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Boys and girls

Some cultures go further than merely differentiating between children and adolescents. The Indonesian word balita refers to those under five years old; the Hindi term kumari means a girl between ten and twelve, while bala is a young woman under the age of sixteen. The Cook Islands Maoris continue the sequence with mapu, a youth from about sixteen to twenty-five.

False friends

compromisso (Portuguese) engagement

embarazada (Spanish) pregnant

anus (Latin) old woman

chin (Persian) one who catches money thrown at weddings

moon (Khakas, Siberia) to hang oneself

bath (Scottish Gaelic) to drown

hoho (Hausa, Nigeria) condolences

Mid-life crisis

Before we know it, the carefree days of our youth are just fading memories:

sanada arba’ (Arabic) to be pushing forty

parebos (Ancient Greek) being past one’s prime

kahala (Arabic) to be an old fogey at the height of one’s life

Torschlusspanik (German) the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older (literally, gate-closing panic); this word is often applied to women worried about being too old to have children

Getting older Hawaiian-style

The Hawaiians have a highly specific vocabulary to describe the effects of what the Germans call Lebensabend, the twilight of life:

’aua a woman beginning to become wrinkled

ku’olo an old man with sagging cheeks

kani ko’o an aged man who needs to carry a cane

kani mo’opuna the state of old age when one has many grandchildren

hakalunu extreme old age, as when one is no longer able to walk

ka’i koko bedridden; so old one needs to be carried in a net

pala lau hala the advanced loss of hair; the last stage of life

Kicking the bucket

Other languages have highly inventive euphemisms for the tricky subject of passing on:

nolikt karoti (Latvian) to put down the spoon

colgar los guantes (Spanish, Central America) to hang up the gloves

het hoek omgaan (Dutch) to go around the corner

bater a bota/esticar a perna (Portuguese) to hit the boot or to stretch the leg

avaler son bulletin de naissance (French) to swallow one’s birth certificate

The final reckoning

adjal (Indonesian) the predestined hour of one’s death

Liebestod (German) dying for love or because of a romantic tragedy

pagezuar (Albanian) the state of dying before enjoying the happiness that comes with being married or seeing one’s children married

Chinese whispers

Chinese has a rich vocabulary when it comes to the last moments of life:

huiguang fanzhao the momentary recovery of someone who is dying

yiyan a person’s last words

yiyuan a person’s last or unfulfilled wish

mingmu to die with one’s eyes closed, to die without regret

txiv xaiv a funeral singer whose songs bring helpful, didactic messages from the dead person to the survivors

Last rites

In the end the inevitable takes its course:

talkin (Indonesian) to whisper to the dying (i.e. words read at the end of a funeral to remind the dead person of what to say to the angels of death)

farjam-gah (Persian) the final home (grave)

tunillattukkuuq (Inuit) the act of eating at a cemetery

akika (Swahili) a domestic feast held either for a child’s first haircut or for its burial

On reflection

The long of it

Among languages that build up very long words for both simple and complex concepts are those defined as ‘polysynthetic’, and many of them are found in Australia or Papua New Guinea. The Aboriginal Mayali tongue of Western Arnhem Land is an example, forming highly complex verbs able to express a complete sentence, such as: ngabanmarneyawoyhwarrgahganjginjeng, meaning ‘I cooked the wrong meat for them again’. (This breaks down into nga: I, ban: them, marne: for, yawoyh: again, warrgah: wrongly directed action, ganj: meat, ginje: cook, ng: past tense.) In the Australian language known as Western Desert, palyamunurringkutjamunurtu means ‘he or she definitely did not become bad’.

Germans are not the only ones who like to create complex compound