Word: pidgin
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...there more problems for the translator than on the islands of the Pacific, whose people have hundreds of languages, ranging from Bugi, the tongue of Celebes, to Yapese, spoken on the tiny U.S. trusteeship island of Yap. Most of them require awkward circumlocutions to express Catholic dogma. In pidgin English for example, God is "Bigfellow master too much who bosses heaven and ground." Even more bothersome is the primitive Enga language of the New Guinea mountains. In trying to translate the "Hail Mary" prayer, explains one missionary, "we found that if a group of men wanted to greet a group...
...situation really gets ugly. Here come several hundred other Lan celotians marching behind loudspeaker trucks. In their own tongue-a kind of pidgin Spanish-they shout anti-American slogans. They hurl fistfuls of sand in the Marines' faces, threaten them, push them and form human barricades. They are then joined in their hostility by the natives who originally had welcomed the Marines. "Form wedges! Form wedges, goddammit!" cries a harassed Marine sergeant. Finally, the Marines disperse the mob and start pushing inland...
Their task was complicated by the fact that among New Guinea's 2,000,000 people, nearly 750 different languages are spoken. The lingua franca is pidgin - an amalgam of missionary English, Malay, and local dialects...
...with tape recordings of local "sing-sing" music. But presentations occasionally flopped. In one back-country village, natives complained that the voter shown on one of the election drawings was unknown to them. "Dispela man humbug mi no lookin dispela man wantain bepo," said the tribal spokesman in fluent pidgin. ("This is humbug! I've never seen this fellow before.") Interest in the election has spurred the revival of native "cargo cults." Cultists believe that white men do not work, that they merely write secret symbols on scraps of paper, for which they receive planeloads of "cargo"-boats, tractors...
Born in Laredo, with a population that was 85% Mexican-American, Mann grew up speaking both English and a border-town pidgin Spanish called Tex-Mex. His father was a lawyer who "laid down very stern standards about ethics and the law in our house." The family code was backed by the austere beliefs of the Southern Baptist Church ("We didn't even play cards"). In high school, young Mann was chosen "most popular boy" in his senior year, scored well enough in his studies (all A's and B's), but is best remembered...