Colonial borrowing from ‘exotic’
languages:
Captain Cook and the English
Vocabulary
Source
Douglas
Gray, “Captain Cook and the English vocabulary.” Five hundred years of words
and sounds: a festschrift for E.J. Dobson. Ed. E.G. Stanley and Douglas
Gray. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1093. 49-62.
Captain
James Cook
§ where? Pacific Ocean
o
Australasia
o
Polynesia
o
Antarctica
o
NW coast of
North America
§ when? 1768-71, 1772-75,
1776-79
Effect
on English language
§ instrumental in its spread
to Australasia
§ place names and geographical
features
§ flora and fauna, e.g.
o
the Cook pine araucaria
cooki
o
the large wild
pig of New Zealand (“Captain Cooker”)
§ loanwords, mostly from
Polynesia
o
most names of
“animals, plants, foods, implements, or customs”
o
only 3
regularly used in Standard English: kangaroo, tattoo, taboo
Need
or prestige?
“It is probably misleading, even in this extreme
case of a totally strange animal, to think simply of a ‘gap’ in the lexis which
‘needed’ to be filled in this way.”
§ could have used existing
words:
o
for kangaroo,
hare, deer, jerboa
§ report: “an animal something less than a grey hound, it was of a Mouse
Colour very slender made and swift of foot”
§ Cook: “of a light Mouse colour and the full size of a grey hound
and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail which it carried like a
grey hound, in short I should have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking
or runing in which it jumped like a Hare or a dear”
§ Banks: “making vast bounds just as the Jerbua (Mus
Jaculus) does”
o
for tattoo,
“painting”
§ British predecessor Wallis
(cf. peinture by Bougainville)
§ Banks could have produced a
new ‘scientific’ name
o
e.g. platypus
(“that even more extraordinary Australian animal”) “eternizes its
flat-footedness
§ other recorded rivals ornithorhyncus
‘bird-bill’ (1800), duck-mole (1819)
Why
a loanword?
§ very weird animal: “it is
clear that the visitors found ‘the animal’ very unusual, and quite unlike
others that were known”
o
was called ‘the
animal before mentioned’ for weeks in the journals!
§ interested observers: “some at
least of these visitors were themselves very unusual in their keenness to
record and describe fauna and flora and to make friendly contact with the
inhabitants of newly discovered lands.”
o
Royal Society’s
instructions: “lastly, to form a Vocabulary of the
names given by the Natives, to the several things and places which come under
the Inspection of the Gentlemen”
Contact
issues
§ importance of first/early
contacts in establishing the loanword (e.g. kangaroo) and its form (e.g.
taboo)
o
kangaroo from the Endeavour River
area; not known by the inhabitants of Port Jackson 18 years later when the
First Fleet arrived
§ there were “many diverse and
difficult” languages in Australia but this wasn’t known until British
settlement period
§ “kangaroo and the
words picked up from early contacts in the Port Jackson area form the majority
of the Aboriginal loan-words in Australian English”
· cf. North America, “where a
substantial portion come from Algonquian languages, those first encountered by
white settlers (and where an early accepted loanword like wig-wam would
be used for similar lodges of deerskin in different parts of the country
without regard to local native names.”
o
Tongan tabu
was the first form met with by Cook: the general Polynesian and Maori form is tapu
§ importance of observers’
interest in and knowledge of local culture
o
“Cook’s
knowledge of Polynesian life ... was deepened over his three voyages ... much
greater than his knowledge of New Holland”
o
“the large
numbers of Polynesian words in the journals indicates that although the contact
was – by the standards of linguistic history – relatively brief it was quite
intense.”
o
taboo: Cook learned the
word during “a fairly extended stay in Tonga”
§ possibility of
misunderstanding at source when “signs” only medium of communication
o
Banks very
aware of this: “he and his companions checked and compared their lists”
o
easier with
nouns
§ importance of somebody’s knowledge
of the local languages
o
in Tahiti Cook
had companions “who spoke the language tolerable well” and could answer
questions
§
I
began with asking questons relating to the several objects before us: if the
Plantans &c were for the Eatua; ... if they sacrificed men to the Eatua, he
answered Taata eno they did, that is bad men, first Teparrahy or beating them
till they were dead ... I asked if any Aree’s he said no and said these had
Hogs &c to give to the Eatua and again repeated Taata eno...”
o
in Tonga, Cook
had a Tahitian Omai with him, and had made friends with a great chief (whom he
took to be ‘king’)
§ but the most
misunderstandings arose over “words involving ethical or religious concepts”
o
Cook: “if it is a Religious ceremoney we may not be able to
understand it, for the Misteries of most Religions are very dark and not easily
understud even by those who profess them.”
o
when Cook
learned taboo on his second voyage, “it seems as if with the arrival of
this new word he has a key which will unlock at least some of the mysterious
behaviour he meets”
Integration?
§ words glossed? italicized?
o “both
sexes paint their bodys Tattow as it is called in their language”
o
“When
dinner came on table not one of my guests would sit down or eat a bit of any
thing that was there. Every one was Tabu, a word of a very comprehensive
meaning but in general signifies forbidden.”
§ spelling variation?
o
“Kangooroo
or Kanguru”
o
first Cook’s
form tattow “which probably represents the Tahitian diphthong, and then
as tattoo (by end C18th)
1769 COOK
Jrnl. 1st Voy.
July (1893) 93 This method of Tattowing I shall now describe...
As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing their Buttocks, it is
performed but once in their Life times. Ibid.
27 Nov. 164 Few of these people were Tattow'd or marked in the
face,..several had their Backsides Tattow'd.
1803 J.
BURNEY
Discov. S. Sea I.
ii. 61 They [natives of the Philippines] had the custom of marking
their bodies in the manner, which, to use a word lately adopted from the
language of a people more recently discovered, we call tattow.
§ adaptation to English
phonological or morphological rules?
o
spelling tattoo
doesn’t preserve Tahitian diphthong
o
morphological
reanalysis:
§ e atua ‘a god’ appears as Eatua
(cf. el lagarto ‘alligator’)
§ C18th Otaheite for
‘Tahiti’
§ frequency of use
o
taboo: “It is noticeable how frequently
he uses the word once he has it. On shipboard, it seems to have become
thoroughly accepted.”
§ Back in England, it seems to
have worked its way into the standard vocabulary very quickly ... It clearly
answered a ‘need’, both in its more specialized sense (it lived on as a
technical anthropological term for the Polynesian concept, but by the beginning
of this century was being used as a convenient term to describe similar customs
in other parts of the world) – and in its popular one – the distant echoes of a
powerful, sacred prohibition have prevented it from becoming a straightforward
synonym for forbidden.”
1826 MISS MITFORD Village
Ser. II. 63 (Touchy Lady) The
mention of her neighbours is evidently taboo, since..she is in a state of
affront with nine-tenths of them.
§ conversion
o
on shipboard it
appears as a past participle tabooed
o
and in the
compound taboo man ‘priest’
· compounding
o
kangaroo ‘Australian’: kangaroo
apple, fly, grass
o
kangaroo ‘involving kangaroos’: kangaroo
dog, kangaroo hunt, etc.
o
kangaroo ‘like a kangaroo’: kangaroo
rat, kangaroo court (?)
· figurative use
o
on shipboard
Tahitian heiva ‘dance, amusement, dramatic performance’ applied on the
third voyage to Cook’s violent foot-stamping rages
§
“I had a heiva of the old man”
§ “the old boy
has been tipping a heiva to such and such a one”
o
occasional uses
of kangaroo ‘inhabitant of Australia, kind of chair, kind of bicycle’
o
but otherwise
most of the other loanwords retain their specialized original meanings
§ ... “with the exception of
the curious kangaroo-court”