http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4248494.stm
The Meaning of Tingo
by Adam Jacot de Boinod is published by Penguin.The Meaning of Tingo
English is a rich and innovative language. But you can't help feeling
we're missing out.
While English speakers have to describe the action of laughing so much
that one side of your abdomen hurts (hardly an economical phrase), the
Japanese have the much more efficient expression: katahara itai.
Of course, the English language has borrowed words for centuries. Khaki
and croissant are cases in point.
So perhaps it's time to be thinking about adding others to the lexicon.
Malay, for instance, has gigi rongak - the space between the teeth.
The Japanese have bakku-shan - a girl who appears pretty from behind but
not from the front. Then there's a nakkele - a man who licks whatever the
food has been served on (from Tulu, India).
These fabulous examples have been collected by author Adam Jacot de Boinod
into The Meaning Of Tingo - a collection of words and phrases from around
the world.
"What I'm really trying to do is celebrate the joy of foreign words (in a
totally unjudgmental way) and say that while English is a great language,
one shouldn't be surprised there are many others having, as they do, words
with no English equivalent," he says.
Having pored over 280 dictionaries and trawled 140 websites, he is also
convinced that a country's dictionary says more about a culture than a
guide book. Hawaiians, for instance, have 108 words for sweet potato, 65
for fishing nets - and 47 for banana.
Mania
The German propensity for compound words pays dividends. Kummerspeck is a
German word which literally means grief bacon: it is the word that describes
the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating.
A Putzfimmel is a mania for cleaning and Drachenfutter - literally translated
as dragon fodder - are the peace offerings made by guilty husbands to their
wives.
Or there's die beleidigte Leberwurst spielen - to stick one's lower lip out
in a sulk (literally, to play the insulted liver sausage). Perhaps it's a
Backpfeifengesicht - a face that cries out for a fist in it.
Words and phrases can suggest the character of a nation.
The Dutch vocabulary, for instance, seems to confirm the nation's
light-hearted reputation. The word uitwaaien is Dutch for walking in windy
weather for fun.
The Maori-speakers of the Cook Islands sound like an enthusiastic bunch:
the word toto is the shout given in a game of hide-and-seek to show
readiness.
Perhaps the Inuit notion of a good time must be, of necessity, a little
more constrained. The long winter nights must fly by as they play a game
called igunaujannguaq, literally meaning frozen walrus carcass.
(The game involves the person in the centre of a ring trying to remain
stiff as he is passed around the ring, hand over hand.)
But it's those fun-loving people in the Netherlands who should have the
last word - the phrase for skimming stones is as light-hearted as the
action: plimpplampplettere.
The Albanians exhibit a strange fascination for facial hair. There are no
fewer than 27 separate expressions for the moustache.
Madh means a bushy moustache, posht is a moustache hanging down at the ends
and fshes is a long broom-like moustache with bristly hairs.
This hirsute obsession is not confined to moustaches. Vetullkalem describes
pencil-thin eyebrows, vetullperpjekur are joined together eyebrows and those
arched like the crescent moon are vetullhen.
Perhaps nothing so intriguingly displays differences between nations as the
unusual occupations of some of its citizens. Geshtenjapjeks is an Albanian
who sells roast chestnuts on the street. A koshatnik in Russian is a dealer
of stolen cats.
A kualanapuhi is a Hawaiian officer who keeps the flies away from the
sleeping king by waving a brush made of feathers. In Turkey a cigerci is a
seller of liver and lungs and the Danish have a fyrassistent - an assistant
lighthouse keeper.
And Spanish speakers in central America have a description of a government
employee who only shows up on payday - an aviador.
Which brings us back to de Boinod's title: tingo is an invaluable word from
the Pascuense language of Easter Island meaning "to borrow objects from a
friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left".
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