HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Written May 9, 2008 in humor, language, linguistics
…We have one verb paradigm for this language already, entrusted to us by an ancient linguist who took some notes once when stuck in the wilds of Papua New Guinea due to visa problems.* The verb is “to swim”. We decide to elicit this from our speaker for comparison purposes.
1 comment on ' Fieldwork notes, or why I should never… '
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This is lovely stuff.
Reminds me of my Nigerian ‘business partner’. I took him to lunch at Trader Vic’s at the London Hilton. It’s a Chinese takeaway dressed up to the nines in South Seas clobber, and a plastic volcano.
The menu was huge, and unreadable. He eventually, with my prompting, chose ‘Imperial Pork’ (pork chop suey).
When I politely asked him what he thought of it, he said, with his usual smile and wink:
“Jus’ like de white maa-aan…”
regards
Richard.
Written by Richard on May 27, 2008 at 5:40pm
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