I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [5]
tao (Chinese) that’s the way it goes
taetae tiria (Cook Islands Maori) throw it away, it’s dirty!
uf (Danish) ugh! yuk!
usch då (Swedish) oh, you poor thing!
y-eazziik (Dardja, Algeria) an expression used exclusively by women to criticize another person’s action
zut (French) dash it!
Chinwag
The niceties of what in English is baldly known as ‘conversation’ are well caught in other languages:
ho’oponopono (Hawaiian) solving a problem by talking it out
samir (Persian) one who converses at night by moonlight
begadang (Indonesian) to stay up all night talking
glossalgos (Ancient Greek) talking till one’s tongue aches
Breakdown in communication
Whether the person you are talking to suffers from latah (Indonesian), the uncontrollable habit of saying embarrassing things, or from chenyin (Chinese), hesitating and muttering to oneself, conversation may not always be quite as we’d like it:
catra patra (Turkish) the speaking of a language incorrectly and brokenly
nyelonong (Indonesian) to interrupt without apology
akkisuitok (Inuit) never to answer
dui niu tanqin (Chinese) to talk over someone’s head or address the wrong audience (literally, to play the lute to a cow)
’a’ama (Hawaiian) someone who speaks rapidly, hiding their meaning from one person whilst communicating it to another
dakat’ (Russian) to keep saying yes
dialogue de sourds (French) a discussion in which neither party listens to the other (literally, dialogue of the deaf)
mokita (Kiriwana, Papua New Guinea) the truth that all know but no one talks about
Tittle-tattle
Gossip – perhaps more accurately encapsulated in the Cook Island Maori word ’o’onitua, ‘to speak evil of someone in their absence’ – is a pretty universal curse. But it’s not always unjustified. In Rapa Nui (Easter Island) anga-anga denotes the thought, perhaps groundless, that one is being gossiped about, but it also carries the sense that this may have arisen from one’s own feeling of guilt. A more gentle form of gossip is to be found in Jamaica, where the patois word labrish means not only gossip and jokes, but also songs and nostalgic memories of school.
False friends
Those who learn languages other than their own will sometimes come across words which look or sound the same as English, but mean very different things. Though a possible source of confusion, these false friends (as linguists call them) are much more likely to provide humour – as any Englishwoman who says ‘bless’ to her new Icelandic boyfriend will soon discover:
hubbi (Arabic) friendly
kill (Arabic) good friend
bless (Icelandic) goodbye
no (Andean Sabela) correct
aye (Amharic, Ethiopia) no
fart (Turkish) talking nonsense
machete (Aukan, Suriname) how
The unspeakable …
Cursing and swearing are practised worldwide, and they generally involve using the local version of a small set of words describing an even smaller set of taboos that surround God, the family, sex and the more unpleasant bodily functions. Occasionally, apparently inoffensive words acquire a darker overtone, such as the Chinese wang bah dahn, which literally means a turtle egg but is used as an insult for politicians. And offensive phrases can often be beguilingly inventive:
zolst farliren aleh tseyner achitz eynm, un dos zol dir vey ton (Yiddish) may you lose all your teeth but one and may that one ache
así te tragues un pavo y todas las plumas se conviertan en cuchillas de afeitar (Spanish) may all your turkey’s feathers turn into razor blades
… the unmentionable
Taboo subjects, relating to local threats or fears, are often quirky in the extreme. Albanians, for example, never use the word for ‘wolf’. They say instead mbyllizogojen, a contraction of a sentence meaning ‘may God close his mouth’. Another Albanian taboo-contraction is the word for fairy, shtozovalle, which means may ‘God increase their round-dances’. Similarly, in the Sami language of Northern Scandinavia and the Yakuts language of Russia, the original name for bear is replaced by a word meaning ‘our lord’ or ‘good father’. In Russian itself,