Category Archives: language

by | 9 June 2004 · 8:55 pm

WWII Japanese Translators: The Hakujin Experience

Faubion Bowers, The Man Who Saved Kabuki, was a Japanese language translator in World War II. He contributed the following memoir to the Japanese American Veterans Association website.

In 1941, the year war with Japan broke out, there were 25 American Hakujin (Caucasians) who could read, speak and write–more or less–the Japanese language. Most of these were older, scholastic men who had spent years in Kyoto among art treasures or were missionaries who had set their minds on converting the Japanese from their heathen ways. Twenty-five is not much of a number when you are planning on an Army and Navy of five million or so against a nation of 100 million. The idea of using Nisei [2nd generation Japanese immigrants to America] or Kibei [Japanese Americans who had returned to Japan (usually for education)] had only begun to glimmer in 1940, and, even then, the idea was roundly rejected by the Navy. It would later use its own method of developing linguists: it would go to the Ivy League colleges, assemble the cum laudes and phi beta kappas and offer them a commission (instead of the draft) in exchange for a year’s intensive language training at Boulder, Colorado. The idea was a good one, because it produced, among others, Donald Keene, Ed Seidensticker and Robert Ward, some of the best Japanese scholars in the world today.

The Army was sloppier. Anyone, any White man, who went to Washington in 1940 or 1941, and said “Ohayo gozaimus,” (“Good morning”) or said he had been to Japan as a missionary’s son or businessman or whatnot, was immediately given a commission in Military Intelligence. I had spent the year from March, 1940, to March, 1941, in Japan and, since there were no other tourists, and foreigners were scarce in that country which had been ostracized for the Shina Ji[k]en (China “Incident”) since 1937 and the capture of all of China’s main cities, I had no alternative but to learn Japanese or die of loneliness. I learned it so well, thanks again to the absence of English speakers in the country that, when I left Japan (reluctantly, but it had become impossible for an American to remain there, as war was drawing near), and I continued my travels on down to Indonesia, the Dutch there assumed I was a Japanese spy and put me under armed guard until a ship could be found to send me back to America.

Back in America, by September 1941, I was drafted. I didn’t know about that trick of going to Washington and saying “Ohayo gozaimus.” At the induction center, I filled out all the forms, and, when it came to languages, I noted that I knew well French, Russian, Japanese and Malay (as Bahasa Indonesia was known in those days). The Army was so screwed up then, that my language ability went unnoticed. I was a private, trained in the Artillery, and, when Pearl Harbor exploded, I was in basic training in Fort Bragg, given a quick leave and readied to be sent to Africa for eventual landing in Italy.

However, mirabile dictu, when I reported back to camp, a Major Dickey appeared out of nowhere and said “Ohayo gozaimus” to me. I immediately answered in astonishment, rather homesick for the language, the people and the country I had come to love. My Japanese was better than Dickey’s, and we continued in English. From then on, Army life was more pleasant. I was instantly transferred to the Presidio in San Francisco, and was surrounded by Nisei and Kibei. All of us were privates, or at least none of us was an officer.

Then, we were sent to [Camp] Savage in cold Minnesota. Savage had been an Old Folks’ Home before the Army took it over, and it was a mess. All of us worked long and hard to clean it out. Then, as our military training continued — long hikes with full gear on our backs, PT, tattoo and taps — we began, rather continued, our studies in Japanese. If the hikes had been John Aiso’s idea, he was so conscientious, the Japanese lessons were an antidote. The instructors were marvelous. There was Tusky Tsukahira, a civilian. There was Tom Sakamoto, a staff sergeant, if I remember correctly, and others. Our classes consisted of Japanese-Americans and about 5 or 6 Hakujin–Matt Adams, Jurgenson, Charlie Fogg–I can’t remember the rest. Some of the students were simply marvelous in Japanese. Others were simply awful.

The Hakujin officers, aside from Colonel Rassmussen and Major Dickey, were splendid men; those Hakujin who had gotten their commissions by going to Washington ahead of the hot pursuit of the draft, well, their Japanese was terrible, to put it politely. Trouble began to brew. Here were the Nisei, brilliant in Japanese far beyond the ken of the Hakujin officers. They were drafted privates or PFCs at best. Their parents were confined in camps, their worldly goods and homesteads sold at fractions of their value. And here they were, serving their country in the most invaluable way possible–intelligence.

Rasmussen and Dickey were alarmed at the growing resentment. They were, in addition to being regular Army officers, experienced men of the world, having been military attaches at various embassies throughout the world, notably Japan. It became imperative that some–the best–Nisei be commissioned. However, the Army moves on precedent, and never in its history had anyone ever been commissioned on the basis of language. Further complicating matters was the prejudice against the Japanese-Americans, who had yet to prove themselves in battle.

So, Rassmussen decided to make me a test case. I was the best of the Hakujin linguists, and he reasoned with the authorities in Washington, that, to keep this poor private a private was a grave injustice. So, I was commissioned on the basis of language and given my little gold bars. Rank mattered a lot in those days, and I well remember having a little tiff with Paul Aurel, one of those Washington “Okayo gozaimus” officers. He barked at me, “Look here, Faub, I’m a first lieutenant, and you’re only a second lieutenant.” That taught me a lot about human nature and the importance–to some–of having a rank. At any rate, Rassmussen championed me, and, once I was an officer on the basis of language, it became possible for the first time in the U.S. Army for all the more deserving, far better than I, Nisei and Kibei to be commissioned. And a rather sticky moment in Army history passed without incident.

I also remember in Australia, it became urgent for a Nisei to be given a medal of some sort. Morale, again, was low. Their work was so invaluable that it had to be recognized in some public way. Finally, in New Guinea, my friend Kozaki was wounded. He was strafed while ducking in a boat, as a Japanese plane flew over. We were all assembled in formation, and the citation–Purple Heart and Silver Star–for bravery for Kozaki was read out loud to all of us. He was wounded in the Hopoi sector of New Guinea, it said, and for the duration, “Hopoi” and “ass” were synonymous at ATIS.

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

by | 8 June 2004 · 7:53 pm

D. Yee on Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!

Danny Yee reviews a book with an irresistible title: Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!, by Robin Gill (Paraverse, 2003), “a collection of a thousand haiku about sea cucumbers (namako), given both in Japanese and in translation, and with extensive commentary.”

An introduction places namako in Japanese culture, defends the use of “sea slug” for what are actually sea cucumbers rather than nudibranchs, surveys their taxonomy, and touches on some issues in defining and translating haiku. The bulk of the book divides up the haiku by aspects of sea slugs: frozen, featureless, protean, do-nothing, agnostic, mystic, scatological, helpless, meek, ugly, lubricious, just-so, tasty, slippery, chewy, drinking, silent, melancholy, stuporous, nebulous, and cold, with a large “sundry sea slugs” chapter for everything else….

And Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! offers a different perspective on Japanese culture, with insights into history, literature, mythology, food, and more. These take the form of scattered details rather than substantial analysis, but they are given context by the haiku they help explain.

“‘Mountain’ and ‘ocean’ are formal antonyms in Japan, where one may still be asked whether one plans to vacation in the former or the latter.”

Gill’s tone is relaxed and informal and he doesn’t take himself too seriously or struggle for academic respectability, but he is still precise in his own way, and insanely erudite.

Kids in Micronesia used sea slugs as water pistols–by picking them out of the water, aiming, and squeezing. The Chinese appetite for sea cucumbers (and sandalwood) brought many Pacific islands into world trade networks. The bêche de mer (‘sea cucumber’) trade gave rise the name of the lingua franca of Vanuatu, Bislama. There’s definitely room for a book by Mark Kurlansky on Sea Cucumber: A Biography of the Slug that Changed the World.

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Filed under Japan, language, Pacific

by | 20 May 2004 · 7:25 pm

The New Guinea Schoolboy and the Japanese Officer

The following story was told to me in 1976 by a man from Morobe Province, New Guinea who was a noted traveler and raconteur whose nickname was “Samarai,” because he had once spent time there. (My late West Virginia uncle had also spent time as an Army cook on nearby Goodenough Island after spending time in Australia. He had a lot of respect for the Aussies, and he’d been in fistfights with more than a few of them.)

In this first, rough translation, I’ve tried to capture the storyteller’s idiom without presuming too much specialized knowledge on the part of my readers. We can be sure the story has “improved” over countless retellings, but it nevertheless conveys a third-party perspective on the Pacific War that is too rarely heard. For more local reactions to the Pacific War, consult the Australian-Japan Research Project for Australia and PNG, and the book Typhoon of War for Micronesia.

While were were in school [around March 1942], the Japanese came and took over Lae, took over the Bukaua coast [the south coast of the Huon Peninsula], all the way to Finschhafen. But we stayed there at school for another year. Then, okay, the Australians and Americans seemed to be planning to come back. Their number one patrol officer, Taylor, sent a letter saying, “Natives, don’t stay in your villages any more. Build huts in your hillside gardens and stay there. A big fight is coming.”

So here’s what we did. We people at Hopoi abandoned Hopoi. We took our school, our desks, and everything and set them up in the forest. We stayed at a place called “Apo.” We kept going to school and, okay, the Australians came from over on the Moresby side, they came all the way to Wau. And they came down that little trail and they and the Japanese fought each other over at Mubo and Komiatam [above Salamaua].

And they sent word to us Kembula [Paiawa], Numbami [Siboma], and Ya [Kela] villagers to go carry their cargo to Komiatam. And they did that and the fighting got harder. The Australian forces got bigger. And some Numbami went and carried cargo over at Salamaua. They went at night. They went there and the Australians came down and fired on the Japanese so the Numbami ran into the forest.

They ran into the forest and there was one guy named G. “G, where are you? We’re leaving!”

So, okay, they went and slept overnight and the next morning arrived at Buansing. And a Japanese bigman there named Nokomura [probably Nakamura], he heard the story so he came down and talked to me. He talked to me and I said, “Oh, that was my cousin, my real [cross-]cousin.”

So the Japanese guy said, “Really? Your cousin? Oh, your cousin has died. The Australians shot him dead.” And he spoke Japanese, and he said, “One man, bumbumbumbumbumbu, boi i dai.”

I said, “Oh, you’re talking bad talk.”

Then he said, “Tomorrow, you go to school until 12 o’clock, then come to me.” So I went to school until 12 o’clock and I went to him.

He gave me, dakine, a rifle, a gun. And he gave me, dakine, ten cartridges, ten rounds. Then he said, “I’d like for you to take this and go shoot a few birds and bring them back for me to eat.”

So, okay, I took it and I went. And he wrote out my pass. And there were bigmen with long swords the Japanese called “kempesi” [probably kempeitai, the dreaded military police]. One man, his name was Masuda [possibly Matsuda]. This man had gone to school over in Germany. And he really knew German well.

So I came by and he saw me, “You, where are you going with that gun?”

So I said, “Oh, a bigman gave it to me to shoot birds for him to eat.”

“Let me see your papers.”

So I showed him my papers and he said, “Okay, go.”

So I went and found a friend of mine. His name was Tudi. I said, “Hey, Tudi. A bigman gave me a gun and I haven’t shot a bird yet. Could we both go and you shoot?”

“Okay.”

So we both went and stopped at an onzali tree and two hornbills were there. So he went and planted his knee and shot one and it fell down. So I was really happy and ran and got it. We kept going until he shot a cockatoo.

So after I thanked him, I said, “Give me the gun and I’ll see if I can shoot.”

So he gave it to me and we kept going until we saw some wala birds, and I said, “I’ll try to shoot. Shall I shoot or not?”

So, okay, I fired and I shot a wala bird to add to the others. So I said, “Okay, we have enough, so I’ll take it and go.”

So I tied the wings together and hung them over the gun and carried them back over to Buansing. I went and all the Japanese bigmen were sitting in a, dakine, committee. They were talking about the coming battles. They were sitting there talking and their bigman said, “Look, here comes my man,” and the guards saluted him. And I was invited in.

So I entered the building and the guard at the door said, “Ha!” When he said that I replied, “Ha!” And I bowed three times and he bowed three times.

After we finished, okay, I went up to the second guard and he went, “Ha!” And I said “Ha!” And I bowed three times and he bowed three times. Okay, then I walked on.

So then I went up to the man who stood at the steps up to the bigman. When he said, “Ha!” then I said, “Ha!” and we had both bowed the third time, I went up the steps.

I went up the ladder and the people who were sitting in the meeting, they stood up and went “Ha!” to me and I said “Ha!”, then I went up and they gave me a chair. I sat down.

And the bigman glanced at his cook. And, okay, he took smokes and opened a pack and passed them around until they were gone. Okay, then he struck his lighter and gave everyone a light, then we all sat down. We sat and sat, maybe a half-hour. Then he told his people, “Okay, the talk is over.”

So they all split up and went out leaving just him and me still sitting. We stayed sitting until he said, “I’ve already given you a blanket and a mosquito net. Here’s a knife. Here’s your lavalava. Over there are your bags of rice and dried bonito, two tins of meat, a tin of fish.”

I said, “Oh, you’ve given me so much. How will I carry it?”

He said, “Oh, it’s all right. Take it away.”

So I asked him, “You’ve given away so much. What does it mean?”

“Oh, there’s a reason. I guess I’ll tell you. After you leave, a ship will come tonight, a submarine will come and I’ll board it and go to Rabaul.”

I said, “Why are you going to do that?”

“Nothing. All us bigmen are going up to Rabaul because the bigmen and a whole lot of soldiers are at Rabaul. And these people, their job is to stay behind, and fight the Australians and Americans when they come, and destroy them, destroy them here. And us bigmen will be in Rabaul.”

“Oh, all right.”

Then he told me, he said, “You go get a good night’s sleep so that when you see the crack of dawn you’ll get up quickly.”

So I listened to him and left.

For a very well-researched Japanese account of the defense of Lae-Salamaua, see here.

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Filed under Japan, language, military, Papua New Guinea, war

by | 5 May 2004 · 6:31 pm

Literacy, Emotion, and Authority on a Polynesian Atoll

Is writing just speech in a different medium? Is writing more authoritative, objective, and reliable than speech? Can a text be understood without its context? Not in the literacy practices of the Polynesian atoll in Tuvalu, according to a book by anthropologist Niko Besnier.

The chief value of a good ethnographic description lies not in what its readers learn about others, but in what they learn—or unlearn—about themselves. Besnier (B) provides the ingredients for a healthy dose of unlearning in this useful and stimulating attempt both to describe the roles of literacy on Nukulaelae in Tuvalu and to offer a broader comparative and theoretical perspective, as the series title implies. This work is especially valuable in casting doubt on several assumptions that linguists too rarely question about the written vs. spoken word: (1) that writing is just speech in a different medium; (2) that writing is more authoritative, objective, or reliable than speech; and (3) that a transcribed text can be understood without its context.

B starts with a useful introduction to literacy theory (1–20) and concludes with a very stimulating comparative-ethnographic discussion (169–187). He contrasts two primary approaches: “the autonomous model” primarily articulated in a series of works by Jack Goody, and “an ideological model” primarily articulated in works by Brian Street. (The choice of determiner already reveals B’s sympathies, since it implies that the former has begun to lapse into rigor mortis, while the latter is still growing in new directions.) According to B, the autonomous model proposes that literacy itself is a causal (or at least enabling) factor that explains the differences often described (or imagined) between preliterate and literate individuals, societies, and cultures (2–3). Critics, including B, “find highly suspect the uncanny resemblance between middle-class academic ways of viewing literacy … and the social, cultural, and cognitive characteristics purported to be the consequences of literacy” (3). They argue instead that “literacy should be viewed not as a monolithic phenomenon but as a multi-faceted one, whose meaning … is crucially tied to the social practices that surround it and to the ideological system in which it is embedded” (3). B thus concentrates on the two most important products of literacy on Nukulaelae: letters and sermons.

Although whalers first visited Nukulaelae as early as 1821, literacy was first implanted by Samoan teachers and pastors dispatched by the London Missionary Society (LMS) in the 1860s. Conversion to Protestant Christianity was swift and thorough, but the language of religion and literacy remained primarily Samoan for a hundred years thereafter. Western missionaries rarely visited and the Bible was not fully translated into a dialect of Tuvaluan until 1987. Although English has by now supplanted Samoan as the model for literacy practices, few residents of Nukulaelae command it as well as their ancestors did Samoan. (Those who do so are likely to have learned it elsewhere and to seek salaried work that takes them elsewhere.)

As in many other parts of the world, literacy was introduced to Nukulaelae primarily for evangelistic purposes. Although some thus consider it to be an unredeemably nefarious hegemonic technology, the islanders quickly put it to use for a very important socioeconomic function of their own: keeping in touch with their far-flung networks of relatives and friends, benefactors and beneficiaries. Virtually all adults on the atoll are able to read and write their native language in a rough-and-ready orthography based on Samoan, which lacks only the geminate consonants found in Tuvaluan and several other Polynesian outliers and thus affords no consistent means to write them. Whenever the government ship arrives in Nukulaelae on its unpredictable rounds (at perhaps monthly intervals), the island becomes a hive of activity as people feverishly prepare to receive and then dispatch passengers, packages, and letters by the time the ship leaves the next day. Letters serve the purpose of renewing emotional as well as economic ties across long distances. They tend to be read and written late into the night in the same emotionally charged state that characterizes traditional farewells and returns. If anything, letters often display an even greater emotionality than is socially acceptable face-to-face. Cousins of opposite gender, for instance, are supposed to avoid each other’s presence, and yet letters between them “display as much affect as any other letter” (108). Nukulaelae Islanders thus appear to “define letter writing and reading as affectively cathartic contexts” (111). At the same time, letters undertake the more prosaic task of listing the contents of accompanying packages or the material needs of the writers that their correspondents are invited to fulfill. But here too, letters cannot be considered more objective and reliable than speech. Letters are often lost, damaged, delayed, or misunderstood, so the most authoritative and reliable way to send a message is for someone to deliver it in person and to explain the context in which it was written and answer any questions the recipient might have.

The written word is considerably more authoritative in religious contexts, with the printed Bible the most authoritative of all. However, written tracts distributed by competing religious groups are not accorded the same degree of respect. The authorship of a message confers authority and legitimacy more than its medium….

SOURCE: Review of Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll, by Niko Besnier (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1995) in Oceanic Linguistics 35 (1996): 148-151

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Filed under language, Polynesia

by | 2 May 2004 · 4:39 pm

The Oldest Malay Manuscript Ever Discovered

Uli Kozok, assistant professor of Indonesian language at the University of Hawai‘i, is studying the oldest Malay manuscript ever discovered. It appears to date from before the advent of Islam.

In 2001 I received a Research Relation grant to study the Kerinci script of central Sumatran as part of my work on the palaeography of Southeast Asia. The grant was used for the mapping of existent variants of the central Sumatran scripts that provided us with new insights into the internal relationship between the two closely related scripts. [See map.]

In 2002 I received a second Research Relation grant that resulted in the spectacular discovery of what I believed was the oldest extant Malay manuscripts. This manuscript, a legal code of 34 pages that I found in the village of Tanjung Tanah, contains two texts, one in the old Malayu script, and one in an ancient form of the Kerinci script, which is very likely the missing link in the development of the Kerinci and other South Sumatran scripts from an earlier version of the Sumatran version of the kawi script [Indic-derived and used to write Old Javanese].

The research was continued in 2003, again supported by a Research Relation grant. In the meanwhile my assertion that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is the oldest extant Malay manuscript came under attack by scholars of Javanese palaeography who argued that, on palaeographic grounds, the manuscript is not older than 200 years. As an expert in Sumatran script I immediately knew that such a late age was impossible, and also the textual evidence (e.g. the absence of any Arabic loanwords) ruled out a date as recent as the 18th century. Since I was unable to challenge their conclusion (I am not in expert of the Javanese script to which the Sumatran Malayu script is closely related), I decided to support my claim with scientific evidence and asked the owner to provide me with a small sample of the manuscript that I sent to the Rafter laboratory in Wellington, New Zealand. The result corroborated my hypothesis which was based on philological and historical evidence unanimously.

This manuscript is now beyond any doubt the oldest Malay manuscript in the world (most likely 2nd half of the 14th century) predating the hitherto oldest manuscript by nearly 200 years! …

My research on the Tanjung Tanah manuscript (which is the only Malay manuscript in a pre-Islamic script) is significant in that it makes a number of theories on early Malay literacy obsolete, and forces us to entirely rethink the intellectual history of the pre-Islamic Malay world.

If it can be established that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is palaeographically related to the 13th century Adityawarman inscriptions, we will not [only] have convincing proof that the manuscript dates to the 14th century, but it is also very likely that the manuscript will force us to entirely rethink Sumatran palaeography that hitherto had been closely linked to Java with its abundance of stone inscriptions and (from the 14th century onwards) manuscripts [in Arabic-derived Jawi script].

The translation of the manuscript, and the analysis of the language it is written in will give us new insights into the early Malay legal system, the political relationship between the coastal Malay maritime kingdoms with the upriver communities in the Bukit Barisan mountain range, but also into the development of the Malay language since this is the oldest existing substantial body of text in the Malay language.

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Filed under language, Malaysia

by | 1 May 2004 · 1:48 pm

New Caledonia and the Origin of Kanak

Head Heeb recently posted a nice backgrounder and update on New Caledonia.

The upcoming election in New Caledonia is shaping up to be significant for the future of the country. As usual, the election will pit the ruling settler-dominated, anti-independence Rally for Caledonia in the Republic against the indigenous, pro-independence opposition, but this time the leader of the ruling party wants to pull out of a 1998 power-sharing accord.

New Caledonia is one of the Pacific’s few settler colonies. Like Australia, it began as a penal colony with many of the convicts choosing to stay after the completion of their terms; nickel and copper booms later in the 19th century led to further settlement. Unlike other regional settler colonies such as New Zealand and Hawaii, however, the indigenous Kanaks were never reduced to a small minority. Instead, the Kanaks and the descendants of settlers are at rough parity. The Kanaks are the largest group but are only a 42.5-percent plurality of the population, with Caldoches (whites) at about 37 percent and Asian and Pacific labor migrants making up the remainder. The higher birth rate of the Kanaks gives them a long-term demographic edge, but the relatively even numbers have led to sharp conflict.

The history of how the Hawaiian word for ‘human, person’, kanaka, eventually came to be appropriated by Melanesian nationalists in a French colony named after Scotland is a tangled one.

The word kanaka comes from the original Polynesian tangata as it was pronounced in the eastern end of the Hawaiian archipelago (the island named Hawai‘i), where earlier t had come to be pronounced [k]. The western dialects, in particular those of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, preserved the older pronunciation as [t]. (The island of Taua‘i shows up on early Western maps as “Atooi.”) In 1778, the English explorer, Captain James Cook, on his way north to seek the Northwest Passage, sighted the biggest, highest, southernmost island in the archipelago before any of the other islands he named after the Earl of Sandwich. The local chief, Kamehameha, thus acquired the means to conquer the other islands before his neighbor-island rivals did. His kingdom was named after his home island, and his dialect eventually set the standard for the huge volume of written Hawaiian language materials during the 1800s, a rich legacy which is now being translated and standardized.

The same Captain Cook was responsible for naming New Caledonia (after the old Roman name for Scotland) when he first sighted it on an earlier voyage in 1774.

By the 1840s, at the peak of the whaling and sandalwood trade, Hawaiians could be found on ships and in ports all over the Pacific. At Fort Vancouver, for instance, 40% of the Hudson’s Bay Company laborers were Hawaiian.

As the English vessels stopped in the Sandwich Islands, now the Hawaiian Islands, to take on stores of food, water, and goods like rum and coral, Natives were offered (or sometimes forced into) short-term, renewable contracts with the Company; they boarded ship (in fact, they gained a reputation as skillful aboard because, unlike most sailors of the day, they could swim) and joined the workforce at Fort Vancouver. The employee village, just southwest of the stockaded fort proper, came to be known as Kanaka Village because of the large population of Hawaiians residing there, though it was home to all the diverse employees of the Company.

The common languages were either Canadian French or Chinook Jargon, a trade language based on Chinook but incorporating elements from English, French, and Hawaiian. In the early years of the fort, English was used infrequently, with visiting missionaries or the remnants of unsuccessful American fur trading ventures.

Among the gathering places in the South Pacific for whalers and traders in sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber, trepang) were Tanna in the southern New Hebrides and the Loyalty Islands off New Caledonia. The equivalent of Chinook Jargon here was Bislama, which also incorporated elements from English, Hawaiian, and later more and more French, as France began claiming territory in the area during the 1850s and 1860s.

By this time, kanaka seems to have been used on ships all over the Pacific to mean ‘native’, with the same derogatory implications that its English gloss has. In both Bislama and Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin), it suggests someone who is not just a native, but an uncivilized hillbilly. The word and its meaning were borrowed into French as canaque. However, Melanesian nationalists reversed its derogatory implications and defrenchified the spelling to Kanak, which has the advantage of denoting all New Caledonians of Melanesian ancestry, no matter which of three dozen different Melanesian languages they might speak.

If you’ve read this far, you really should go read the rest of Head Heeb’s post.

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Filed under France, language, Pacific

by | 22 March 2004 · 7:03 am

U.S. Marines Rely on Translation Devices

Gregg K. Kakesako reports in Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

Breaking the language barrier: Two tools help Marines communicate instantly in dozens of languages

The Marines have two types of universal voice translator devices to communicate with Iraqis about anything from searching vehicles to giving medical aid.

Shujie Chang, director of experimental projects at Marine Forces Pacific, said the devices are meant to help Marines who are now being sent to all corners of the world.

“You can take these devices,” Chang said, “into any country and they are a means to communicate with the local population.”

However, both voice translation devices are only one-way, where the commands or questions are made in English and then translated. Both rely on a pre-programmed lists of phrases.

The Phraselator P2 is the size of hefty personnel digital assistant, with a three-by-four-inch LCD display screen. It is manufactured by VoxTec, a subsidiary of Marine Acoustics Inc. in Newport, R.I.

The Voice Response Translator was developed 10 years ago for law enforcement officials and is basically a portable computer that attaches to a police officer’s belt. It was designed, said Timothy McCune, president of Integrated Wave Technologies, to keep the hands of the police officer free.

Aaargh. Better than nothing, I suppose. But not by much.

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Filed under language, military, U.S.

by | 4 March 2004 · 8:28 pm

Chinese now no. 3 language in Canada

China’s People’s Daily recently reported that Chinese is now the no. 3 language in Canada:

In Canada if you don’t speak English or French it is most likely that you speak Chinese. This is indicated by the latest census conducted by the Canadian government. According to the statistics Chinese has become a No. 3 language used in Canada and the number of people who speak Chinese keeps on increasing.

According to Nouvelles d’Europe from 1996 to 2001, the population whose mother tongue is Chinese grew 18 percent and reached 870,000 – about 2.9 percent out of 31.4 million of the population in Canada, a rise 0.3 percent over the original Chinese proportion of 2.6 percent. Most of the Chinese-speaking population live in BC and Ontario, Vancouver and Toronto being the two most populous cities.

Is this really news to anyone? I wonder what the no. 3 language in Japan is: Chinese or Korean?

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Filed under Canada, China, language

by | 23 January 2004 · 8:16 pm

A Language Freak Wandering in Siberia

If you feel the need to follow an ever farther outlier, check out this blog by pf, a language freak wandering through Siberia on his own.

Oddly, Russia is the only country I’ve been in where you can’t find manaiacal Australian tourists scurrying out wherever you step. In Europe, you can’t find a town so small but it’s got an Australian (or, if you’ll pardon the expression, a New Zealander) in it, or having just left it, or on the way to it. Here, though, I haven’t met a single antipodean, curiously. Though a couple Indian billionaires in April stayed in the hotel I stayed at in Suntar. I was called upon to verify their English, which I pronounced to be competent, but clearly not that of a native speaker. All marvelled at my deductive powers, for indeed, the Indians had been born in India, and not, as appearances might lead to believe, in any other country.

Americans do occur up here, though. There’s one, I don’t know if I mentioned him, who lived on Kamchatka for a year in high school, and now is studying Japanese (Japanese!) at Yakut State U. (Yakut State!) for a year. There was another who came to a village near Suntar, I wasn’t clear on which, and stayed for two years, or maybe three, hung around the local museum a lot, and then went home, where she turned into a doctor of anthropology. Everybody still remembers her, and, shaking their heads, say, “We’ve lived with this museum all our lives, and she comes here, looks at it for a couple years, writes some stuff down, and gets a doctorate!” She married a local, and took him home with her, where he now makes Sakha (Yakut) jewelry in North Carolina. I’m sure you can track him down, there’s probably not many Sakha (Yakut) jewellers in North Carolina. He’s got his own wall, with pictures of him, and a special cabinet for pictures of his brothers, local jewellers, and a picture of his father, touchingly hung next to a photocopy of his death certificate.

Hat tip: languagehat

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by | 17 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Asian Acronyms: Did you teach at GWYX or at Guangwai?

Discriminating linguists sometimes distinguish between acronyms pronounced as if they were a word, like NATO and UNICEF; and initialisms pronounced as a series of letters, like IBM or the UN. This distinction breaks down in orthographies that write whole syllables at a time, like Chinese.

In Chinese, for instance, acronyms are composed of the initial syllabic characters of (usually) two-syllable words. So, Peking (= Beijing) University, or Beijing Daxue [lit. ‘NorthCapital BigSchool’] becomes Beida [lit. ‘NorthBig’]. In Korean, Korea University, or Koryo Taehak [lit. ‘HighBeautiful BigSchool’] becomes Kodae [lit. ‘HighBig’]. In Japanese, it’s a bit more complicated. Chinese characters can be pronounced not just in their Chinese loan forms, but as native Japanese words that mean (more or less) the same thing. This is what makes Japanese far and away the most complex, least efficient writing system on earth. In either case, each character is usually pronounced as two syllables, since Japanese had to add final vowels to one-syllable Chinese roots in order to pronounce any final consonants, most of which have been lost in modern Mandarin Chinese. (The same thing happens to current Japanese borrowings from English: ranchi < lunch, setto < set, beisubouru < baseball, and so on.) So the acronym for Hiroshima University, or Hiroshima Daigaku [lit. ‘WideIsland BigSchool’] becomes HiroDai [lit. ‘WideBig’]. The name Hiroshima is native Japanese (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation would be Koutou = Ch. Guangdao), but Daigaku is Sino-Japanese [= Ch. Daxue].

After China adopted the supplementary Latin-based alphabetic pinyin writing system, which is increasingly used in computer input, you could begin to see alphabetic abbreviations, some of them rather alarming and most of them quite unpronounceable. Very few Chinese syllables start with vowels: a- is not uncommon, but e- and o- are rare, and i- and u- are nonexistent. Even worse, initial q-, x-, y-, and z- are way too common.

So, if you were to take the first pinyin letter of each syllable, Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute would be abbreviated GZWGYYXY < GuangZhou WaiGuo YuYan XueYuan [lit. ‘WideState OutCountry SpeechTalk LearnYard’]. You would do better to take the first letter of each two-syllable word rather than the first letter of every single syllable, in which case the same school would end up as GWYX < Guangzhou Waiguo Yuyan Xueyuan [lit. ‘Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute’]. However, most Chinese acronyms are more economical than that. The common name for this particular school was equivalent to “GuangFor” (Guangzhou Foreign), namely, GuangWai [lit. ‘WideOut’]. (It has now merged into GDUFS, the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, which would still qualify for the acronym GuangWai in Chinese. The unfortunate English acronym must certainly be guh-doofs.)

These syllabic acronyms aren’t unique to Chinese. Indonesian (or Malay) uses a Latin-based alphabetic writing system, but is chock full of syllabic as well as alphabetic acronyms (and initialisms). Acronyms seem to proliferate under big bureaucracies–especially if the military has a free hand. Examples of syllabic acronyms in Indonesian include the names of provinces like Sulsel < Sulawesi Selatan [‘south’], Sulut < Sulawesi Utara [‘north’], and Sulteng < Sulawesi Tengah [‘central’] on the island of Sulawesi (Celebes); schools like UnHas < Universitas Hasanuddin in Sulawesi and UnPatti < Universitas Pattimura in Maluku (Molucca); and terms like tapol < tahanan politik [‘political prisoner’].

UPDATE: Like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese characters and has lots of Chinese loanwords. Judging from the website of Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese seem to abbreviate by taking the first letter of each separately written syllable. Thus, (ignoring diacritics) Dai hoc Quoc gia Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh [lit. ‘University National City Ho Chi Minh’] is abbreviated DHQG-HCM. Ho Chi Minh City is also abbreviated TP.HCM, which I’m pretty sure is often pronounced Saigon. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue how these abbreviations are pronounced.

FURTHER UPDATE: Korean usage of taehak seems to be diverging from that of its cognates in Japanese (daigaku) and Chinese (daxue). While each term applies to a variety of institutions of tertiary education, Korean now distinguishes between taehak ‘college’ and taehakkyo ‘university’ very much long the lines of American usage. Taehakkyo indicates a larger institution that offers graduate education. So Kodae now stands for Koryo Taehakkyo, as the Chinese characters and Korean title on their homepage shows. I don’t think the cognate forms, Jp. daigakkou and Ch. daxuexiao, even exist, much less serve a similar function.

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