AntC sent me a link to this RNZ story by Layla Bailey-McDowell, saying “This is one of those silly gossip-magazine ‘competitions’ that I wouldn’t bother with except a word in Te Reo Māori is the winner. (Also a Welsh word came third.)” It is certainly silly, but I like the word; the story begins:
A Māori word describing the responsibility to care for the natural world has been named the world’s most beautiful word by language-learning platform Babbel. The kupu, kaitiakitanga topped a list of 223 words from 75 languages after Babbel analysed discussions across online communities including Reddit and TikTok before an international panel of linguists, writers and cultural experts selected a winner.
The word means guardianship and protection. It was a way of protecting and caring for the environment for present and future generations based on the Māori world view. Babbel said kaitiakitanga stood out for its distinctive sound, layered meaning and cultural significance. […]
(I’ll spare you the guff about its profundity and “concept that has no direct equivalent in many other languages”; I’m sure you can fill in the blanks for yourself.) The runner-ups include such perennials as Welsh hiraeth ‘wistfulness; nostalgia’ (or, in excitable journalese, “A deep, bittersweet longing for a lost or never-truly-known home or time”) and Portuguese saudade ‘wistfulness; nostalgia’ (aka “A deep longing for someone or something that is absent – both painful and beautiful”), but it also has fresher items like Turkish yakamoz ‘phosphorescence in the sea due to bioluminescent dinoflagellates; the reflection of moonlight or other lights on water,’ which pleased me by being borrowed from Greek διακαμός ‘phosphorescence in the sea.’ (It also includes what it calls Yiddish luftmensch, although that’s the English spelling — the Yiddish word, לופֿטמענטש, is transliterated luftmentsh. It’s a word I’ve always loved, but I’m not sure I’d call it beautiful.) As for the winner, kaitiakitanga /kaiˈtiakiˌtaŋa/ is from kaitiaki ‘guardian’ + -tanga (nominalising suffix), and kaitiaki ‘guardian’ is derived from tiaki ‘to guard,’ whose Polynesian cognates you can see at POLLEX. Thanks, AntC!
I thought Katie a Kitanga was one of the Atomic Kittens (or a cover band from nearby Nouvelle Calédonie).
For beauty you might like to try this similar word (with bonus FDR in the examples). That said, I only know it from reading, and it may well be completely obsolete by now.
OP:
Not to spoil the fun, but is this a calque of ‘guardianism’?
Oh, and how do you avoid leaving that orphan comma inside a quotation or parenthesis?
@DM: Well, two of the texts using Luftikus quoted in the WP article are from the 2010s. So, not obsolete yet, but I agree that it’s not exactly youth slang.
is this a calque of ‘guardianism’?
As shows at @Hat’s link to POLLEX, the root is all across Eastern Polynesian languages; then it dates back at least to ~1250 CE. So no, not a calque of any Euro/Enlightenment concept, indeed possibly the other way round. Usually it’s calqued as ‘guardianship’, as in the quote.
(I believe (as-was Prince) Charles recognised the idea as ‘Stewardship’: the relationship between the Monarch and the institutions of State.)
Or did you mean ‘Grauniadism’? — a bleeding-heart unquestioning liberal over-respect for indigenous people and customs, as correction for calling them ‘savages’?
The Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives one example:
Kaitiakitanga mātauranga ‘education trust board’ is so boring. Worse than cellar door, itself also an “extraordinary word”, with “a distinctive sound, a [literally] profound meaning, and a concept that has no direct equivalent in many other languages.”
AntC: POLLEX links to the root, not to the fully derived word, which Trond suggested as a calque. All the same I have never heard of “guardianism”.
“Luftikus” maybe could be “flibbertigibbet” in English. Or what about “airhead”?
It’s nonsense, of course; the world’s most beautiful word is, without doubt, the Mampruli word for “lily”, pɔ’a-veelli-ku-siisi-koom (literally, ‟beautiful-woman-will-not-touch-water.”)
It brings together everything that makes a word extraordinary: a distinctive sound, a profound meaning, and a concept that has no direct equivalent in many other languages.
Perhaps this “app”, “Babbel”, unaccountably lacks support for Mampruli? But it supports Mooré, at least, right? Right?
[Inevitably, “Ubuntu” figures in the list, along with its “meaning”, “I am because we are.” That one manages to be even more irritating than hiraeth.*]
* This is an ancient Welsh word, rooted in age-old druidic wisdom, meaning “longing for jourmalists to learn even the basics of linguistics, or, failing that, to pass over all linguistic matters in holy silence.” It was revealed to our forefathers by Dogon** from Sirius B.
** This ethnonym derives from the Welsh Dogion, “people of the Dog Star.”
Correction: the ‘board’ part is poari. Measure twice, type once.
@Y: Thanks! Yes, I should have written ‘guardianship’ obviously.
the fully derived word, which Trond suggested as a calque.
Emm why should Polynesian languages be in need of calquing something for which they already have well-developed vocabulary? They’re savages, so they wouldn’t have abstract concepts is what Trond seems to be suggesting(?)
-tanga abstractivising suffix in Te Reo. And from a pan-Polynesian root.
Let me quote some of my original email to @Hat:
The word is contentious in NZ colonial history: the Te Reo version of our founding document, The Treaty of Waitangi, is not a translation of the English version — which talks about ‘Sovereignty’. So the indigenous signers thought they were ceding something more like ‘guardianship’/’trusteeship’ — that is, kaitiakitanga. Of course in Māori culture there is no concept of humans or tribes ‘owning’/having ‘sovereignty’ over land; rather the humans are held to the land through genealogy — where their placenta is buried after birth.
Academic/legal commentary.
Wasn’t it rangatiratanga that was used where the English used ‘sovereignty’? Your link associates tiakina with “protect”.
I’m not suggesting any such thing. I also don’t think it serves anyone to attribute mystical qualities to various indigenous languages (see “Mother Godess”). Calquing is interesting as linguistic as well as more general cultural history. I speak a Germanic language where a large part of the (originally) learned religious, juridical, and/or administrative vocabulary was calqued from German, which in turn calqued Latin, which in turn calqued Greek, which may in turn well have calqued something and/or other. Such calquing may take different forms. Sometimes the whole pattern is calqued regardless if indigenous compound syntax, sometimes indigenous elements are put together according to indigenous rules and the words still sound foreign until they don’t, sometimes indegenous terms are given extended meanings, etc., etc.
@Jonathan, it’s tangled (but you already knew that)
How ‘kaitiakitanga’ connects to these concepts:
The English text of the Treaty was prepared by Colonial officials, not lawyers; so is already dubious. The translation to Te Reo that the chiefs signed was by Rev Henry Williams, more used to translating the bible; also not a lawyer. And it was all done in a terrible rush before the French could take possession of some of the territory.
@Trond, English legal language is calqued from Norman French from Latin. I’m not attributing “mystical qualities” to Te Reo or Polynesian languages, merely before any European contact: a) noting there was a full suite of concepts wrt ‘covenants’/’ceding’ powers/chiefly/tribal ‘governance’; so b) pointing to pre-existing vocabulary.
My understanding of ‘calquing’ is that it creates words or phrases in the target language that didn’t previously exist (particularly not the jammed-together neologisms). We can certainly say the translators of the Treaty did a terrible job. In some cases they shied away from what they knew would be a better translation, because it would give a phrasing the Chiefs/culture would reject. Particularly around ‘owning’/buying/selling land or the foreshore.
If the languaging needed slamming round pegs into square holes, it would come from translating the Roman Empire and Cities world of the Gospels into a non-urban chieftan/clan-based hunter-gatherer structure.
I also don’t think it serves anyone to attribute mystical qualities to various indigenous languages (see “Mother Goddess”)
Absolutely. This attitude regarding other cultures is on a “these people sure have natural rhythm” level; regarding one’s own, it feeds into fascist self-mythologising (or, if you’re a bit luckier, into the comparatively harmless notion of “sacred languages.”)
Of course in Māori culture there is no concept of humans or tribes ‘owning’/having ‘sovereignty’ over land
It’s one of the distinctive features of the Mossi-Dagomba states that the chiefs (supposed to be the descendants of the foreign conquerors who founded these kingdoms) cannot own the land; only the common people (who believe themselves to be indigenous) can. All parties, including the chiefs, take it as axiomatic that the land itself is inalienable; all decisions regarding land use and occupation must be taken by the tindaana “land-owner”, who is regarded as a descendant of the original oikist or first settler. A captious or arbitrary tindaana would come to be regarded as illegitimate, and would be deposed, but in principle, all land “ownership” is contingent and provisional.
Such are the quaint customs of these peoples, that even a woman can be a tindaana.
My understanding of ‘calquing’ is that it creates words or phrases in the target language that didn’t previously exist (particularly not the jammed-together neologisms).
Sure, just like borrowing, and in both cases the (trivial) fact that the words or phrases didn’t previously exist does not in any way imply that the concept didn’t previously exist. As DE never tires of pointing out, this would mean that peoples who borrowed words for ‘child’ previously had no idea of the existence of children. The consequence is that suggesting calquing or borrowing is in no way an insult; all languages do those things all the time. It is just linguistic change at work.
@de
Re Mampruli,
NB: kulikyi is also waterlily, so I think the longer word may be a kenning. Typical plant and animal words are shorter (two components). But
naanaakpabigbandi = =”again/also” + See kpabimigbaŋŋu?
kpabimigbaŋŋu = “fold up your leaves [it’s raining]” (mimosa pudica)
pɔ’anyaankurugnyingaaŋŋu = “old woman’s stuck-out tooth”
Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what plant pɔ’a-veelli-ku-siisi-koom is, and strongly suspect that the lexicographer didn’t either; the gloss “lily” is based on the use of the word in the Bible version at Luke 12:27, and similarly with the Kusaal na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om (literally, “queen-won’t-touch-water”), which presumably refers to the same plant (whatever it is.)
Versions of Luke 12:27 in other Oti-Volta languages most often have a compound noun which literally means “grass-flowers”, e.g. Toende Kusaal mɔ-puum. The Mooré version has rulg-lɛlemde, but I’m sorry to say that the dictionary merely glosses this “fleur (espèce.)” [Gee, thanks, Lexicographer!]
The lexicographers are mostly no better at botany than I am, and their sometimes suspiciously precise species identifications should probably be regarded with some caution. There are some sources by authors who really have looked into plant-name identification properly, though, sometimes in collaboration with actual botanists, and from them it does seem that traditional terms do, themselves, tend to be quite precise. (For Kusaal, for example, there’s a very detailed account of plants used in traditional medicine in Ernst Haaf’s Die Kusase, and there’s a careful account of Talni-area agricultural practices, with traditional Talni names, by a Brit colonial agricultural officer in the 1920s.)
There are quite a few unanalysable stems which go way back to proto-Oti-Volta or beyond, for locally well-known plants like baobabs and dawadawa and red kapoks (indeed, such words seem remarkably stable.)
Then there are a lot of “blackbird” type formations, like Kusaal gɔn’-sabilig, literally “black thorn”, but in fact meaning, specifically, Vachellia hockii.
Then there are the “forget-me-not” compounds like na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om. That kind of zero-conversion of a clause to a noun is fairly marginal in Westen Oti-Volta in general*, but there are hints that it’s fairly common in plant names (much as in English.) I suspect that their rarity in dictionaries reflects the fact that the dictionaries often overwhelmingly reflect written sources like Bible translations (this is very strikingly the case with Naden’s Kusaal dictionary.) I imagine that a few days research with a knowledgeable Kusaasi consultant and a botanist would turn up a lot more of them.
* Notably commoner in the Mooré ductionary than the Kusaal, but I suspect that part of this is due to the fact that the Mooré dictionary is based on a much broader range of sources.
It may be simply morphological, in part, too: Kusaal nominalises verb phrases and clauses with a preceding particle a, where Mooré equivalents have zero, e.g. Kusaal asʋ’ʋ-m-mɛŋ “independence”, Mooré soog-m-menga. (Cf Kusaal m sʋ’ʋ m mɛŋ “I own myself.”)
Mampruli kulikyi, incidentally, looks like a transparent compound of kuliga “river” and kyi “millet” (= Kusaal kɔlig and ki.) It may not actually mean “water lily” … maybe the same as Kusaal kɔlkantim “bulrush, Cyperus blepharoleptos“?)
“Water lilies” are not, of course, actual lilies. The most likely local actual “water lily” is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphaea_lotus
In Mooré, that plant is called gʋ́ɩɩlle. Gulimancema guondi looks like a cognate. Just to make life more difficult, Naden’s dictionary of Agolle Kusaal glosses kɔlkantim as “lotus” too, but I think that’s probably another mistake based on overhasty acceptance of Bible-translation supposed equivalents.
You can go for […], but I tend to leave it in. The original author/editor wanted it to look silly, so who am I to disrespect that?
Maybe I spoke too soon: the Mbelime dictionary has
hóńyòòdè: nénuphar, « le sorgho du marigot », mot général pour plusieurs espèces de plantes – tel que [class. Nymphaea alba*] ou [class. Nuphar lutea].
(The compound means “river-millet”: hóń- is indeed the combining form of wúónú “river”, cognate with Kusaal kɔlig, and yòòdè “millet”, is cognate with Kusaal za, another word for “millet”, more specific than ki, which can refer to cereals generally. In Mbelime, it seems to be yòòdè which is the vague “cereal” term, though.)
So maybe water lilies really are called “river-millet” in Oti-Volta-land, or maybe “river-corn.” Sometimes.
* As far as I can tell, Nymphaea alba is not actually native to West Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphaea_alba#Distribution_and_habitat
@de
https://www.scribd.com/document/947120493/TN-MPdictionary-1st-Edn-XP
and
https://www.webonary.org/mampruli/browse/browse-vernacular/?letter=k&key=maw&totalEntries=708&pagenr=21
have gloss “Nymphaea sp.” for kulikyi, so maybe not bulrush.
In search of beauty, I decided to check (subject to the accuracy of google translate …) how other languages rendered the mysterious and ineffable concept of “cellar door. ”
Maori: tatau o te rūma ruinga
Welsh: drws y seler
Luganda (why not?): oluggi lw’ekiyumba
Which is beautifullest?
AntC.: I’m not attributing “mystical qualities” to Te Reo or Polynesian languages,
No, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. But some do, and to what really is clunky dictionary definitions.
merely before any European contact: a) noting there was a full suite of concepts wrt ‘covenants’/’ceding’ powers/chiefly/tribal ‘governance’; so b) pointing to pre-existing vocabulary.
Sure. But, for various reasons, that doesn’t always mean that it will be used. As you say, English had perfectly good legal terms but ended up with Norman French. Te Roa had perfectly good terms for rights to land use but ended up with something else. The cases may be compared and contrasted.
@PP:
I’ve got that dictionary; it’s the one I was actually referring to. I don’t think its identification of plant species can be relied on too much.*
Having said that, see my note above regarding Mbelime hóńyòòdè “nénuphar.” I dare say that when you’re a subsistence farmer in the savanna, everything looks like millet until proved otherwise; and ki is used sometimes for cereal plants in general, too.
* Naden’s Kusaal dictionary, though useful, and much better than anything I could do, and partly prepared with the help of L1 speakers, nevertheless contains numerous errors, and not just in things like identification of plant species. On the other hand, Naden lived for many years among the Mamprussi, and was much involved with the New Testament translation. Nevertheless, accurate identification of plant species relies on skills usually lacking not only in foreign linguists but also in their local language consultants.
I have repeatedly come across Linnaean-style glosses for Oti-Volta plant (and sometimes animal) names in the dictionaries which actually refer to species which are not actually present in the area where the language is spoken. I have consequently acquired a certain wariness in accepting identifications made by non-specialists. (I think the Linnaean name as given, far from being based on an identification by an actual botanist – or zoologist – tends to be a sort of back-translation of the term used in the local English or French; as Naden himself has rightly pointed out, such local names rather often don’t actually mean what a naive L1 speaker of English or French expects. The possibilities for misunderstanding and misidentification are considerable.)
And of course calques and/or loanwords need not fill a lexical vacuum because (no doubt in some languages more than others) synonyms or near-synonyms are a thing. So e.g. in English “overseer” and “supervisor” have managed to coexist for many centuries reasonably amicably without either completely displacing the other.
@de
Blench has for Dagbani “kulchi”
—
white water lily
Nymphaea lotus L.
probably applies to other plant spp. covering open water
et. river + millet. Produces a small edible grain used as a famine food or eaten by children. The fresh leaves are ground and then applied to boils
—
https://www.ethnopharmacologia.org/prelude2020/pdf/biblio-hb-43-blench.pdf
So what you said.
Nymphaea lotus is widespread in Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari (roughly), including Ghana.
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:605604-1
The tubers and seeds are edible, says Wikipedia, which might increase the tendency to call it “water millet”.
Ninja’d by pp!
English legal language is largely *borrowed* from Norman French, not calqued: e.g., attorney, chattel, escheat, escrow, jury, plaintiff, tort.
Blench certainly counts as an expert in this context. Nymphaea lotus it is, then. The detail about the edible seeds is very illuminating.
That also suggests that Mampruli pɔ’a-veelli-ku-siisi-koom and Kusaal na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om in fact don’t mean “water lily”; to be fair, that was my own misapprehension, based on overinterpreting the literal meanings. Other instances of Kusaal na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om in the Bible all render “lily”, and have no connection with rivers.
On the other hand, Kusaal kɔlkantim is consistently used for “reeds, rushes” in the Bible translation. The rushes that Moses’ mum hides him in are just mɔɔd “grass”, though. Anyhow, kɔlkantim doesn’t sound much like Nymphaea lotus (though the lean kine in Pharaoh’s dream do eat them.)
I see that the Dagbani dictionary also has paɣiviɛligakushihikom “beautiful woman won’t touch water”, glossed “marsh lily”, but no species name.
If they mean
https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Crinum_campanulatum
that seems not to be native to West Africa …
It spoils the joke a bit, but David once let slip what the Welsh had before they had ‘children’:
https://languagehat.com/a-botany-of-words/#comment-1834883
Which is the sadder picture, the Welsh with no ‘children’ before the Romans, or the English with no ‘adults’ before the Renaissance?
The older version of the Dagbani dictionary glosses paɣiviɛligakushihikom as Amaryllis belladonna … which is … not native to West Africa.
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:62705-1
TBH, there doesn’t seem to be a lot else beside “Nymphaea lotus” for this to mean at all plausibly. I suppose there’s no law that a language can’t have more than one name for the same plant, and neither Kusaal nor Dagbani, at any rate, seem to preserve cognates of Mooré gʋ́ɩɩlle (though I long since learnt not to conclude that a word doesn’t exist because it’s not in the dictionaries.) In Dagbani Mampruli, the presumably-original etymon would probably have ended up confusingly similar to words variously meaning “ridge” and “kola nut”, too, and even in Kusaal, the expected *gʋ̄ʋl would have been rather confusable with gʋ̄ʋr “ridge” etc.
@David E.: Nymphaea maculata also seems to be native to Ghana. According to Wikipedia, it has edible fruits and rhizomes, which might be farther from millet than N. lotus, but I wonder whether it could be referred to by the same name.
I’d have thought the waterlily-that-won’t-touch-water was a land plant that resembled waterlilies in some way, maybe about as much as waterlilies resemble actual lilies. A look at the very far from complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flora_of_Ghana didn’t turn up anything that seemed promising for “marsh lily”.
Aha! Should have looked at Blench!
He says that Dagbani pàɣ`vièlìɣù ku!shìhì kôm is Marantochloa cuspidata.
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:565151-1
Blench does warn that his own sources (mostly Irvine) are not always correct.
(His preliminary remarks on Dagbani are unreliable; the language does have an accepted orthography, and its closest relatives are Mampruli, Hanga and Kamara, not Nabit and Talni, which are more closely related to Kusaal. The language is not really “exceptional” within its group phonologically, except for its bizarre rule of shortening original long vowels in originally open syllables.)
I suppose that the flowers do look a bit lily-like (if you squint a bit):
https://www.monaconatureencyclopedia.com/marantochloa-cuspidata-2/?lang=en
It sounds like it does live along riverbanks, at least in the savanna zone. If it needs “ample availability of water”, as advertised, it would pretty much have to.
Sadly, none of the local names for the plant that are listed are given with named languages that they’re taken from (the Ghanaian ones all look vaguely Akan and/or Ewe.)
Incidentally, the nice sharp cutoff in its distribution at the borders of modern nation-states in the Kew maps tells you just how unreliable such pretty maps really are.
Hi there; learned language lovers,
Can anybody point me to the verification for this story, I can’t find any mention of it at Babbel. There is a piece about “Diaphanous” being the highest ranked ‘beautiful’ word in English (https://www.babbel.com/most-beautiful-words), as voted by the ‘Poetry Society of America’, followed by a discussion of most beautiful words in non-English languages where ‘Kaitiakitanga’ isn’t mentioned at all????
I’m confused, help me out here
another two cents on calques: they can also be highly culturally specific – everyone’s favorite yiddish example is moshe-rabeynus-kiele [our teacher moses’ little cow = ladybug], which is part of a continent-wide “holy-person’s animal” naming pattern whose russian and belarusian versions are “god’s cow” (also welsh, establishing it as the ur-form, or at least hinting that pan-slavism should turn its eyes westward and make common cause with Celtic Leaguers rather than pan-turanians), while versions further west and south invoke mary. i don’t know if there’s a clear origin point for the pattern, but it’s clearly been calquing around for quite a while.
We discussed this before (almost always a safe bet) … or possibly the discussion was at Language Log in the days of its glory. Not sure …
ktschwarz: I also broached the matter of pre-Roman Welsh children at this (more recent) thread:
https://languagehat.com/khazi/
I still think my student’s suggestion was a good one, especially considering Xerîb’s pointing to a Breton word hinting that a cognate of Welsh “plant” had once existed in Breton (and thus that the word may indeed have been borrowed by Proto-Brythonic itself, i.e. back in the days of Roman Britain).
All about ladybugs – including the unanswered question of whether there was an even earlier thread on LLog.
the verification for this story, I can’t find any mention of it at Babbel.
Hi Ian, good question! No I couldn’t find independent verification either. (I did find the “Diaphanous” piece.) So I did post it to @Hat with some caution. OTOH I don’t think RNZ would have just made it up. And how is anybody going to disprove the claim?
Here’s a substack piece, with some more links, but they ultimately go round in circles.
Babbel.com compiles many listicles of words/languages. Perhaps they’ve let RNZ have early sight before they publish. Equally plausibly they’ve sent different listicles to different countries, each polishing the egos of minority-language speakers. (I wonder how that would go in say Australia with an Aboriginal word?)
The news media is so under-resourced in NZ, they’ll snap up any copy. So Babbel gets free advertising.
I’m not sure the concept of “verification” makes much sense when it comes to “most beautiful words” lists. You can make up your own and it will be just as scientific.
I think Ian just wanted to verify that this really came from Babbel (not that anyone else would be likely to gift Babbel so much free advertising). Yes, it did; their page is in German only for some reason, although evidently when a Māori word came out on top they must have sent a press release in English to the NZ media.
Babbel chose not to give the morphological breakdown kai + tiaki + tanga. Is it only beautiful as a mystical unanalyzable lump?
Of course! Wordsworth said it long ago:
Lord, I hate that poem.
“Hullo clouds! hullo sky!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Fotherington-Tomas
@DE: Interesting to get an ID.
I suppose that the flowers do look a bit lily-like (if you squint a bit):
https://www.monaconatureencyclopedia.com/marantochloa-cuspidata-2/?lang=en
Maybe even more if you close your eyes.
It seems like an odd choice for a beautiful woman or a queen (I see I was confused in thinking it was named a waterlily that won’t touch water) and for something arrayed better than Solomon in all his glory.
So did you see the leaves used to wrap food or kola nuts, or had they been replaced by petrochemicals?
The standard leaf-as-food-wrapper plant where I was is bɛŋir “Vigna unguiculata”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea
Indeed, bɛŋid-nɛ-ki “cowpea-leaves-and-millet” is a fixed name in Kusaal for a particular traditional snack, rather along the lines of Brit “fish ‘n chips.”
But my leaf-recognition skills are not up to telling cowpea leaves from queen-won’t-touch-water leaves.
Well spotted, @kts. Even now none of my search engines find that. And if I try going to Babbel’s de. site, it redirects me to English.
Is it only beautiful as a mystical unanalyzable lump?
NZ’ers know Wortbildung is a feature of Te Reo. (There’s several other examples up-thread.) Even Aotearoa analyses to ‘(Land of the) Long White Cloud’ — maybe. The world’s longest placename also appears frequently in such listicles, far outstripping that place in Ynys Môn.
@DE: This may not be interesting to you or anyone here, but just in case, Marantochloa cuspidata leaves are “up to 40 cm. long and 26 cm. broad” (from here), so you’d have been able to tell they weren’t cowpea leaves (really leaflets).
A useful tip.
Thanks for the responses to my question. The nice people at Babbel responded too: “This was a Germany-led story, which is why the supporting materials are currently available only in German. I’ll attach the German press release but you can also find all the info on the following landing page as well! https://de.babbel.com/das-schoenste-wort-der-welt
Just noticed that Blench’s paper on Dagbani plant names actually mistranslates pàɣ`vièlìɣù ku!shìhì kôm as “woman’s bucket [?] does not touch water (referring to the fact that if you dip the leaves in water they do not become soaked.)”
Perhaps he found Dagbani viɛluŋ “well” in a word list and thought it meant “hole for drawing water from” rather than “in a good manner” …
(“Bucket” in Dagbani is in fact bɔkati, a word of deeply mysterious origins.*)
Always a help to actually know something about the language you’re translating …
More interestingly, maybe this came from a Dagomba collaborator, (though none are named), which might imply that the speakers have no idea why the plant is called “pretty-lady-won’t-touch-water” either. But it seems an unlikely misinterpretation from a L1 speaker. (Wrong verb TAM too.)
Just noticed that Blench also says “Recording plurals is very important, as in many cases, the plural of a tree name is the name of its fruits or leaves.” Nope. Doesn’t happen.
I can never really make my mind up about Blench.
* Assuming the tones are correct (and they certainly look OK to me), even if there actually were a word vièlìɣù “bucket”, even then, the construction couldn’t mean “a woman’s bucket”; the first word would then have had to have high tone, not low, with tone spreading onto the initial TBU of the alleged “bucket.”
Though, I suppose, if the leaves really are comparatively water-repellent, and given that they seem to be used a lot for food packaging, that might indeed shed some light on the odd name. (Maybe that was what Blench’s informants were trying to tell him.)
The “pretty lady/princess” bit might just be because the locals think the flowers are decorative; after all, the Kusaasi and Mamprussi Bible translators all thought that this plant was a good rendering for the lilies in Luke 12:27.
Assuming the tones are correct (and they certainly look OK to me)
Actually, the tones don’t look quite right (though it doesn’t affect my argument), and I think there’s a (minor) segmental error too; I think that the Dagbani name of the pretty-lady-won’t-touch-water plant should really be pàɣ’ viɛ̀lìɣá kúꜜ shíhí kôm.
Don’t mind me. Talk among yourselves …
@DE: A useful tip.
Yes, that feature is also— never mind.
The “pretty lady/princess” bit might just be because the locals think the flowers are decorative; after all, the Kusaasi and Mamprussi Bible translators all thought that this plant was a good rendering for the lilies in Luke 12:27.
If Blench has the right species. He said his sources weren’t always correct.
If Blench has the right species
I see that for Dagbani kùlkàrlí, Blench has Vetiveria nigritana, which I initially thought must be wrong, because vetiver-vetiver, Chrysopogon zizanioides, is not native to Africa.
Vetiveria nigritana is, though:
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:1012067-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysopogon_nigritanus
On the other hand, kùlkàrlí looks like a cognate of Kusaal kɔlkantim “rush, reed”, which I think is Cyperus blepharoleptos, and the older Dagbani dictionary calls kùlkàrlí “a swamp grass” (the kul- bit is “river” again.)
And the WP article on Vetiveria nigritana doesn’t sound much like it’s a riverbank plant, with all its talk of planting it in hedges to protect crops and prevent soil erosion. (The article reads rather like a plug from the Vetivera Marketing Board. There is an actual Dagbani version of the article, labelled kulkarli, but it turns out just to be a stub, basing the identification on the very same Blench paper …)
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Nobody Knows Anything.
It’s just occurred to me that the Kusaasi and Mamprussi Bible translators might actually have thought princess-won’t-touch-water and pretty-lady-won’t-touch-water were neat renderings of the lilies that outdressed Solomon in Luke because of their traditional names, rather than because of their actual appearance.
Belatedly remembering that I have an actual dead-tree Dagbani New Testament, I see that the lilies are paɣ-viɛlli-ku-shihi-kom “pretty-lady-won’t-touch-water” there too.
[The viɛliɣa/viɛlli variation in the adjective “beautiful, good” is unsurprising: like Kusaal, Dagbani has lost noun-class-based grammatical gender. Adjectives used to agree with the class of the preceding head noun (and still do, in most of Oti-Volta), but since the demise of grammatical gender in most of Western Oti-Volta, about half of all adjectives have been left stranded with several different class suffixes in free variation. It’s rather as if French had come to use blanc or blanche at random.]
Aha. For paɣaviɛligakushihikom, https://dag.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa%C9%A3avi%C9%9Bligakushihikom says it’s Amaryllis belladonna, the “Jersey lily” or “naked-lady-lily”, native to South Africa. The photo stands more comparison to Solomon in all his glory than M. cuspidata does, ya wanna know my opinion. But is the “pretty lady” thing a) a comparison that would occur to people in many cultures b) influence of the scientific name or other European names on African names, c) vice-versa, d) the reason for the misidentification of paɣaviɛligakushihikom as this species, or e) evidence that the Scandi-Congo hypothesis is far too timid?
ETA: “Naked” because it blooms on a bare stem before producing leaves. (ObVocab: Wikipedia informs me that this is called hysteranthy.) I don’t see anything about not touching water, except that it needs good drainage and little water.
The identification of paɣ-viɛlli-ku-shihi-kom as Amaryllis belladonna is definitely wrong; it’s from Tony Naden’s Dagbani dictionary, and it’s an instance of the very problems I’ve been complaining of. I suspect that it’s retrofitted to the English word “lily”, based on the very fact that paɣ-viɛlli-ku-shihi-kom was used to render “lily” in the NT version.
The photos are also very often based on whatever French or English translation has been adopted, not on original research or actual field identification. I’ve a whole baseball-card collection of these SIL dictionaries, and the same stock photos turn up in most of them. (I quite like the girl they use to illustrate “tongue.” She looks like a good sport.)
The SIL dictionaries are usually the only thing there is in Oti-Volta work, and one is grateful for them. But they are sometimes, to be frank, not very good. (With some sterling exceptions.)
[Deleted long rant about specific deficiencies. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, I suppose. Also, I am hardly an ace lexicographer myself.]
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Nobody Knows Anything.
You have taken the first step toward wisdom, young padawan.
But is the “pretty lady” thing a) a comparison that would occur to people in many cultures
Sure. Why not? Kusaal has verbs meaning “blossom, mature” of both people and plants, for example. It’s hardly an obscure analogy. (And we’re talking agricultural folk here …)
b) influence of the scientific name or other European names on African names
No chance of that. When I lived in the area, hardly anyone outside Bawku knew English (or French), let alone Linnaean names of plants.
Na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om also turns up for “lily” outside the Gospels in the Kusaal Bible, for example in the description of the ornamentation of the pillars Jachin and Boaz in Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 7. So it evidently ended up just referring to the shape of the flowers.
On the other hand, that may just be because it had got established as translationese for “lily.” But it can’t have been a very old tradition: I see that the older versions of the Kusaal New Testament (1976 and 1996) just have puum venla “pretty flowers”; it was only the 2016 revisers who hit on the idea of making the non-toiling non-spinning flowers into princess-won’t-touch-water flowers specifically. Given that my Dagbani NT dates from 1982, maybe they nicked the idea, though not the precise plant name, from their Dagomba colleagues. (The Mampruli New Testament only dates from 2001.)
It occurs to me that “won’t touch water” probably doesn’t summon up to people in that area the idea of a bathing-averse person, as it may tend to do for us. A major and onerous part of the fate of a woman is to be expected to fetch all the water that the household will need during the day at dawn, from a river or spring that until a few decades back* was often miles away, and carry it all back herself. So a woman who won’t touch water might be a non-toiling type (like a princess.)
* When a particularly wise charity organised and paid for the sinking of deep wells in nearly all the villages in the Kusaasi area.
The identification of paɣ-viɛlli-ku-shihi-kom as Amaryllis belladonna is definitely wrong; it’s from Tony Naden’s Dagbani dictionary, and it’s an instance of the very problems I’ve been complaining of. I suspect that it’s retrofitted to the English word “lily”, based on the very fact that paɣ-viɛlli-ku-shihi-kom was used to render “lily” in the NT version.
Oh, you’d said that.
On the other hand, I don’t see that being non-native rules it out, if (big if) it’s a common garden plant or naturalized in the region, and considering that the non-water-toucher wasn’t used in Bible translations till recently.
Me: b) influence of the scientific name or other European names on African names
DE: No chance of that. When I lived in the area, hardly anyone outside Bawku knew English (or French), let alone Linnaean names of plants.
But if A. belladonna is known in West Africa, it would probably have been introduced by Europeans, and they might well have said, “This is the pretty-lady plant. You can see why we call it that.”
i’m guessing that since DE hasn’t mentioned one, there isn’t a folkloric figure who gets called princess-won’t-touch-water who some enterprising informant could have associated with a flower that a reviser decided was lily-ish enough to work?
(consider princess-bruises-through-mattresses – she toils not, and neither does she spin, but perhaps she should see a hematologist)
(consider princess-bruises-through-mattresses – she toils not, and neither does she spin, but perhaps she should see a hematologist)
Not to be that guy, but I would remind you that the bruises were not a problem. They proved she was a princess. That is what the dude was looking for.
That’s how fucked-up genes get propagated.
@Stu: Indeed! And so a genetic defect that causes blue eyes got widespread in Northern Europe.
Blue genes.
“Just call me helicase!
I’d like to unzip
your genes!”
if it’s a common garden plant or naturalized in the region
It isn’t. (And “gardens” are for growing food in those parts, not looking pretty.)
It’s true that paɣ-viɛlli has literally the same meaning as “bella donna”, I suppose, but I can’t imagine any plausible way for it to be an actual calque. And the Kusaal name doesn’t have a pretty lady: it has a na’apu’a “chief-woman.” (I used “princess” rather than “queen” because it sounded a bit more natural as an English translation, but “prince/princess” in Kusaal is actually the unisex na’abiig or bina’ab.)
Na’apu’a in principle could mean “woman chief”, a regnant queen, but the monstrous regiment of women is unknown in the Mossi-Dagomba states, so in practice it means “chief’s wife.” Esther is one in the Bible version. Pu’ana’ab is used in the Bible for regnant queens, like the Seba Pu’ana’ab, but Esther (who is about as non-regnant as it gets) also gets to be one, and it’s a general property of Kusaal compounds of two human-reference nouns that they’re kinda appositional, and the components are reversible: yambipuŋ or bipuŋyammʋg “slave-girl/girl slave.”
“Chief’s girlfriend” is a kenning for “housecat” in some Oti-Volta languages, so there is some precedent for the non-toiling implication. (Cf “pretty freeloader”, in TV Tropes speak, too.)
English boasts “love-in-idleness” plants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_tricolor
I’m not sold on this explanation of the won’t-touch-water part of the names, though. I think the waterproof-leaves angle is more promising.
I think it’s a point in favour of the Marantochloa cuspidata reading that it’s a common plant locally. That fits the lilies-of-the-field context in Matthew and Luke a lot better than some exotic foreign introduction. And the 2016 revisers generally improved the localisation and idiomatic quality of the translation.
Me: if it’s a common garden plant or naturalized in the region
DE: It isn’t.
Well, that takes care of that.
It’s true that paɣ-viɛlli has literally the same meaning as “bella donna”, I suppose, but I can’t imagine any plausible way for it to be an actual calque
How about the other way—the literal meaning was part of whatever strange process led Naden to Amaryllis belladonna?
I think it’s a point in favour of the Marantochloa cuspidata reading that it’s a common plant locally. That fits the lilies-of-the-field context in Matthew and Luke a lot better than some exotic foreign introduction
I agree, but I’ve already mentioned what I see as the point against them. I think settling it will require help from native speakers. And there would still be the problem that a word can be the name of more than one plant and a plant can have more than one name, even in a single language.
People don’t necessarily know what’s exotic. I’ve surprised one or two people here, whose ancestors have been here for centuries, by telling them that the annoying Tribulus terrestris, which everyone knows as “goatheads”, isn’t native.
I think settling it will require help from native speakers
True. I was hoping it might turn up in Haaf (he actually worked with a botanist on identifying what Kusaal plant names meant) but sadly, no.
I think the moral of the Dagbani entry for kulkarli may be that not all native speakers actually really know what the less-common traditional names refer to, either: perhaps especially not the kind of native speakers who end up collaborating on linguistic works with foreign linguists; they tend to be bookish types who’ve done well at school and whose whole lives have been built around escaping from the subsistence-farming life (and good luck to them.)
And there’s the issue that I touched on above, that the terms used in local English or French don’t actually always mean what they do in London or Paris, e.g. kunduŋ “wolf” (actually hyena) and su’oŋ “rabbit” (actually Lepus victoriae.)
[I just noticed that the trickster hare Asumbul is glossed in Naden’s Agolle Kusaal dictionary as “Mr Spider.” The illustrations in my Agolle Kusaal book of folktales clearly show him as a hare … I suspect that Naden was misled by his knowledge of Mampruli, where Asumbul’s avatar Sambulli is indeed a spider, like his even-farther-south instantiation Anansi. Niggli’s Toende Kusaal dictionary rightly has Asũmbul: “Lièvre dans des contes.”]
Jeffrey Heath has done a good bit of careful ethnobotanic documentation with native speakers and with proper identification of specimens, but unfortunately the Heathian Lean Mean Language Documentation Machine has never got as far south as to document any Central Gur languages.
Na’apu’a in principle could mean “woman chief”, a regnant queen, but […] in practice it means “chief’s wife.”
one of the areas of contention in current conversations about the yiddishes of the future is the status of the feminizing suffixes attached to occupational nouns. some of the compounds mean a woman working in the occupation (e.g. lererin [woman teacher]); others mean the wife of a man working in the occupation (e.g. lesnitse [wife of a forest ranger]); others are ambiguous (e.g. fisherke [woman fish-seller or wife of a fisherman]). and then there are ones that are originally wife-of terms but have accumulated their own occupational meaning (rebetsin being the clearest, because the wife of a rabbi is expected to take on a fairly specific area of work, and because the term has been embraced by men married to rabbis).
there are people who’ve struggled for equal respect for the feminized terms, and so are attached to them. and there’s also current advocacy for moving away from them and having the article attached to the root occupational nouns vary with the person referred to (e.g. der lerer, di lerer, dos lerer or di rebetsin, der rebetsin, dos rebetsin as appropriate) – coupled with support for those who want to keep using them, who are often selective in their use, (for example) embracing tentserin while insisting on shrayber or zinger.
Going back to some of those “runners-up” in the original post, google translate says that Welsh “hiraeth” translates into Portuguese as “saudade,” and vice versa. So I guess maybe they’re only “untranslatable” into English?
It’s a wonder people can even think at all in English, with its cruelly limited vocabulary. The Pirahã of Europe …
google translate says that Welsh “hiraeth” translates into Portuguese as “saudade,” and vice versa.
In the post, I translated them as I did for a reason.
Separately, I feel a bit skeptical about the contention that לופֿטמענטש “is transliterated luftmentsh,” because of the dubious-seeming implicature that a respectable Yiddish word could have only a single transliteration.
And possibly relatedly, I simply don’t believe that the compilers of this list really evaluated “aura” and “zephyr” as “Greek” words occurring in the context of running Greek prose rather than as well-established English words long ago borrowed from Latin which had in turn borrowed them even longer ago from Greek. Indeed, wiktionary suggests that in Modern Greek https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B1#Greek is just a learned/high-register word for “breeze” rather than having anything to do with “distinctive presence, energy, or atmosphere that surrounds a person.”