The Tongan language has
astonishingly few words. I do not know the exact statistics, but the number of
Tongan words is comparatively low relative to the international average. Since Tonga was a British protectorate
from 1900 to the mid-70’s and has relatively few words to express numerous
ideas, many Tongan words are simply the Tongan equivalent of our words in
English (or as I like to say the words are “Tongified”).
This works in several ways.
Certain words, like the days of the week, are separate words but are clearly
based on their English equivalent. For example monite for Monday and tusite
for Tuesday. Other words are the exact same as their English counterparts, but
are pronounced differently. Party is still party but pronounced parttttiiii,
with an emphasis on the final ti. The word “birthday” is also the exact same
but sounds completely different when a Tongan says it in “Tongan.”
Other words are “Tongified.”
Cancel becomes Kanseli and promise
become polomosi. There are
traditional Tongan words for these terms but they are used much less often. I
could keep on going but I think you all get the point.
The reason for this long
diatribe is that I have become interested in language acquisition since I
started learning Tongan. I hear a lot of stories regarding how a word became a
word, but the inspiration for this post is a story I heard last week from a
Tongan friend of mine, Vava.
The word tulo means excuse me in Tongan. I never though much of the word
because there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the Tongan and English
words. However, Vava told me last week that tulo
does in fact come from an English phrase. He said that some time ago when the
first American Mormon missionaries arrived in Tonga, a missionary walked into a
Tongan house and said in English, “too low,” referring to how low the roof was
in the house and indicating that he had to duck to enter.
Vava told me that this was how
the word tulo became a part of the
Tongan lexicon to mean excuse me. I have no idea if this story is true or not,
and in all honesty it is probably not, but I like it anyway. Thanks for reading
and enjoy some of the aerial photos of Tonga below.
P.S. Thank you to everyone who
has donated to Camp Glow and Grow so far. If you still wish to give something
to the project it is not too late and the link is:
https://donate.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=14-421-001
Port Maurelle in Vava'u
Tongatapu
Leaving Tongatapu
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