Word: papua
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the Portuguese landed on the south coast of the island in 1526, they called it Papua, after a Malay word that described the fuzzy hair of the inhabitants. When the Spanish claimed the north coast 19 years later, they called it New Guinea, because they thought the natives resembled those on the Guinea Coast of Africa. Since the two territories became jointly administered by Australia in 1949, they have gone by the hybrid mouthful of Papua New Guinea. The region is scheduled to become a single, self-governing nation in December, and the search...
Because the territory is home to hundreds of tribes and has nearly 500 different dialects, it struck some members of the Papua New Guinea Executive Council that a new national name might plausibly come from pidgin-the colorful fractured English (mirror, for example, is glas bilong lukluk) that has become the lingua franca of the area. To test popular reaction, the council recently decided to name the proposed national airline Air Niugini. Papuans complained that this might be a happy solution for New Guineans but it was a slight to them. Not so, said the council. Besides being pidgin, niugini...
Territory of Papua and New Guinea...
...weird fusion of modern democracy and Stone Age dogmatism, the 2,446,000 residents of Papua New Guinea were choosing a House of Assembly that will acquire powers of self-government-and possibly full independence from Australia-over the next four years. A reluctant colonial power, Australia inherited Papua from Britain in 1906, and took New Guinea from Germany in World War I, administering it in recent years as a United Nations trustee. The two territories, which together constitute the eastern half of New Guinea island (the rest is the Indonesian province of West Irian), were given a joint name...
More than half of the 611 candidates were under 35; at least 160 had no formal schooling. Early returns counted last week showed that Papua New Guineans had decided to take on self-government-or so it seemed. The conservative, white-dominated United Party, which had sent sound trucks through the main towns with the message in pidgin "My fella vote Unided Pati, yu fella vote Unided Pati," lost some seats it had held in the last Assembly, and emerged without a majority. The Pangu Pati (acrophonetic pidgin for Papua New Guinea Party), which draws its strength from the radical...