

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Filed under Japan, language, Mongolia, sumo

by Joel | 23 May 2009 · 11:27 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Irimoya, Shikorobuki

Since February this year, I’ve been doing a lot more Wikiputtering and Flickring than blogging, thanks to a few stimuli (about which more later) that led me to volunteer to add photos to Wikimedia Commons in order to illustrate as many of the landmarks as I can in Wikipedia’s National Register of Historic Places listings in Oahu. Well, one thing led to another, and now I’m editing or creating Wikipedia entries for some of those properties and for some of the architects who designed them.

Makiki Christian Church, Honolulu

In the process, I’ve learned a lot more about how WikiProject teams work, and a hell of a lot more about the local history and architecture of Oahu. While I don’t believe that people can’t see what they can’t name (an extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), I readily agree that linguistic categories help assign social significance to our perceptions. In fact, that’s what my little Wordcatcher Tales are all about. So here goes another.

By way of introduction, I have to confess that I have known the Japanese word yane ‘roof’ from when I was a child, but that it somehow never occurred to me—growing up subliterate in one of my childhood languages—to wonder about its etymology: 屋根 ‘house-root’, a roof over one’s head being the most basic of housing requirements. A more comprehensive list of glosses for 屋 ya would include ‘roof, house, shop, dealer’. One of my favorite examples of the last gloss in the list is 何でも屋 nandemoya ‘(whateverer, dealer in whatever =) jack of all trades’.

Hawaii Shingon Mission, Honolulu

入母屋 irimoya ‘entrance-mother-roof’ – It was photographing and then creating a separate Wikipedia entry for Hawaii Shingon Mission that sucked me into a miniresearch project on Japanese roof styles, especially the 入母屋 irimoya style, which seemed at first exotic but turns out to be pan-Buddhist, according to Japanese Wikipedia, which includes images from China, India, Korea, and Laos, and also mentions Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The irimoya is a hip roof (sloping down on all four sides) integrated with a gable roof over the central portion. So it can be glossed as a hip-and-gable, gablet, or (more ambiguously) Dutch gable roof. According to JAANUS, the gabled part covers the central 母屋 moya ‘mother-hall’, while the hipped part covers the eaves (廂 hisashi) that shelter the corridor that often surrounds one of more sides of the main hall. So perhaps the 入 iri ‘enter’ refers to the portion of the roof that extends over the potential entrance ways.

錣葺 shikorobuki ‘neckguard-thatch’ (also 錣屋根 shikoroyane ‘neckguard-roof’) – A related hip-and-gable roof style consists of a central gabled roof surrounded by a separate protective hip roof. On samurai helmets, the shikoro is the extension that protects the nape of the neck (which I’ve also seen translated as havelock). One can see how the shikorobuki style might be easier to build than the irimoya style when working with thatch, but 葺 fuki no longer means just ‘thatch’. Now it applies to any roofing material, so that 葺き替える fuki-kaeru (‘roofing-change’) is much more likely these days to mean ‘retile’ or ‘reshingle’ than ‘rethatch’.

Koganji Tendai Buddhist Temple, Honolulu

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, language, religion

by Joel | 27 April 2009 · 8:37 am

Hawaiian Names for Proofreading Symbols

One of my side jobs during graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i—after using up both my G.I. Bill allotment and my graduate assistantship eligibility before finishing my dissertation—was double-proofreading publications full of technical jargon and tabular matter. In double-proofing, one person reads aloud from the copyedited manuscript while the other reads along looking for errors on the galley proofs. To make sure everything matches exactly, you have to read aloud not just every word, but every piece of punctuation. In that capacity I either read aloud, or listened while eyeballing many an issue of the journal Pacific Science: pronouncing every scientific binomial, every abbreviation, every superscript and subscript, every change in type style, and every scrap of punctuation. It was often weirdly amusing, once you got punch-drunk on the stream of critical sounds with rarely a digestible message.

I was reminded of this when I saw the following sign showing the Hawaiian names of punctuation, diacritics, and proofreading symbols used in early Hawaiian printing, which began in 1822 and built up a huge legacy (ho‘oilina) of written records before almost dying out a century and a half later. I imagine there was a lot of double-proofing going on during the earliest days.

Na inoa o na kiko a me na kaha

I believe the title Nā inoa o nā kiko a me nā kaha — Kūpono i ke kākau a me ke pa‘i ‘ana can be translated as ‘The names of the dots and lines — Proper in writing and printing’. (Nā is the plural article, ke or ka is the singular.)

Two of the terms are borrowed directly from English: koma ‘comma’ and kolona ‘colon’. But most of the rest describe either the shape or the function of the symbols.

Nā kiko: The semicolon is kikokoma ‘dot-comma’; the period/full-stop is kikokahi ‘dot-one’ (in head-modifier order); the question mark kikonīnau is ‘dot-question’; the exclamation point kikopū‘iwa is ‘dot-startle’; the apostrophe is komaluna ‘comma-high’; and quotation marks are kāunakoma ‘cluster.of.four-comma’. The last is my favorite by far. In the Pacific Islands, it is very common to count the larger sorts of gathered foods that one person can carry home—like coconuts, tubers, or fish—in clusters of four such items strung together.

Nā kaha: The hyphen is kahamoe ‘line-lying.down’; the dash is kahamaha ‘line-pausing’; the acute accent is leopi‘i ‘voice-ascending’; the grave accent is leoiho ‘voice-descending’; the macron is leolōihi ‘voice-long’ (cf. loa ‘long’); the breve is leopōkole ‘voice-short’ (cf. poko ‘short’); the circumflex is leo‘uwo ‘voice-splice/interweave’ (or possibly leouwō ‘voice-loud’); and the diacritic marking diaerisis is ka‘awaleleo ‘separate-voice’.

In the 1986 Hawaiian Dictionary, Pukui and Elbert call parentheses or brackets kahaapo ‘mark-embrace’, but this older chart labels a pair of square brackets as simply nā apo ‘brackets’ and a pair of parentheses as apowaena ‘bracket-middle’. A single curly bracket is labelled hui ‘group, union’.

Marks more specific to proofreading include the section mark, palena ‘boundary, partition’; the paragraph mark, po‘ohou ‘head-new’; the strikethrough, ‘ōlelowaiho ‘word-omit’; and the caret, poina ‘forgotten’, which shows where to insert new text. (Pukui & Elbert call the caret puamana, perhaps from the ‘issue, emerge’ sense of pua usu. ‘flower, blossom’ and the ‘branch out, fork’ sense of mana usu. ‘power, authority’.)

Finally, there is the pointing finger, limakuhi ‘hand-point’, corresponding to nota bene (and perhaps also cf., q.v., see also).

UPDATE: Another poster at the Mission Houses Museum lists the names of the earliest Hawaiian printers: John Papa I‘i, Henry Tahiti, George Kapeau, Richard Kalaaiaulu, S. P. Kalama, Paahuna, Kaumu, Kawailepolepo, and the Kawainui brothers.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language, publishing

by Joel | 18 April 2009 · 5:13 pm

Wordcatcher Tales from the Merrie Monarch

Each year the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, Hawai‘i, showcases the best of the best in Hawaiian hula, which nowadays includes performances by hālau from overseas, where some of the top hālau have branches. I haven’t watched it that regularly, but it is easier now that KITV in Honolulu offers a special Merrie Monarch website with stories, slideshows, and streaming video.

Hawaiian hula has a lot of distinctive terms and cultural practices that are usually not translated into English. Kaua‘i’s Ka ‘Imi Na‘auao O Hawai‘i Nei has a helpful webpage that explains the principal roles and responsibilities within a hālau. And Hula Traditions has a useful page naming and explaining dozens of different types of hula. Thanks to KITV’s helpful video captioning, I also picked up a few new words this year.

Each Merrie Monarch Hula Kahiko has three formal segments (like a concerto), introduced by an oli (‘chant’), which can be intoned by either the ‘olapa (dancers) or the ho‘opa‘a (‘memorizer’, chanter, drummer, maestro). In the individual Miss Aloha Hula competition, however, the dancer is judged on both her oli and her hula, so she must perform both. The center of each hula is the mele, the processional/lead-in movement is called the ka‘i, and the recessional/exit movement is called the ho‘i. The spectators are not generally expected to remain silent between the movements, and they often break into cheers as the mele gets underway.

I like the traditional Hula Kahiko (‘ancient’) much more than the modern Hula ‘Auana (‘wandering, straying’), and only watched the Kahiko performances this year. One of my favorites among the Wahine Kahiko was Kumu Kapua Dalire-Moe’s Hālau Ka Liko Pua O Kalaniākea‘s “Kaulilua I Ke Anu Wai‘ale‘ale,” a hula pahu (to drum beat) that was performed at the coronation of King David Kalākaua, the Merrie Monarch himself. I liked the subdued costumes, stately movements, and excellent synchrony. Very suitable for a coronation.

But I was also utterly entranced by Kumu Rae K. Fonseca’s Hālau Hula ‘O Kahikilaulani (Hilo hometown favorites), whose Kane Kahiko and Wahine Kahiko performances both took wonderfully vigorous advantage of the percussive effects of the wooden stage itself.

The first authentic hula I can remember seeing was in the early 1970s at Hawai‘i Loa College, where a seemingly frail ‘Iolani Luahine performed a vigorous Kane Kahiko, even slapping her chest and biceps. In fact, she was instrumental in preserving and passing on many of the key elements of men’s hula.

UPDATE: Well, the judges really went for the hula ma‘i, which traditionally celebrated the chiefly genitals at the birth of a new heir. Hula ma‘i are performed later in the evening and are full of suggestive movements and rich double-entendres. Language proficiency has become ever more important in evaluating Hawaiian hula compositions and performances. The hula ma‘i performed by the women of Kumu Sonny Ching’s Hālau Nā Mamo O Pu‘uanahulu was indeed very finely executed, and the performance by longtime veteran Kumu O’Brian Eselu’s Ke Kai O Kahiki was by far the most athletically demanding and the most lascivious men’s hula I have ever seen. In fact, the men and women of Ke Kai O Kahiki were the overall winners, while those of Hālau Nā Mamo O Pu‘uanahulu took second place.

Ke Kai O Kahiki means ‘The Sea of Tahiti’ and would have been *Te Tai O Tahiti before *t shifted to /k/ in what later evolved into Standard Hawaiian. But the title of the suggestive mele in the hula ma‘i performed by the men of Ke Kai O Kahiki was Tū ‘Oe, which preserves the earlier *t. (If tū corresponds to kū ‘stand tall’, perhaps the title might be translated as “Get it up, you!”)

Now, there’s another suggestive mele full of both double-entendres and instances of /t/ in place of /k/ (but /k/ as well). Tewetewe ‘back and forth’ is ostensibly about the little red-tail goby fish (‘o‘opu hi‘ukole). I wonder if the use of the old-fashioned /t/ in both mele is just coincidental.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language, music, Polynesia

by Joel | 8 April 2009 · 9:43 pm

Tokelauan Diaspora Language Revival

The Far Outliers recently had the chance to attend a Polynesian music and dance performance by Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika ‘The Future of Tokelau in America’, and I’ve added a few photos of it to my Flickr account. They recently won the Po Fatele competition at the Tokelau Festival in New Zealand. One thing that appealed to me about the performance was the combination of vigorous dance and wonderful Polynesian choral harmonies at the same time. You don’t get that combination so much these days in Hawai‘i, although you can hardly beat the vocal harmonies at the Kamehameha Song Contest or the hula at the Merrie Monarch Festival each year. Two other nice features of the Tokelauan troupe were the youth of the performers, the youngest of whom were learning by doing, just as they would in a less formal village setting; and the atoll-authentic percussion instruments: a slit-gong (pate), a biscuit tin (apa), and a wooden box (pokihi).

The background story about how this group got started is chronicled by two linguists, Yuko Otsuka and Andrew Wong, in an article in Language Documentation & Conservation 1, no. 2 (December 2007), from which I’ll excerpt a few of the highlights:

Tokelauan is a Polynesian language closely related to Samoan. Together with English, it is an official language of Tokelau, an island territory of New Zealand, with approximately 1,400 speakers (Gordon 2005). The total number of speakers of Tokelauan is estimated to be approximately 4,000, including those living in American Sāmoa, New Zealand, and the United States. The first missionaries came to Tokelau from Sāmoa. Noting the resemblance of the language spoken on the islands to Samoan, they decided to use the Samoan Bible instead of translating it into Tokelauan. Thus, Tokelauans read the Samoan Bible till this day….

Like many other Polynesian peoples, more Tokelauans live outside their homeland than in it. The vast majority of Tokelauans reside in New Zealand. According to the 2001 census, 6,200 Tokelauan people live in New Zealand. That is four times larger than the population in the homeland. Sixty-six percent of them were born in New Zealand. In 2001, only 44 percent of those living in New Zealand were reported to be able to hold an everyday conversation in Tokelauan, down from 53 percent in 1996 (Statistics New Zealand 2005). These figures suggest that language maintenance outside Tokelau is crucial to ensuring the future of the Tokelauan language….

Tokelauans in Hawai‘i come from Olohega (also known as Swains Island), the southernmost atoll of the Tokelau island group, which lie three hundred miles north of Sāmoa. Geographically, the Tokelau group consists of four atolls: Atafu, Fakaofo, Nukunonu, and Olohega. Politically, however, only the first three belong to Tokelau, an island territory of New Zealand. These islands became a British protectorate in 1889 and were transferred to New Zealand administration in 1925. Olohega followed a separate course of history. In 1856, an American, Eli Jennings, came to Olohega with his Samoan wife and turned it into his private copra plantation. In 1925, Olohega was annexed to the United States and was placed under the jurisdiction of American Sāmoa.

Jennings’s son imposed forced labor on all residents of Olohega. In 1953, the residents of Olohega went on strike in protest to the violations of civil and labor rights. They drew up a petition and submitted to the American Sāmoa attorney general. In response, the acting Governor ordered a state-sponsored eviction of over half the population of Olohega. Many families ended up as refugees in Pagopago, American Sāmoa. Living there was not easy for Tokelauans. Even though they were American nationals by virtue of the annexation, Samoan law precluded them from owning land or businesses. The hardship of life in Sāmoa turned their eyes to the United States (Ickes 1999, 2002). In the 1950s, a student from Olohega, who was on scholarship at the Lā‘ie Community College (today’s Brigham Young University Hawai‘i), saw the opportunities in the pineapple plantations in Central O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He sent for his brothers and they brought their families to live in the plantation labor camps provided by Del Monte (Ickes 1999, 2002)….

Since 2004, the Tokelauan community in Wahiawā, Central O‘ahu, has been making active efforts to revitalize the Tokelauan language as well as culture within the community. Two organizations play a key role in initiating and promoting the community’s efforts for language maintenance: Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika (The Future of Tokelau in America) and Te Taki (The Guide) Tokelau Community Inc.

In July, 2004, a youth group from Tokelau visited Honolulu on their way to the Palau Pacific Arts Festival. They performed for the Tokelauans who hosted them in Wahiawā. This encounter sparked a keen interest among the Tokelauan youth (teenagers and young adults) of the community in their Tokelauan heritage. They were deeply impressed by the richness of their cultural heritage and at the same time were shocked to realize that they knew very little of it. The children asked their parents why they had never taught them their own language and culture. It was a rude awakening not only for the children, but also for the parents, who had not seen any value in teaching their children Tokelauan, thinking that they would be better off with English.

This incident led to a sudden awareness among young members of the community that the language was gradually disappearing within the community. Deeply moved by the children’s yearning to learn their heritage, two young parents started a Saturday school to teach the Tokelauan language as well as songs and dances. This is how Te Lumanaki o Tokelau i Amelika came into being. The elders of the community welcomed the opportunity to share their knowledge of the language and culture. As it turned out, they had long been concerned about language loss, but had never voiced their concerns until then. Te Lumanaki’s Saturday morning gatherings thus brought together an intergenerational group of Tokelauans who were eager to share the language, songs, and dances.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language, migration, music, New Zealand, Polynesia, U.S.

by Joel | 7 April 2009 · 8:42 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kipuka

I learned a new English borrowing from Hawaiian today, a scientific term probably borrowed around the same time as the terms for two types of lava: clinkery aa (a crossword-puzzle favorite, from Hawaiian ʻaʻā) and smooth pahoehoe (from Hawaiian pāhoehoe). Kipuka shows up as a headword in the Encyclopedia Britannica and in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (unabridged). English Wikipedia, however, spells kipuka, aa, and pahoehoe with all their Hawaiian diacritics, as if they have never been assimilated into English orthography and usage.

Here’s an English definition from the introductory paragraphs of “Soil-Vegetation Relationships in Hawaiian Kipukas” by D. Mueller-Dombois, and Charles H. Lamoureux in Pacific Science 21(1967):286-299.

KIPUKA, the Hawaiian word for “opening,” has come into scientific usage as a term used to designate an older area on the slopes of volcanic mountains that has been surrounded by more recent lava flows. Kipukas are common landscape features on the slopes of Mauna Loa and Kilauea volcanoes on the [Big Island] of Hawaii, where they can be readily recognized as islands of denser vegetation in the vast, sparsely vegetated areas. They range in size from a few square meters to hundreds of acres.

Kipukas are of special interest for several reasons. As vegetation islands they provide seedsource centers for the invasion of vegetation on new volcanic material. As vegetation islands they represent somewhat simplified ecosystems, analogous to bogs or lakes, that are very suitable for studying internal ecological relationships. The isolation of small populations in kipukas provides unique opportunities for evolutionary studies.

The usual Hawaiian (and Hawaiian Pidgin) term for ‘hole’ in the sense of ‘perforation, gap, blank (in a form), zero’ (vs. lua ‘pit, hole in the ground, latrine’) is puka, as in one-puka-puka, the U.S. Army’s 100th Infantry Battalion. Hawaiian kīpuka may be a puka with an intensifying prefix, and it has an interesting range of meanings that have nothing to do with lava. Here’s the full entry from Pukui and Elbert’s (1986) revised and enlarged edition of their Hawaiian Dictionary:

1. Variation or change of form (puka, hole), as a calm place in a high sea, deep place in a shoal, opening in a forest, openings in cloud formations, and especially a clear place or oasis within a lava bed where there may be vegetation. 2. Short shoulder cape; cloak, poncho. 3. Loop, lasso; snare, as for catching owls (a rat was tied to a sharp stick in a net; the owl, pouncing on the rat, was pierced by this stick).

Ouch!

UPDATE: As its Hawaiian etymology suggests, the kipuka is usually a hollow spot in a lava flow. A kipuka that projects above the surrounding lava is a steptoe, “named after Steptoe Butte, a quartzite protrusion above the Columbia Plateau lava flows near Colfax, Washington” or a dagala, from an Italian term for “an islandlike mass of older land surrounded by later lava flows,” according to the (1960) second edition of the Glossary of geology and related sciences: A cooperative project of the American Geological Institute.

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Filed under anglosphere, Hawai'i, language, science

by Joel | 5 April 2009 · 1:50 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Sawa-azami, Hime-gonomi

During our day-trip to Gifu, Japan, last summer, we picked up an easy-to-carry packet of a local food specialty from the gift shop of a hotel whose lobby we relaxed in while waiting to see the cormorant fishing that evening. The box languished in our cupboard until recently, when we finally used it as a side dish in a somewhat Japanese-style meal.

沢薊 sawa-azami (Cirsium yezoense) ‘marsh thistle’ – This particular species of thistle is not even listed under Cirsium in English Wikipedia. In Japanese Wikipedia, however, it is not only listed under azami (Cirsium); it even has its own separate entry as sawa-azami: Cirsium yezoense (Maxim.) Makino, a thistle found along mountain streams along the Japan Sea side of northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido (old Yezo country). Kamchatka, too, seems to have its own species of thistle, and several subspecies. This particular package of pickled thistle was labeled as coming from the Neo (根尾 ‘root hair’) region of Gifu Prefecture, right on the border of Fukui Prefecture, which faces the Japan Sea. And, speaking of root hairs: Did you know that another genus of thistle—Arctium, burdock—was the inspiration for Velcro? Don’t dis thistles! (I used to know a weekend sailor who named his sloop Thistle Dew.)

姫ごのみ hime-gonomi ‘princess-fond (= flamboyant)’ – The package of lowly thistles is labelled somewhat incongruously as both (一) coming from the inaka ‘countryside’ (田舎, a kanji combination I didn’t recognize, but a word I know well), and (二) fit for a princess, that is, for one who is flamboyant. The -gonomi part can also be written -好み, as in お好み焼き o-konomi-yaki ‘cooked as you like it’, which nowadays means something quite different from the better-known ‘cooked as you like it’: すき焼き suki-yaki. However, as far as I can tell, the following three constructions all describe the same type of showy, flamboyant woman: 派手好み hade-gonomi ‘flamboyance-fond’; 派手好き hade-zuki ‘flamboyance-fond’; and 姫ごのみ hime-gonomi ‘princess-fond’.

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Filed under food, Japan, language