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.