Category Archives: language

by | 5 July 2008 · 11:57 am

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Country Cousins

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 11-12 (my translation):

From the earliest years of my childhood, we would spend part of our holidays, especially at Easter and in summer, together with Father in his native village, Nadeşul Săsesc [Saxon Nades] in Târnava Mică county, where lived Grandmother, an uncle who was a priest, married to my father’s sister, Auntie Elena, and several first and second cousins. We would leave from Braşov for Sighişoara on either the express or the limited express, and from there we would take a suitably dilapidated bus for about an hour, through potholes, dust, or mud, along the road between Sighişoara and Târgul Mureş. At the bus station, which was at the head of the village, would be waiting Uncle Rusu and a few cousins, who would accompany us on the road to the parsonage in the middle of the village, where they lived. We would walk, while the oxcart followed slowly behind with the suitcases and packages we had brought along, with an occasional “haw” or “gee,” which would give me great pleasure. It makes me nostalgic to think of the evenings we spent crammed around the table, chatting over a glass of Târnave wine or, when I was still small, listening to my elders. During the days, we would go for walks through the vineyards or to the neighboring villages, Ţigmandru and Pipea, collecting mushrooms on the road through the woods. In the evening we would roast them with pieces of bacon skewered on spits of hazel wood expertly carved by Uncle Ionel.

Every afternoon around five was a special moment, when the bus delivered the postal sack, which was carried to the Post Office, whose mistress was my cousin, Tiţa Dan. I would attend the undoing of the sack as a kind of ritual, snatching out of her hands envelopes addressed to me. Other cousins would usually attend this “cult”: Elvira and Sabina Dan, Ionel Moldovan, Lucia and Stela Rusu, with whom I would discuss the news in the letters and magazines we received. Sometimes I would go home with Ionel Moldovan and we would sit on a wooden bench under a leafy tree, breaking open large and juicy onions and drinking generously of wine brought by Auntie Aurelia, the mother of Ionel, a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the cavalry.

The last time I was in Nadeş was only for a single day, with Mira, in the spring of 1946, only a few months before leaving the country. Grandmother examined us with her weak eyes under the ever-present headscarf covering her forehead, then took me aside and said, “Bravo, Ştéfane (accented on the first e), fine wife you’ve taken. She’s a real lady!” At parting, she asked me if I had opened an office (she knew that I was licensed in law), and when I was just about to leave she put a question to me that I didn’t realize at the time showed prophetic vision, “What do you think, Ştéfane; will this democracy last a while? Because the kids roam the streets and shout that that’s democracy!”

NOTES: ‘Auntie’ renders Tuşa; ‘express’ renders accelerat and ‘limited express’, rapidul; ‘dilapidated’ renders hodorogit; ‘haw’ renders hăiş and ‘gee’, cea, which steer draft animals to the left or right, respectively; ‘mushrooms’ renders bureţi (also ‘sponges’); ‘cousins’ renders veri şi verişoare (Fr. cousins et cousines); ‘juicy’ renders zămoase (zămos), a word I couldn’t find in my dictionaries (but see zămoşiţă ‘hibiscus’, which has a sticky sap); ‘was just about to leave’ renders eram gata de drum (lit. ‘was road-ready’).

UNSOLICITED PLUG: I’ve bought a motley assortment of Romanian dictionaries in print, none of them either comprehensive enough or bilingual enough to handle this translation. Instead, whenever I translate from Romanian, I now keep open the best Romanian-English dictionary I’ve found in any medium. According to the publisher, it has over 30,000 words in Romanian, along with more than 35,000 translations of common and less common phrases. And it is indeed “extremely fast and easy to use.”

UPDATE: Mulţumesc cititorului Mihai, who pointed me toward zemos ‘juicy’, related to zeama ‘juice’, a word I knew but didn’t think of when I needed it.

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Filed under democracy, family, language, Romania

by | 29 June 2008 · 8:02 pm

Ethiopia, 1978: One More Equal Than Others

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 245-248:

In September 1976 the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), drawing support from the labour unions, teachers and students, all vehemently opposed to military rule, embarked on a campaign of urban terrorism against the Derg and its civilian ally, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, usually known by its Amharic acronym, Meison. An assassination attempt was made on Mengistu in the centre of Addis Ababa in September, the first of nine such attempts. Scores of officials and supporters of the Derg were murdered. The Derg in turn sent out its own murder squads…. By mid-1977 the EPRP was effectively destroyed. In the final phase of the red terror, to establish his own supremacy, Mengistu turned on his Meison allies, destroying them too. The young generation of intellectual activists, who had so avidly supported the revolution were all but wiped out.

Mengistu’s hold over other parts of Ethiopia was nevertheless precarious. By mid-1977 the Ethiopian army in Eritrea had lost most major towns and controlled little more than Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. In July 1977 Somalia, deciding the time was ripe to take advantage of the Derg’s preoccupation with Eritrea and other revolts, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden. By August the Somalis controlled most of the Ogaden. In September they captured Jijiga, an Ethiopian tank base, and pressed on towards the town of Harar and the rail and industrial centre of Dire Dawa, the third largest city in Ethiopia.

What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by Soviet and Cuban forces, determined to prop up his Marxist regime. In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of military advisers to Ethiopia. A Cuban combat force numbering 17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, the Ethiopians launched their counter-offensive in the Ogaden in February 1978, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Somalis. The full force of the Ethiopian army, supported by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea.

At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square in Addis Ababa watching a procession of army units and civilian groups pass before him. Then he returned to his headquarters at the Grand Palace. Having succeeded in holding the old empire together, he liked to portray himself as following a tradition of strong Ethiopian rulers. Indeed, Mengistu came to be compared with the Emperor Tewodros, a nineteenth-century ruler who started his career as a minor local chieftain, fought his way up to take the Crown and then strove to reunite the empire after a period of disintegration. At official functions at the Grand Palace, while members of the Derg stood respectfully to one side, Mengistu chose to preside from the same ornate chair that Haile Selassie had once favoured.

One of his ministers, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, once a fervent supporter of the revolution, recalled his growing sense of disillusionment.

At the beginning of the Revolution all of us had utterly rejected anything having to do with the past. We would no longer drive cars, or wear suits; neckties were considered criminal. Anything that made you look well-off or bourgeois, anything that smacked of affluence or sophistication, was scorned as part of the old order. Then, around 1978, all that began to change. Gradually materialism became accepted, then required. Designer clothes from the best European tailors were the uniform of all senior government officials and members of the Military Council. We had the best of everything: the best homes, the best cars, the best whisky, champagne, food. It was a compete reversal of the ideals of the Revolution.

He recalled, too, how Mengistu changed once he had gained complete control.

He grew more abrasive and arrogant. The real Mengistu emerged: vengeful, cruel and authoritarian. His conduct was not limited by any moral considerations. He began to openly mock God and religion. There was a frightening aura about him. Many of us who used to talk to him with our hands in our pockets, as if he were one of us, found ourselves standing stiffly at attention, cautiously respectful in his presence. In addressing him we had always used the familiar form of ‘you’, ante; now we found ourselves switching to the more formal ‘you’, ersiwo. He moved into a bigger, more lavish office in the Palace of Menelik. He got new, highly trained bodyguards – men who watched you nervously, ready to shoot at any time. We now were frisked whenever we entered his office. He began to use the Emperor’s cars and had new ones imported from abroad – bigger, fancier cars with special security provisions. Wherever he went he was escorted by these cars packed with guards, with more riding alongside on motorcycles.

He concluded: ‘We were supposed to have a revolution of equality; now he had become the new Emperor.’

You get the same result every single time a revolutionary thug promises equality—and begins to deliver it with the help of other revolutionary thugs. Every French Revolution yields a new Robespierre—and then a new Napoleon.

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Filed under Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, labor, language, military, USSR, war

by | 27 June 2008 · 6:00 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Languages, Holidays

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 8-9 (my translation):

I was sent to a Saxon kindergarten. It seems to me that it would have been on Castle Street, beneath Mt. Tâmpa, but I don’t remember the exact location, even though I can still see before me the dark stairway to the upper floor. Fraülein’s name would seem to have been Liewehr, and I see myself singing, leaping like a pony, hear melodies like “Wulle, wulle, Gänschen” and “Alle Vögel sind schon da,” and see myself sitting on a stool cutting stars out of cardboard for the Christmas tree, on each of which Fraülein had written in gothic letters “Ştefan” and which Mama used to hang from the tree year after year. At about the same time, I went once or twice a week to a nursery school where we learned French with the Grande Dame Staia, singing “Savez-vous planter le chou.”

My education was, from the beginning, trilingual: Romanian at home, German in my earliest schools, Hungarian with the maidservants, because the latter all came from Szekler villages. Hungarian, I haven’t heard since leaving Brasov in 1937, and I’ve almost totally forgotten it, except for the songs I used to hear in the kitchen or on the Promenade, where we used to go for walks, listening to the city orchestra composed of solemn gentlemen in black jackets and stovepipe hats.

Christmases were celebrated at our home, where all the family gathered, but from the morning of Christmas Eve we were sent to my Aunt Jenny, who lived far from us, sometimes on Fork Street (Cuza Voda), sometimes on Postal Orchard. My parents felt bound to resort to this strategy because it was hard for them to restrain me until the arrival of the “Angel.” In those years, Father Christmas didn’t exist in Transylvania, and Saint Nicholas used to come on the evening of the 6th of December.

Otherwise, these traditions were scrupulously respected at home. At Easter came the Bunny, with Father making the sound of speedy steps going into the distance, to show that the Bunny had run past our house, leaving behind red eggs and chocolates, mandarins, and oranges. On the 6th of December came Saint Nicholas, with a big sack on his back, with a fur hat over his eyes and a white beard, in whom I believed with a religious intensity until I discovered that he wore the same gaiters as Father, and which he had bought a few days earlier at Lischka.

Christmas was, of course, the ultimate celebration, with a tree that reached to the ceiling, mountains of presents (the maidservants would carry theirs off in woven clothes baskets), a huge meal, interrupted by carolers who came down from Şchei hillside, or up from Old Brasov, who ended off with the chorus “To Şaguna High School” before being invited to partake of wine and pound cake. Name days were not celebrated; instead, birthdays had a special importance, with a ritual I still follow today, across decades and continents. Speaking of religious celebrations, I cannot forget Epiphany, when on the Twelfth Night came the archpriest Iosif (Sâvu) Blaga or the priests Nae Stinghe and Furnica, who had baptized me, and was now professor of religion at the “Real School” (Liceul Dr. Ioan Meşota).

NOTES: ‘The Grande Dame’ renders doamna maior; ‘stovepipe hats’ renders ţilindru pe cap (usu. cilindru) ‘cylinder on the head’; ‘continents’ renders geografii ‘geographies’; ‘Father Christmas’ renders Mos Crăciun; ‘Epiphany’ renders Bobotează (cf. boteza ‘baptize’); Twelfth Night (= Epiphany) renders Iordanul (the Jordan [River]); archpriest = protopop. I hadn’t realized that the Epiphany holidays came to focus on the baptism of Christ (in the Jordan River) among Eastern-rite Christians but on the coming of the Magi among Western-rite Christians. The Wikipedia entry for the holiday contains an interesting observation that may apply to Transylvanians in general: “Hungarians, perhaps because of their location between East and West, celebrate the coming of the Magi, but refer to the celebration as Vízkereszt or “water cross,” clearly a reference to baptism.”

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Filed under Austria, education, Hungary, language, religion, Romania

by | 25 June 2008 · 10:55 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Earliest Friends

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 6-8 (my translation):

On the floor below lived Major Mihailescu, who had two children, Mircea and Coca (the daughter had an air I now recognize as Japanese), with whom I didn’t become friends. The major had an orderly he called Zachariah, with whom the maidservant who used to take me for walks had fallen in love, calling him “Zakarias” and singing a pitiful song that ended with the words “Zakarias szép eletem.” One day, the major had a conflict with Mr. Borescu, apparently having to do with the beating of carpets at unauthorized hours. When the insulted concierge leapt up to hit the major, the latter rushed into his house, from which he appeared in a martial pose, brandishing a saber in the air like a fencer, threatening the head of the typographer, who didn’t know how to respond to this unexpected invitation to a duel. I remember that during the 1940s, as a discharged general, Mihailescu was named inspector of the casino in Sinaia.

In the back of the courtyard lived Doctor Valeriu Negrila, married to a beautiful Polish woman. I was friends with their daughter, Valerica, while I was little, but later, as often happens, we drifted apart and hardly even greeted each other when I became a “Şagunist” and she a student at the Princess (Elena). One day when I was returning from a walk with the maidservant, I saw two people dressed in white carrying a stretcher on which lay a body covered with a sheet, with locks of black hair hanging out from under it. The maidservant later told me that Valerica’s mother had been found to have “taken poison,” but after a few days I saw her passing through the courtyard with Valerica in tow. I don’t recall the other neighbors, but I cannot forget the entrance hallway in the evenings, with gilded metal bars glittering in the light of the bulbs, and marble veneer shining in a way that seemed fairylike.

Just outside the alleyway, on the right and left were two shops: Lischka, men’s clothing; and Books Cooperative Enea, Stinghe, and Ţigoiu, one of whose owners, Professor Sterie (Sterica) Stinghe, had written a few books about the history of Brasov, and whose wife, named Lucia I think, had the habit of strutting around haughty and elegant, the tapping of her high heels audible from far off.

I lived on Customs Street, I believe, until around 1928–29, when I finished primary school, thus eight or nine years, maybe ten. The fact is, I cannot recall exactly when we moved from Spitz Palace, just as I cannot remember exactly when we left Prundul Florilor.

But I have some vivid memories of the building, which during the early years did not yet have electric lights. I recall those autumn days when Mr. Stroescu, the father of my primary school classmate, Elena Stroescu, used to set up his machine in the Graft Valley, beyond the walls, and cut whole cartloads of wood, which after being chopped up was hauled into the cellar on a kind of wooden stretcher by backwoodsmen hired by the day, who at lunchtime would pull out of their knapsacks “pită şi slană” [bread and fatback, usu. slănină] eating slowly and silently.

I recall going with the maidservant to the first silent films I saw at the movie theatre Modern (a wooden shack sitting on the site they later made into the city park), where I enjoyed watching Lia Mara, Maciste, Zigoto, Fatty, Harry Piel, Pat and Patachon, with little Patachonel, and then returning at nightfall to find at the entrance to our apartment dozens of galoshes and overshoes belonging to the “students” at the night classes Father used to teach in the years after unification [of Transylvania and other territories with the Old Kingdom of Romania]: bank directors, officials, attorneys, merchants, who were keen to learn Romanian in those first years of Greater Romania. About that time, Zeidner Books had come out with a grammar of Romanian for foreigners, whose authors were Father and Michael Teutsch. It was a bit slapdash, of a type the Saxons called Zwinkelmisch [lit. ‘twinklemix’], but it sold well and was reprinted several times.

After the students left, Father used to amuse himself by telling stories about the mistakes his “students” would make. Carved in my memory are words like “Berger-leţkia” (lecţia) [lesson], or “tratavitele” in place of tratativele [‘negotiations’], which the Hungarians and Saxons had trouble pronouncing, as they did â as opposed to a. Other friends that I remember from the age of 4 or 5, besides Puiu Borescu and Valerica Negrila, were the sisters Takáts, Tony and Baba, somewhat older than me.

On the Promenade, where I went with the maidservant, I had “friends” who seemed at that time to be over a hundred years old, if not older: “Old Man Snow,” gone completely white, who talked with me as if I was his age, whom they used to call Cipu (Cipariu) or Ţipu, and who I believe was a judge on “penzie” [pensie ‘pension’]. One “friendship” that my parents did not regard well was that with the doctor of law, Aurel Olteanu, who wore a shiny clip on his tie, patent leather shoes with laces, and a long, sturdy cane, with whose handle he would hook my calf, while glaring at me with bulging eyes and shouting: “I’ve got you, you knave! I’ve got you, you bandit!” To me, the words were amusing, as I knew what bandit meant (Tomescu and Munteanu were famous bandits at the time), but I had no idea what knave [şnapan] meant and my parents showed themselves to be less than enchanted by this “enrichment” of vocabulary. The third “friend” was a little, or rather a short, elderly man, Patruţ Pop, wrapped summer and winter in a long overcoat, something between a blanket and a frock, wearing a black hat, who would stroke my head without saying a word. I vaguely remember having heard that Patruţ Pop was from the family of someone who had played a leading role on the Field of Liberty, at Blaj [in 1848]. As I grew and entered primary school, I lost track of those friends of my early childhood.

NOTES: Baciu spelt cearşaf ‘sheet’ as cearceaf—it’s just the difference between English sh and ch. A “Şagunist” is a student at Andrei Şaguna High School. After failing to find clipici in my dictionaries, I translated it ‘slapdash’ (after considering ‘rush job’), despite its relation to a clipi ‘to wink, blink’ (and its Saxon equivalent, Zwinkelmisch). The hardest phrase to translate in this passage was de moţi tocmiţi cu ziua, which didn’t make sense until I found that Moţi designates people from the Western Mountains (Munţii Apuseni) of Transylvania, sometimes known as Ţara Moţilor, known for their pre-Roman features, archaic customs, isolated settlements, and fierce independence—sort of the West Virginians of Transylvania. An explanatory translation like ‘men from Munţii Apuseni hired by the day’ was too long-winded, while ‘hillbilly day-laborers’ was too pejorative. I almost went with ‘itinerant woodcutters’ before settling on ‘backwoodsmen’.

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by | 23 June 2008 · 10:04 pm

POW Language Use, Nagasaki, 1944-45

My sociolinguistics professor in grad school once opined that the best place to learn a foreign language was in a foreign prison. I assume he was thinking of the advantages of a complete immersion environment, total physical response methodology, and very rigorous incentive structures.

He must have been at least half serious, because he later applied for a grant to fund an audacious experiment to see what innate linguistic structures might emerge in an isolated, silently administered camp whose workers were recruited in equal numbers from communities speaking languages of a full range of word-order typologies and in minimal prior contact with typologically different languages. I believe the granting agency’s Committee on Human Experimentation nixed the proposal, for reasons one can well understand.

What makes me recall this is the abundance of fascinating bits of data about foreign language learning in prison that I’ve been finding in one of the books I’m currently reading, First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006). Here are some of the insights of the reporter and the prisoners themselves, arranged under a few general headings.

Incentive Structure

Tervald Thorpson (Wadena, Iowa): “I managed to go a whole year without being beaten. Americans worked hard in the mine, but some had difficulty learning Japanese, and misunderstanding commands got them beatings.” (p. 97)

Sergeant Robert Aldrich (Capitan, New Mexico): “I was in the mine ever since it opened, but I was more fortunate than most because I learned Japanese, thus avoiding beatings due to misunderstanding.” (p. 101)

Methodology

Oscar Otero of Los Lunas, a husky New Mexican captured on Bataan, learned Japanese by being chauffeur to a colonel. By refusing to allow him to talk any Filipino [?], the Japanese furnished the coal mine prisoners with their ablest unofficial interpreter. (p. 88)

Bilingual Assistants

Dark-skinned Junius Navardos (Los Angeles): “Pressure in the mine caused me to pass out once while working. When I came around in the hospital I found myself with burned patches all over my skin. The boys told me that the burns had been made by an American-educated interpreter, Yamamuchi [prob. Yamaguchi], whom we called Riverside because he was brought up there. Asked whether he had done the burning, the interpreter told the doctor, ‘Yes, I did this, because I thought he was feigning.'”

Leland Sims (Smackover, Arkansas): “Many guards could speak English. One who we called Long Beach, because he was educated there, caught me smoking and said, ‘It’s all right with me, but don’t let the other guards catch you.'” (p. 96)

Japanese for Special Purposes

Corporal James Brock (Taft, Texas): “I was most often overworked by a boss we called Shitbird, usually with a hammer handle or a mairugi—that’s a small timber [丸木 maruki ’round wood = log’?]. He hit everybody who passed him, whether you belonged to his shift or not. I’m sorry he’s disappeared since the camp was liberated.” (p. 86)

Henry Sublett of Cisco, Texas, a Marine captured on Corregidor: “I was down with pneumonia and worked in the mine both after and before. Our first Buntai Joe [分隊長 buntaichō ‘squad leader’], or overseer, used to be drunk all the time and beat me every day for my first three months. He always used to the day start off with a few savas [サービス = sābisu ‘freebie’]—meaning ‘gifts’—of blows.” (p. 88)

Runge, captured at Singapore, was “an old Aussie,” which means he arrived at the Mitsui camp and entered the coal mine in June 1944, joining the Bataan and Corregidor Americans who had already been toiling for nearly a year underground. By February 1945 Runge was instructing “new Aussies” in the use of a jackhammer. He was showing F. R. Willis and Robert Tideswell how to chip rock, the whole party being under an overman named Katu-san [prob. Katō], when three cars carrying coal ran off the rails, causing Katu-san’s temper to do likewise. Saying “Dummy, dummy, that’s no good,” the Japanese promised that he would report Runge for haitis savis [兵隊サービス heitai sābisu ‘soldier freebie’], meaning “military gifts”—that is, a beating. (p. 104)

The idea of the camp administrator, Captain Yuri, was that a prisoner’s main and only job was to dig coal for the Japanese, and his only reward for twelve hours’ daily labor should be his salary of three-quarters of a cent daily, plus a yassamai [休み yasumi ‘rest’] or rest day every ten days or so. (p. 108)

With the arrival by train from Nagasaki of the first Army-Navy team for the evacuation of Kyushu’s largest prisoner of war camp, the final sinkes [出欠 shukketsu ‘attendance, (take) roll’] (Japanese for roll calls [otherwise 点呼 tenko lit. ‘point call’]) were sounding today over the grimy buildings and meagerly-clad G.I.s. This camp, 1,700 strong—700 being Americans from Bataan and Corregidor—has been thinned already to 1,300 by impatient ex-prisoners, mostly Americans, who have hit the high road for the American airbase at Kanoya in southernmost Kyushu. (p. 92)

So profound is the prisoners’ hatred of Baron Mitsui’s coal mine, the Japanese military police, and the aeso [営倉 eisō] or guardhouse where five Americans have found a violent death, that the entire camp would probably have been deserted had not the Army-Navy team arrived today. Hospitals filled with cases of malnutrition, diarrhea, beriberi, and mutilated men offer special problems. (p. 92)

Graduate Assistants

Pharmacist William Derrick (Leesville, Louisiana): “The Korean straw bosses were decent to us except when the Japs were around, who frightened them.” (p. 96)

Sergeant Wiley Smith (Coushatta, Louisiana): “We looked across the bay toward Nagasaki after emerging from the mine and saw black smoke starting up. The atomic bomb, falling ninety minutes before, had kindled Nagasaki. Our Japanese bosses kept pointing that way and chattering. It was better than Germany’s surrender, which we only heard about from Korean miners.” (p. 91)

Thoughts on Graduation

Navy Cook Laurel Whitworth (Bourne, Texas): “Leaving Japan for me means not having to cook any more dogs to eat. One day I had to cook sixty-nine, another seventy-three, another fifty-five. I hate cooking dogs.” (p. 94)

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Filed under anglosphere, Japan, language, U.S., war

by | 22 June 2008 · 5:24 pm

How Modernism Feeds Tribalism

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 154-157:

African societies of the pre-colonial era – a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires – were formed often with shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances. Identities and languages shaded into one another. At the outset of colonial rule, administrators and ethnographers endeavoured to classify the peoples of Africa, sorting them out into what they called tribes, producing a whole new ethnic map to show the frontiers of each one. Colonial administrators wanted recognisable units they could control. ‘Each tribe must be considered as a distinct unit,’ a provincial commissioner in Tanganyika told his staff in 1926. ‘Each tribe must be under a chief.’ In many cases, tribal labels were imposed on hitherto undifferentiated groups. The chief of a little-known group in Zambia once ventured to remark: ‘My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. [District Commissioner] told us we were.’ When local government was established under colonial rule, it was frequently aligned with existing ‘tribal areas’. Entirely new ethnic groups emerged, like the Abaluyia or Kalenjin of western Kenya, formed from two congeries of adjacent peoples. Some colonial rulers used tribal identities to divide their subjects, notably the British in southern Sudan and the French in Morocco. Chiefs, appointed by colonial authorities as their agents, became the symbol of ethnicity.

Missionary endeavour added to the trend. In the process of transcribing hitherto unwritten languages into written forms, missionaries reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each helping to define a tribe. The effect was to establish new frontiers of linguistic groups and to strengthen the sense of solidarity within them. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many others were formed in this way.

Missionaries were also active in documenting local customs and traditions and in compiling ‘tribal’ histories, all of which were incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools, spreading the notion of ethnic identity. African teachers followed suit. In southern Nigeria, young men from Ilesha and Ijebu who attended school in Ibadan or Oyo were taught to write a standard form of the Yoruba language and to identify themselves as Yoruba – a term previously reserved for subjects of the Oyo empire. As mission stations were largely responsible for providing education, educational achievement tended to depend on their locality and thus to follow ethnic lines.

Migration from rural areas to towns reinforced the process. Migrants gravitated to districts where fellow tribesmen lived, hoping through tribal connections to find housing, employment or a niche in trading markets. A host of welfare associations sprang up – ‘home-boy’ groups, burial and lending societies, cultural associations, all tending to enhance tribal identity. Certain occupations – railwaymen, soldiers, petty traders – became identified with specific groups which tried to monopolise them.

It was in towns that ethnic consciousness and tribal rivalry grew apace. The notion of a single Igbo people was formed in Lagos among the local ‘Descendants’ Union’. The Yoruba, for their part, founded the Egbe Omo Oduduwa – a ‘Society of Descendants of Oduduwa’, the mythical ancestor of the Yoruba people; its aim was ‘to unite the various clans and tribes in Yorubaland and generally create and actively foster the idea of a single nationalism throughout Yorubaland’. Ethnic groups became the basis of protest movements against colonial rule.

In the first elections in the postwar era in Africa, nationalist politicians started out proclaiming nationalist objectives, selecting party candidates regardless of ethnic origin. But as the number of elections grew, as the number of voters expanded, as the stakes grew higher with the approach of independence, the basis for campaigning changed. Ambitious politicians found they could win votes by appealing for ethnic support and by promising to improve government services and to organise development projects in their home area. The political arena became a contest for scarce resources. In a continent where class formation had hardly begun to alter loyalties, ethnicity provided the strongest political base. Politicians and voters alike came to rely on ethnic solidarity. For politicians it was the route to power. They became, in effect, ethnic entrepreneurs. For voters it was their main hope of getting a slice of government bounty. What they wanted was a local representative at the centre of power – an ethnic patron who could capture a share of the spoils and bring it back to their community. Primary loyalty remained rooted in tribal identity. Kinship, clan and ethnic considerations largely determined the way people voted. The main component of African politics became, in essence, kinship corporations.

The formation of one ethnic political party tended to cause the formation of others. In Nigeria the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the first modern political organisation in West Africa launched in 1944, started out with the aim of establishing a broad-based national movement, but after tribal dissension it became an Eastern regional party, dominated by Igbo politicians. Yoruba politicians left to form the Action Group, building it around the nucleus of Egbe Omo Oduduwa. In Northern Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani, while disdaining the nationalist cause which Southerners espoused, nevertheless formed in 1949 the Northern People’s Congress as a political offshoot of a predominantly Hausa cultural organisation, Jam’yyar Mutanen Arewa – Association of the Peoples of the North. In a more extreme example, in the Belgian Congo rival tribal parties were launched by the score. In most countries, political leaders spent much time on ‘ethnic arithmetic’, working out alliances that would win them power and keep them there.

Few states escaped such divisions. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere was helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the fact that the population was divided among 120 tribal groupings, none of which was large enough or central enough to acquire a dominant position. He benefited too from the common use of the Swahili language, spread initially by Arab traders, then taken up by the Germans and the British as part of their education system. Other states had to contend with a variety of languages, sometimes numbering more than a hundred. In all, more than 2,000 languages were in use in Africa.

There was a widespread view at the time of independence that once the new states focused on nation-building and economic development, ethnic loyalties would wither away under the pressure of modernisation. ‘I am confident’, declared Nigeria’s first prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, during a 1959 debate over the motion to ask for independence, ‘that when we have our own citizenship, our own national flag, our own national anthem, we shall find the flame of national unity will burn bright and strong.’ Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea spoke in similar terms in 1959. ‘In three or four years, no one will remember the tribal, ethnic or religious rivalries which, in the recent past, caused so much damage to our country and its population.’ Yet African governments were dealing not with an anachronism from the past, but a new contemporary phenomenon capable of erupting with destructive force.

It doesn’t seem all that different in kind, only in degree, from what happened in Europe with the spread of vernacular literacy, Protestantism, historical and comparative linguistics, and the scientific subclassification of everything and everyone on earth—and what continues apace in modern universities, prisons, and other political/protective patronage networks that privilege race/ethnicity over social class, religion, or other more mutable cross-cutting categories.

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Filed under Africa, democracy, education, Europe, language, nationalism

by | 13 June 2008 · 8:34 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hack, Buckboard, … Democrat

From Plain Buggies: Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren Horse-Drawn Transportation (Intercourse, Penn.: Good Books, 1998), by Stephen Scott, pp. 46-47:

The open spring wagon, the utility vehicle with one seat and a hauling space in back, has a wide variety of local names. In Holmes County, Ohio, it is a “Hack”; in Arthur, Illinois, a “Buckboard”; in Dover, Delaware, a “Durban”; in Adams County, Indiana, a “Johnny wagon”; in Daviess County, Indiana, a “Long John”; and in Aylmer, Ontario, a “Democrat.”

A recent style of spring wagon, featuring an open bed or long storage compartment in back and an enclosed driver’s seat will be referred to as a “cab wagon” in this book. In Pennsylvania a carriage-like vehicle with heavier suspension on the rear axle is called a “market wagon” or “peddle wagon.”

A number of vehicles used by the plain people are somewhat out of the scope of this book. These include heavy farm wagons and other agricultural vehicles. The special wagons designed to transport benches from one Amish meeting place to the next are found in each Amish church district. In Lancaster County the Old Order Amish and Mennonites make use of specially designed hearses. In Holmes County vehicles resembling a cab wagon transport the coffins.

Sleighs, cutters, and bobsleds are rarely used in most communities and are not of any special style. Few new snow vehicles are produced. Enough antique vehicles are around to serve the limited demand.

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Filed under language, religion, U.S.

by | 1 June 2008 · 5:38 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Lē‘ahi ‘Tuna Point’

Most people who have lived in Hawai‘i for a while know that Diamond Head crater got its English name from the sparkle of worthless crystals in its rocky exterior, and not from real diamonds. And many know that it got its Hawaiian name, Lē‘ahi, from the resemblance of the crater’s ridgeline to the dorsal fin of a tuna. But the name doesn’t exactly mean ‘dorsal-fin of tuna’.

I gave the etymology a closer look after finding a bogus etymology on the historical plaque that marks Diamond Head Lighthouse. Lē‘ahi does not come from lei ‘wreath’ plus ahi ‘fire’, and thus has nothing to do with Hawaiian practices of navigational bonfires imagined by the builders of the modern lighthouse. Haw. ahi ‘fire’ comes from Proto-Polynesian (PPN) *afi ‘fire’, a good and widely reflected Austronesian root. In Numbami, a language I studied in Papua New Guinea, the word for ‘fire’ is yawi (with the /w/ slightly fricative before front vowels). Even highly aberrant Yapese seems to have a cognate, nifiy ‘fire’. But Haw. ‘ahi ‘tuna’ comes from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian (PNP) *kasi (with *k > /‘/, *s > /h/), which seems not to be so widely attested beyond Polynesia.

The first part of the compound is trickier. According to Place Names of Hawaii, lē comes not from lei ‘wreath, garland’, but rather from lae, which in place names usually translates ‘cape’ or ‘point’. However, the Hawaiian Dictionary lists a wider range of meanings: ‘forehead, brow; cape, headland, point, promontory; wisdom’ (< *la‘e). So some of the tourist literature now translates Lē‘ahi inappropriately as ‘tuna brow’ or ‘brow of the tuna’. Tuna Head(land) would be just as accurate, but Cape Tuna or Tuna Point would be more in keeping with the glosses in Place Names of Hawaii. (I think we can also rule out Tuna Wisdom!)

UPDATE: But what about Aku Head?

There used to be a well-known radio personality in Hawai‘i who called himself “J. Akuhead Pupule” (= ‘J. Tunahead Crazy’), reputedly after being called as much by irate listeners. I’m not sure why aku-head would be a sharper insult than ‘ahi-head, but it might be because aku is the Hawaiian name for the bonito or skipjack tuna genus Katsuwonus, whose name derives from Japanese katsuo, which in Japan is usually dried into a woodlike block, katsuobushi, from which flakes are shaved off for use as a flavoring. So maybe akuhead = blockhead.

From my fieldwork experience long ago in Papua New Guinea, where I elicited far more fishnames than I had ever heard of before, I would guess that Haw. ‘ahi matches pretty well with the genus Thunnus while Haw. aku names tuna of the genus Katsuwonus (and perhaps a few other similar genera).

In checking Wikipedia entries for other members of the family Scombridae (tunas, bonitos, and mackerals), I see that the one for wahoo, Haw. ono (< PPN *‘ono), offers entirely unsupported speculative etymologies for both names. Wikipedia should not confirm one person’s speculation with that of another. Leave that to the news media.

UPDATE 2: The cape at the southwestern tip of O‘ahu—a long, flat counterpart to Lē‘ahi at the southeastern tip—was for a time called Barber’s Point, but has now reverted to its Hawaiian name, Kalaeloa ‘The Long Point’.

A reader asks why I don’t simply consult a fluent native speaker of Hawaiian. One reason is that native speakers with encyclopedic knowledge are extremely rare in any language, but especially for Hawaiian these days, where most fluent speakers learned the language in a classroom, not from their parents and grandparents long resident on a plot of land. (In fact most have lost the lands of their ancestors.) Another reason is that local residents are usually content to offer folk etymologies and wild guesses when asked about anything not utterly transparent linguistically and historically. At least that is my experience from incessantly asking just such questions of local drivers, store clerks, wait help, baristas, sushi chefs, and random passers-by in my travels to odd parts of the globe over many years.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language

by | 21 May 2008 · 10:01 pm

A Linguistic Rediscovery Close to Home

During my dissertation fieldwork in Papua New Guinea over thirty years ago, I discovered that a bunch of Austronesian languages in Morobe Province mark their relative clauses in a manner that is pretty rare from a typological point of view: they mark both the beginning and the end of the clauses. An English equivalent would go something like, “The language [that they were speaking that] sounded vaguely familiar,” or “The language [which they were speaking such] sounded vaguely familiar.”

The only other place where I could find languages that did the same was in Central Africa, and my dissertation cited a 1976 article by the great French linguist Claude Hagège which mentioned by name two Nilo-Saharan languages, Moru and Mangbetu, and two Niger-Congo languages, Mbum and M’baka. Over the years, I lost track of anything pertaining to those languages except their names.

But I got curious again recently as I worked on updating for publication an old paper on clause-bracketing in PNG Austronesian languages. So, yesterday, after googling those names and finding out that Mbum and M’baka (= Ngbaka) are spoken in the Central African Republic, I emailed my historian brother in Strasbourg, whom I recently visited, to ask whether he knew of any CAR languages that bracketed their relative clauses. He had spent years working in the (at that time) Central African Empire for the US Peace Corps and USAID while I was writing my dissertation in linguistics, and he later wrote a dissertation himself on Japan-Africa relations before World War II.

My query didn’t ring any bells with him at first, but after some reflection he came up with some examples in Sango, CAR’s national lingua franca. And then he emailed to ask his linguist friend Raymond Boyd at CNRS whether he could think of Adamawa-Ubangi languages that used such markers for relative clauses. Boyd replied:

Right off, I can’t think of one that DOESN’T. In languages like Sango and Chamba, opener and closer can be the same. In Zande, the opener is etymologically an indefinite and the closer is a locative. I’ve been reading a dissertation on Mambay (an Adamawa language closely related to Mbum and Mundang) where there is only an opener, but I take this to be perhaps a Chadic influence (I’d have to check this on a much larger range of data).

It was a Eureka moment for both of us.

I can’t believe I never thought to ask my own brother before! Back in January, when he took us to the used book vendors in place Gutenberg in Strasbourg, I discovered a book I couldn’t resist buying—despite the 30€ price—for no other reason than that I had mentioned the language it described in my dissertation. It was La Langue des Makere, des Medje et des Mangbetu, par A. Vekens, Dominicain (Editions Dominicaines Veritas, 1928), and the pages were still uncut. But even then, it didn’t cross my mind to quiz my brother about the CAR languages he had worked on.

Here are some examples of bracketed relative clauses.

Mangbetu (Vekens 1928) in Congo

A belu [si kesia né môlô ta kira ne] kambuba e faranga môkôtu.
Les hommes [ceux font le travail avec intelligence ceux-là] gagneront des francs beaucoup.
‘Those who work smart get plenty money.’

Sango (my brother, pers. comm.) in CAR

Tene [so mo tene so] ake nzoni ape.
word [thus you say thus] is good not
‘What you say is no good.’

Jabêm (Dempwolff 1939) in PNG

Lip [tec aê gawa nec] gêjac mocseŋ teŋ.
trap [Dem I I-set Dem] it-catch bushfowl one
‘The trap I set caught a bushfowl.’

South Watut (Holzknecht 1989) in PNG

Jek i-ra jiyaʔ ri naip a [ti ra-gin afu ŋga]
Jack he-cut tree with knife [Dem I-give to Dem]
‘Jack cut the tree with the knife which I gave him.’

Patep (Lauck 1980) in PNG

Ông ob tyoo yii yuu nuhu [wê ob lam ge]
you will dodge spear two arrow [Rel will come Rel]
‘You will dodge the spears and arrows that will come.’

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Filed under Africa, Central African Republic, language, Papua New Guinea

by | 19 May 2008 · 7:12 am

Wordcatcher Tales: gatvol, makwerekwere, utari

I’m still bogged down with obscure linguistic research projects that are not yet bloggable, and already half-blogged books on depressing 20th-century European history that I haven’t finished reading. But I see that two other bloggers, Khanya and No-sword, have explored the social context of some interesting vocabulary from two far-outlying parts of the globe, the northernmost island of Japan and the southernmost country in Africa. So, without further ado, here are snippets of Wordcatcher Tales by proxy.

Steve at Khanya appends the following glossary to a post on Xenophobia – the gatvol factor in South Africa:

1. Gatvol – which being interpreted for the benefit of makwerekwere [2], is Afrikaans, meaning literally “hole full”, or more idiomatically, “Fed up”, or “had enough”, or “had it up to here”.

2. Makwerekwere – which, being interpreted for the benefit of foreigners, means foreigners.

Another South African blogger who in his home country was mistaken for a Nigerian explains the second term more specifically at The Zeleza Post:

Makwerekwere is the derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe non-South African blacks. It reminds one of how the ancient Greeks referred to foreigners whose language they did not understand as the Barbaroi. To the Black South African, makwerekwere refers to Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, especially Nigerians. I was confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid.

Meanwhile, Matt at No-sword investigates why the Hokkaido Ainu Association, founded in 1930, changed its name to the Hokkaido Utari Association in 1961, and has now announced it will revert once again to its original name.

Ainu is obviously the name used to refer to the Ainu as a people distinct from other peoples; this is directly from the Ainu word aynu which means, predictably, “man” or “person” (as opposed to “supernatural being”).

Utari is a more interesting word. As a loan word in Japanese, it is usually glossed as “compatriot” (“同胞”, dōhō), which usually implies “fellow Ainu”. Its etymology in Ainu is more interesting.

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Filed under Africa, Japan, language, nationalism