Trevor Joyce sent me a link to Danica Salazar’s Guardian piece on an OED update a couple of years ago, but it slipped to the unseen recesses of my inbox before I got around to it, and I hereby abashedly retrieve it for your delectation. After an introit on how “English spread across the globe,” we get to the good stuff:
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.
Speakers of world varieties of English are remaking its vocabulary to better express their identities, cultures and everyday realities. In Hong Kong, people exclaim add oil as a show of encouragement or support, an expression literally translated from the Cantonese gā yáu, with reference to petrol being injected into an engine. In the Philippines, many houses have a dirty kitchen, which is not actually a kitchen that is dirty in the sense you think, but a kitchen outside the house where most of the real cooking is done – a necessary convenience in a tropical country where it is best to avoid trapping heat and smells indoors. In Nigeria, a mama put is a street-food stall, and its name comes from the way that its customers usually order food: they say “Mama, put …” to the woman running the stall, and point to the dish they want so it can be put on their plate.
Meanwhile, the Japanese have invented, and South Koreans have popularised, the word skinship, a blend of the words skin and kinship that refers to the close physical contact between parent and child or between lovers or friends.
What great expressions! (Yes, I know some of you feel strongly that such terms are not part of English as you conceive it; we can take the objection as read.) The etymology for kaveera (East African English /kaˈvera/) actually provides a morphological analysis in Luganda, though it would have been nice if they’d ventured a guess as to where ‑veera comes from:
< Luganda (a)kaveera < (a)ka-, singular class prefix + ‑veera (single-use) plastic bag (plural (o)buveera buveera n.).
Compare buveera n. (which is also used as a plural of kaveera n. in English).
Belated thanks, Trevor!
Is Luganda kaveera simply from English cover, with the initial syllable reinterpreted as the Luganda class VI singular noun marker? If so, it’s a pity that the Oxford English Dictionary overlooked this… (For the reinterpretation, compare Swahili kinara, built on mnara, from Arabic منارة manāra.)
Googling the spelling cavera together with Uganda gets some hittage.
GT gives Luganda obuveera for “plastic.”
The ka- singular is Bleek-Meinhof class XII, apparently diminutive (sometimes) in Luganda, and certainly so elsewhere in Bantu.
Of interest, in that the presumably cognate singular suffix *-ka is (often) diminutive in Oti-Volta too. (It also turns up in e.g. Kusaal biig, Mbelime bīìkɛ̀ etc etc “child.”) The affix is also used for tools and instruments in Oti-Volta and in some Bantu.
Swahili kitabu “book”, plural vitabu is another example of this kind of reanalysis. Even better is Lingala motuka “car”, plural mituka.
Oti-Volta languages do this thing of fittlng loans into the noun-class system by analogy pretty much routinely, though as the languages use class suffixes rather than prefixes it doesn’t look quite so outlandish. Thus e.g. Mooré lórè “car”, plural loaya.
Victor Mair is a fan of “add oil!” and has blogged on it several times at Language Log, first in 2016, then in 2018 after the OED added it, and a couple times after that.
Ah, I thought it sounded familiar!
I’m not convinced kaveera is from English: you’d have expected “cover” to end up as something like kava – both the r and the long ee are odd. (Anglophone African English is non-rhotic.)
According to
https://learnluganda.com/combo
luveera o- (lu/n) arch, garment of goatskins; current thin/flimsy/transparent wrapper or cover. oluveera lw’ekiteeteeyi a flimsy, transparent dress; a long, flowing dress.
Dunno what sources underlle this.
Yes the word means that. And it is indeed customary practice to share out the nurturing of kids around the family.
But I wouldn’t say that’s the familiar word for English speakers in NZ. Rather ‘whānau out’, where whānau means (extended) family.
luveera
That is excellent! It’s John D. Murphy (1972), Luganda–English Dictionary, p. 305.
Of all the abundance of the 70-ish languages of California, only three words made it into English AFAIK, and two mostly locally: abalone, from Spanish aulón, from Rumsen Ohlone ’awlun ‘red abalone, Haliotis rufescens’; toyon, from some (northern?) variety of Ohlone, ‘Heteromeles arbutifolia’; and islay, through Spanish, from Migueleño Salinan sle’y, ‘hollyleaf cherry, Prunus ilicifolia’.
I retain from somewhere—probably the 2nd edition of the Random House Dictionary— the etymology of chuckwalla from Cahuilla. What Random House says:
But now the Wiktionary, Wikipedia, etc., say that chuckwalla could also be from ‘Shoshone’, whichever of several varieties is intended by that. Jon Philip Dayley Tümpisa (Panamint) Shoshone Dictionary gives tsakwatan, tsakawatan with /ts/ (the stops being voiced and lenited intervocallically), and the other Numic languages have similar words. I am certainly not qualified to evaluate the choice between a Cahuilla and a Numic etymon. (But Spanish ch- does sometimes replaces Nahuatl initial tz- : chicle (Nahuatl tzictli), chapote ‘Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana)’ (doublet of Spanish zapote; Nahuatl tzapotl), chinchayote ‘edible root of the chayote plant’ (a virtual Nahuatl *tzinchayohtli : tzintli ‘butt; base, foundation’ + chayohtli ‘chayote’), chinaco…)
Merriam Webster includes wokas. Would you allow that to squeak by as Californian? Of course, I don’t know whether the Modoc word was basically the same as the Klamath. M.A.R. Barker (1963) Klamath Dictionary has the following entry:
Hawaiian hānai is used like Maori whāngai for adoptive or foster relatives, but also for close family friends, who might also be addressed or referred to as Uncle or Auntie in English. Keiki hānai ‘foster child’, makua hānai ‘foster parent’. Hawaiian hānai is also a verb meaning ‘to nourish or support (or suckle)’.
Hānau ‘birth’ is most commonly heard in Hau’oli Lā Hānau ‘Happy Birthday’!
https://www.trussel2.com/HAW/haw-h.htm#hana
I first heard ja you! (‘add oil’) at an athletic event at the junior college we taught at in Zhongshan in 1987-88.
Mamaput reminds me of how my bilingual twin toddlers named streaming videos “howbouts,” after the way I’d offer them options in my southern US accent: “How ’bout this big truck one? No? Ok, how ’bout one about trains?”
That turned into: “We want a howbout! Let’s watch a howbout ’bout monster machines!”
(Also, old houses in the South used to have “dirty kitchens” too, but we called them “summer kitchens.”)
Xerîb: good call on the chuckwalla! I checked Bright and Gudde’s California Place Names (4th ed.), whose etymologies are excellent, when available. It says, “The name of the lizard is borrowed from California Spanish chacahuala, or directly from Cahuilla cháxwal, perhaps with influence from Chemehuevi chagwara (Munro); this is one of the few animal names that have entered English from California Indian languages. Chuckwalla Wells is mentioned in the 1870s as a stopping place of stagecoaches.”
I wouldn’t include wokas, though. Likely the name was indeed used by the Klamath harvesting the lower Klamath River marshes, but as far as I can tell the name never was adopted into English, except in the specific context of what Indians called their traditional food.
Speaking of Klamath, M.A.R. Barker’s dictionary and grammar of the language are the most complete available, and are good. He, however, was a piece of work, and not in a good way.
I recognize Barker’s name, albeit dimly, from being familiar with Empire of the Petal Throne during my long-ago period of adolescent D&D obsession, which did not long survive the presidency of Jimmy Carter. I didn’t know about his work on Klamath, or the non-Klamath “not in a good way” other interests to which Y alludes.
My copy of Robins’ The Yurok Language used to belong to him.
Perhaps I should have it exorcised.
His Klamath grammar is impressive but weird. Idiosyncratic …
(I had no idea about the D&D stuff.)
Yeesh. A holocaust denier who is secretly pushing for a holocaust. The line in wiki about his Islamic conversion is a brilliant send-up of his intellectual dishonesty.
I dunno. “Seemed like a more logical religion” seems legit to me. None of the Christological paradoxes. I can see that.
Horrible people can be perfectly sincere believers.
Not that I was ever a Tékumel guy, but I had managed to forget about Barker’s scumminess.
Y wrote:
and islay, through Spanish, from Migueleño Salinan sle’y, ‘hollyleaf cherry, Prunus ilicifolia’.
There is a street in Santa Barbara named “Islay”.
How is it pronounced?
“ How is it pronounced? “
When speaking English, I’ve always heard “is-lay” as in Lays Potato Chips (sorry, I can’t do IPA). When people are speaking Spanish I’ve heard a mix of two pronunciations, one like in English (“is-lei” or “ees-lay”) and another pronounced as the word would be in Spanish (“is-lai” or “ees-lie”) but I’ve probably heard the first pronunciation more often.
Also, growing up in Santa Barbara its pretty common to have one or more abalone shells lying around the house and it wasn’t unusual to see one being used as an ashtray.
But not pronounced /ˈaɪlə/ like the island in the Inner Hebrides with the same spelling (a spelling designed to baffle outsiders).
There is an Islais Creek in San Francisco, now mostly culverted. I would have guessed “is-ley” as well, not having heard it pronounced, but now, upon checking Bright and Gudde and some videos, I find that it’s traditionally /ˈɪslɪs/. However, young ‘uns in recent videos pronounce it /ˈɪslə/ (a newscaster!), /ɪzˈleə/, /ɪsˈla.ɪs/ and no doubt other ways. Won’t someone do something about it?
The only time I have seen abalone shells on the beach was on one with no public access. People can’t resist them.
But not pronounced /ˈaɪlə/ like the island in the Inner Hebrides
That pronunciation is reserved for Isla Vista, near Santa Barbara.
Whose street names are the topic of this complaint.
Whose street names are the topic of this complaint.
‘“Del Playa” appeared to her an incorrect version of “de la playa,” which means “to the beach” in Spanish.’ Ow! Ow!
From the linked news artcle:
” Cerrato was born in Sonora, Mexico, and moved to a Mexican-American neighborhood of Oxnard, Calif. at 14. She now notices when people pronounce “El Colegio” with a hard “g” instead of the “h” sound used by native Spanish-speakers.
“Everyone knew how to pronounce things in Spanish” in Oxnard, Cerrato said. “People here don’t try whatsoever to pronounce the names correctly.”
Keep in mind that Isla Vista is right next to the University of California at Santa Barbara which draws people from all over California and beyond who might not be familiar with proper Spanish pronunciation ( even among Californians of a certain age) plus I.V. ( as locals call it ) is located near a number of companies that also draw people from all sorts of places. Raytheon used to employ a lot of people in the area and it was located not far from Isla Vista.
I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say El Colegio Road with a hard g but it’s been a very long time since I hung out in I.V.
Ms. Cerrato is from Oxnard which has a huge Mexican-American community ( including a Mexican neighborhood known as La Colonia which is located literally on “the other side of the tracks”*) and lived in Isla Vista with all its undergrad and grad students from somewhere else. If she lived in or near the Mexican neighborhoods** of Goleta and Santa Barbara she would have met plenty of people who know how to pronounce things in Spanish ( although admittedly there are plenty of locals who hold on to English and/or quirky pronunciations of Spanish and Chumash words, like saying “luh coom-bruh” instead of “lah coom-bray” for La Cumbre.)
*In Sant Barbara the train tracks run close to the ocean past Downtown. I had an Anglo friend from a nice neighborhood above the old Mission who once jokingly told me, “well at least you can’t say that you’re from the other side of the tracks!”.
**There used to be more Latinos and more non-students of other backgrounds living in Isla Vista but in the 90s, as the university expanded and drew even more students, a lot of the apartment buildings there were bought by new landlords who evicted the tenants to remodel the buildings, raise the rents and cater to UCSB students and their needs. This pushed out a lot of poorer and non-student Isla Vistans.