Cupboard love
Those who have food on the table will always be popular:
giomlaireachd (Scottish Gaelic) the habit of dropping in at meal times
aimerpok (Inuit) to visit expecting to receive food
luqma-shumar (Persian) one who attends feasts uninvited and counts the number of mouthfuls
Snap, crackle, pop!
Is it the way they hear it? Or is it simply what sells the product? The sound of Rice Crispies crackling and popping is very different across Europe:
French: Cric! Crac! Croc!
German: Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!
Spanish: Cris! Cras! Cros!
Rice
In Japan, gohan (literally, honourable food) comes in a bowl and means rice that is ready for eating. But it’s also a general name for rice and even extends in meaning to ‘meal’. At the other end of the spectrum is okoge, which is the scorched rice stuck on the bottom of the pan.
False friends
prune (French) plum
gin (Phrygian, Turkey) to dry out
korn (Swedish) barley
sik (Ukrainian) juice
glass (Swedish) ice cream
prick (Thai) pepper
chew (Amharic, Ethiopia) salt
Hawaiian bananas
Hawaii’s traditional cuisine is based on quite a restricted list of ingredients: fish (there are 65 words alone for describing fishing nets), sweet potato (108 words), sugarcane (42) and bananas (47). The following are among the most descriptive words for this fruit:
mai’a kaua lau a banana, dark green when young, and yellow and waxy when mature
kapule a banana hanging until its skin has black spots
palaku a thoroughly ripe banana
maui to wring the stem of a bunch of bananas to cause it to ripen
pola the hanging down of the blossom of a banana palm or a bunch of bananas
halane a large bunch of bananas
hua’alua a double bunch of bananas
manila a banana tree not used for fruit but for rope fibre
lele a tall wild banana placed near the altar, offered to the gods and also used for love magic
Replete
As the meal enters its final stages, a sense of well-being descends on the diner – unless, of course, you’re suffering from bersat (Malay), food that has gone down the wrong way…
uitbuiken (Dutch) to take your time at dinner, relaxing between courses (literally, the expansion of the stomach)
nakkele (Tulu, India) a man who licks whatever the food has been served on
slappare (Italian) to eat everything, even to the point of licking the plate
’akapu’aki’aki (Cook Islands Maori) to belch repeatedly
Post-prandial
After it’s all over, what are you left with?
femlans (Ullans, Northern Ireland) the remains of a meal
sunasorpok (Inuit) to eat the remains of others’ food
shitta (Persian) food left at night and eaten in the morning
Food poisoning
Visitors to Easter Island would be advised to distinguish between the Rapa Nui words hakahana (leaving cooked food for another day) and kai hakahana (food from the previous day that is starting to rot).
Hunger
Food cannot always be taken for granted. Homowo is a Ghanaian word that means ‘hooting at hunger’. Local oral tradition recalls a distant past when the rains failed and there was a terrible famine on the Accra Plains, the home of the Ga people. When a good harvest finally came and there was more than enough to eat once again, the Ghanaians celebrated by holding a festival, still celebrated to this day, that ridiculed hunger.
Daily Bread
Food often figures in colloquial sayings and proverbs, as this selection from Spain shows:
quien con hambre se acuesta con pan suena whoever goes to bed hungry dreams of bread (to have a bee in one’s bonnet)
agua fría y pan caliente, nunca hicieron buen vientre cold water and hot bread never made a good belly (oil and water never mix
pan tierno y leña verde, la casa pierde fresh bread and green firewood lose the house (two wrongs do not make a right)
vale bolillo it’s worth a piece of bread (it doesn’t matter)
con su pan se lo coma may he eat it with bread (good luck to him)
Quenched
After all this talk of food and eating, it’s hard not to feel thirsty:
gurfa (Arabic) the amount of water scooped up in one hand
tegok (Malay) the water one can swallow at a gulp
qamus (Persian) [a well] so abundant in water that the bucket disappears
yewh-ma (Wagiman, Australia) to scrape out a hole in the sand to collect fresh water
jabh (Persian) arriving at a well and finding no water
Bakbuk bakbuk bakbuk
Like the English expression ‘glug glug glug’, the Hebrew word for bottle, bakbuk, derives from the sound of liquid being poured from it.
Pythons and sponges
Those who have not experienced sgriob (Scottish Gaelic), the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky, may have suffered from olfrygt (Viking Danish), the fear of a lack of ale. And it’s not always a fish the world drinks like:
beber como uma esponja (Portuguese) to drink like a sponge
uwabami no yo ni nomu (Japanese) to drink like a python
geiin suru (Japanese) to drink like a whale
bjor-reifr (Old Icelandic) cheerful from beer-drinking
sternhagelvoll (German) completely drunk (literally, full of stars and hail)
Plastered
To the sober, it’s always intriguing to see what drunken people are convinced they can do when under the influence, such as trying to walk in a straight line (kanale’o in Hawaiian). Perhaps it’s best to bear in mind the Romanian proverb dacă doi spun că eşti beat, du-te şi te culcă, if two people say you’re drunk, go to sleep.
The morning after
at have tømmermaend (Danish) having a hangover (literally, to have carpenters, i.e. hearing the noise of drilling, sawing, etc.)
Katzenjammer (German) a very severe hangover (literally, the noise made by extremely miserable cats)
A useful excuse
As they say in Aymara (Bolivia and Peru), umjayanipxitütuwa – they must have made me drink.
On reflection
Doormat dandy
Languages are full of traps for the unwary, particularly when it comes to words that sound similar but mean very different things:
Spanish: el papa the Pope; la papa potato
Albanian: cubar ladies’ man, womanizer; cube proud, courageous girl
Kerja, Indonesia: aderana prostitute; aderòna perfume
Italian: zerbino doormat; zerbinotto dandy
Arabic: khadij premature child; khidaj abortion
Albanian: shoq husband; shog bald man; shop blockhead
Below Par
u miericu pietusu fa la piaga
the physician with too much pity will cause
the wound to fester
Ouch!
The exclamation denoting pain has many varieties. If you touch a boiling kettle in Korea you cry aiya, in the Philippines aruy and in France aïe. In Russian you scream oj, in Danish uh and in German aua.
Atishoo!
In Japan one sneeze signifies praise (ichi home); two sneezes, criticism (ni-kusashi); three sneezes, disparagement (san-kenashi),
while four or more sneezes are taken to mean, quite reasonably, that a cold is on its way (yottsu-ijo wa kaze no moto). Meanwhile, in Mexico, one sneeze is answered with the word salud (health); two sneezes with dinero (money); three sneezes with amor (love); four or more sneezes with alergías (allergies); laughter often accompanies four sneezes, because health, money and love are obviously more desirable than allergies.
Bless you!
In response to someone sneezing, the Germans say Ges
undheit, ‘health to you’, and the French à tes souhaits, literally, ‘to your wishes’. In Sierre Leone, Mende speakers say biseh, or ‘thank you’; in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, they say velona, ‘alive’, while the Bembe speakers of the Congo say kuma, ‘be well’. In Tonga a sneeze is often taken to be a sign that your loved one is missing you.
Sneezing protocol
In Brazil, they say saúde (health) and the sneezer answers amen. In Arabic, the sneezer says alhumdullilah (‘praise be to God’) first, to which the other person responds yarhamukumu Allah (‘may God have mercy on you’). The sneezer then replies to that with athabakumu Allah (‘may God reward you’). In Iran, things are more complex. There they say afiyat bashe (‘I wish you good health’) and the sneezer replies elahi shokr (‘thank God for my health’). After the first sneeze Iranians are then supposed to stop whatever they were doing for a few minutes before continuing. If the sneeze interrupts a decision it is taken as an indication not to go ahead. Ignoring the single sneeze means risking bad luck. However, a second sneeze clears the slate.
Falling ill
The miseries of the sick bed are universally known:
smertensleje (Danish) to toss and turn on your bed in pain
fanbing (Chinese) to have an attack of one’s old illness
ruttlin (Cornish) the sound of phlegm rattling in the bronchial tubes
miryachit (Russian) a disease in which the sufferer mimics everything that is said or done by another
False friends
gem (Mongolian) defect
lavman (Turkish) enema
angel (Dutch) sting
bad (Arabic) amputation
bladder (Dutch) blister
santa (Egyptian Arabic) wart
turd (Persian) delicate or fragile
Bedside manner
Illness demands sympathy, but the Indonesian word besuk suggests that this is not always forthcoming. It means to refuse to visit a sick person. Possibly with good reason:
bawwal (Persian) one who pisses in bed
osurgan (Turkish) someone who farts a lot
dobol (Indonesian) to have a swollen anus
ra’ora’oa (Cook Islands Maori) to have swollen testicles
kepuyuh (Indonesian) to have to urinate
jerrkjerrk (Wagiman, Australia) diarrhoea
chiasse (French) runs induced by fear
Impatient?
Perhaps the most telling word in the lexicon of sickness is the Chinese word huiji-jiyi – to avoid following your doctor’s advice for fear of being recognized as the sufferer of a disease.
On reflection
Vowelless
The Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber (North Africa) is known for its vowelless words: tzgr, she crossed, and rglx, I locked. Among the longest are tkkststt, you took it off, and tftktstt, you sprained it. And if we accept ‘r’ as a consonant (which is debatable in Czech, as ‘I’ and ‘r’ function as sonorants and so fulfil the role of a vowel) then words consisting entirely of consonants are common in their language: krk, neck; prst, finger or toe; smrk, pine tree; smrt, death. Words beginning with five consonants are not unknown: ctvrt, quarter and ctvrtek, Thursday. Likewise in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian there are: crkva, church; mrkva, carrot; trg, market and zrtva, vinegar.
From Cradle to Grave
xian zhang de meimao, bi bu shang
hou zhang de huzi (Chinese)
compare with the beard that started growing
later
In the family way
Pregnancy can be something of a mixed blessing:
mirkha (Quechuan, Peru) the freckles or spots on a woman’s face during pregnancy
waham (Arabic) the craving for certain foods during pregnancy
tafarrus (Persian) the fainting of a pregnant woman
Birth pains
When it comes to childbirth, English tends to be coy. There is no English equivalent for the Inuit word paggiq, which describes the flesh torn as a woman delivers a baby, nor for the Japanese chigobami – bites inflicted on a mother’s nipple by a suckling baby. As for the less painful aspects of giving birth, we lack the Indonesian word uek, the sound of a baby crying when being born, the very precise Ulwa word from Nicaragua, asahnaka, to hold a child on one’s hip with its legs straddling the hipbone facing the mother’s side, let alone the Persian term kundamoya, which is the hair a child is born with.
Birthing partner
The Inuit have a word tunumiaq which denotes the person who supports a pregnant woman’s back during labour.
First steps in the deep Pacific
In Rapa Nui (Easter Island) there are five detailed words to describe a baby’s early progress: kaukau is a newborn baby first moving its hands and feet; puepue is when it begins to distinguish people and objects; tahuri is when it starts to move from side to side; totoro is when it’s learned to crawl; mahaga is when it is able to stand by itself.
Toddling
English is strangely deficient when it comes to observing the many stages of development:
teete (Zarma, Nigeria) to teach a toddler how to walk
menetah (Indonesian) to help a little child walk by holding its hands to keep it in balance
pokankuni (Tulu, India) to learn by looking at others
keke (Hawaiian) a word of caution to children to cover their nakedness
Growing pains
The next few years are crucial:
polekayi (Tulu, India) writing in a large crooked hand as children tend to do
qiangda (Chinese) a race to be the first to answer a question
nylentik (Indonesian) to hit a child’s ear with the index finger
paski (Tulu, India) punishing a boy by making him alternate between standing and sitting with his arms crossed and both ears seized by his fingers
zhangjin (Chinese) the progress made in one’s intellectual or moral education
Polterabend (German) a stag party for both sexes at which crockery is broken celebrating the end of their single lives
ronin (Japanese) a student who has failed a university entrance examination and is waiting to retake it (adapted from its original sense of a lordless wandering samurai warrior)
Boys and girls
Some cultures go further than merely differentiating between children and adolescents. The Indonesian word balita refers to those under five years old; the Hindi term kumari means a girl between ten and twelve, while bala is a young woman under the age of sixteen. The Cook Islands Maoris continue the sequence with mapu, a youth from about sixteen to twenty-five.
False friends
compromisso (Portuguese) engagement
embarazada (Spanish) pregnant
anus (Latin) old woman
chin (Persian) one who catches money thrown at weddings
moon (Khakas, Siberia) to hang oneself
bath (Scottish Gaelic) to drown
hoho (Hausa, Nigeria) condolences
Mid-life crisis
Before we know it, the carefree days of our youth are just fading memories:
sanada arba’ (Arabic) to be pushing forty