TOK PISIN
I had my last exam today, sociolinguistics and it actually went quite well. I had to write 4 essays in 2 hours, two of the questions were about Welsh in Wales (one about road signs and linguistic landscapes, one about ethnolinguistic vitality), one question about Tok Pisin (where I demonstrated my near fluency in Tok Pisin haha) and then one question about projection of self-identity, where I wrote about convergence and divergence. My professor seems to like it when we include personalised things in our essays so I included something about the time I had to “converge” after going to a middle class school, losing a bit of my Somerset accent and being pressurised to re-adopt a Somerset burrrr when I went back home because everyone made fun and was like “wtf Cat why are you so posh now”. Anyway. Now I can relax and…..read the linguistics books I got for my birthday?!?! A bit of light reading haha!
Anyway. I love Tok Pisin. It’s a pidgin language, with English as its lexifier, spoken in Papua New Guinea and it’s like the best thing ever. I’m such a language nerd! Anyway Tok Pisin is the best. The translation and etymology of some words is just awesome. Like the Tok Pisin word for “abandon” is “lusim” which comes from the English phrase “lose him”. The word for “sad” is “bel hevi” which literally means “heavy belly”. “Hair” is “gras bilong het” which literally translates as “grass on the head”. And a weed or dead grass is “gras nogut” which is, literally “grass that is no good”. “Mausgras” is “beard” - like “mouth grass”. “Air conditioner” is “win masin” - literally “wind machine”. It’s fascinating how the language develops, I think. If you figure out the connection between various phonemes in Tok Pisin and English - ie, “sh” in English becomes “s” in Tok Pisin, “f” becomes “p”, etc, it’s pretty easy to work out the root and origins of different Tok Pisin words, like a kind of code.
It’s a language that started out as a simplified version of English to aid communication between traders of sandalwood and beche-de-mer (a kind of sea-slug), and it’s developed into its own form. Ahhhhh languages. Also did you know the word “pidgin” comes from the word “business”, relating to its previous use as a language of trade. That sentence totally sounded like an essay sentence. I’m in exam mode.
Some meanings in Tok Pisin can diverge from the original English meanings though due to misunderstanding or just plain language growth. “Backsait” - from the English “backside” - does not mean “arse” like it does in English, but means “back”. And strangely, the Tok Pisin word “bai”, which rather randomly comes from the obscure English phrase “by-and-by”, has come to represent a future modifier (ie a word put into a verb phrase to change it into the future tense). And although its lexifier is English, it takes many words from other languages, like the Tok Pisin word “save” which means “know” and is taken from the Portuguese “saber” (“to know”). This kind of shows how the language is an amalgamation of international influence and language.
Ad so concludes today’s Tok Pisin lesson!!