Sidetracked by Pijin

New Guinea amazes people who've heard little about it. It's a massive island but still not a very large country. It manages, in the tropical mountains and valleys that cross the nation, to fit in about 1/5 of all the world's different languages into that space. Most of these have fewer than a thousand speakers and the largest truly indigenous language has not more than 50,000 speakers.

One fascinating part of the country is how an English-based creole has developed in the past century and a half. A pidgin language is an incomplete language that develops when adults are thrown together with no shared language. They act as survivors must and strip most of their own languages of the grammar and vocabulary and often borrow heavily from a single language. In plantations, whether based on slave or free labor, the host language naturally is most often that of the overseers. In Papua New Guinea in the 19th century, this tended to be German, but after World War I, the German administrators and planters were replaced by English speakers, and that is from whence most of Tok Pisin comes.

The words aren't simply taken over whole. Some short ones undergo little change. "Talk" becomes "tok", "man" stays as "man", "car" becomes "car". These adaptations make sense since they bring English words into accord with the sound systems of the speakers own first languages. Changes also are made to the meaning of words. Most often, an English word is made to do multiple duty: as a noun and a verb and often with a wider meaning than is the case in English. "Meri" comes from "Mary" and means "woman, female, wife". "Bihain" comes from "behind" and means, variously "behind, after, later, to come after, to follow, to obey." Some of the meanings can surprise. "As" comes from "ass, arse" and means, understandably enough, "ass, arse" but also "bottom, foundation, cause, reason, beginning". In some versions of the Tok Pisin Bible, the first word is "As". Think of "In the beginning (=as), God created heaven and earth."

One of the delights of learning Tok Pisin is the ways these creative semantic adaptions can play tricks with the reader. "Manmeri" is not a mannish woman but "people", as it comes from the idea of man + woman = "people, everyone". "Bararip" comes from the Australianism "bugger up" and means "to make a mess of things, to harm, to destroy". This is the word God uses when he tells Noah he wants to destroy (bugger up) the world.