Pidgin Then And Now
A cultural commentary to accompany A Special Book
by Tom Conger, kamaaina (Hawai’i-born) RVM resident
As the percentage of residents with Hawaii roots at RVM maintains well into double digits, it seems right to borrow the recent newsletter article (A Special Book, by Sally Hayman) dealing with pidgin, or Hawaiian Creole English, from our sister Mirabella Seattle. As many of our RVM kamaaina were also born & raised in the islands before Pearl Harbor—or at least pre-statehood — speaking pidgin was a given. We not only communicated among ourselves, and the populace in general, in the dialect of our specific island, or neighborhood (or plantation camp), but likewise lived within the overarching polyglot culture of the Territory. To now learn that a devoted cadre of local translators have produced a Pidgin Bible is not surprising. Sure, “da missionaries” made a Bible in Hawaiian in their early efforts to convert the heathen, but not many of us in those idyllic days before the War were fluent in pure Hawaiian; we used Hawaiian words in our pidgin, and conformed to planty old Hawaiian customs (and superstitions), but our everyday idiom was multicultural pidgin. Some of us were lucky enough to be sent to English Standard [or even private] schools, where we were exposed to/taught proper English, but old habits die hard.
Further, in those days – and shortly thereafter – there weren’t a lot of tourists arriving at Hawaii docks and/or crowding the few hotels which existed at the time. The way we talked, and got along, was simply the way we lived in our remote culture. Our pidgin was, and can be, surprisingly expressive, concise, and even unique; inflection was often key to the true intent of the terminology – it was not a written language.
In ensuing decades, however, especially as Hawaii became more & more a tourist destination, the spoken jargon seems to have overpowered cultural aspects of the interface, and many attempts have been made to capture pidgin in print – some fairly successful, others missing the target by a wide margin.
Thus we examine Da Good an Spesho Book from a cautious perspective. A labor of love, requiring twenty-nine individuals working for 33 years from the original Greek, the eventual opus cannot be considered casually slapped together; they did elect, from any number of various island/ethnic dialects, a heavier rural pidgin than is heard in more urban environs. Please bear in mind that the Bible is a perpetual best-seller, printed in a myriad of languages ‘round the girdled earth; thus passages translated into the pidgin as presented are familiar to readers who’ve already seen that text [more than once…] in their native tongue. A cursory review of Genesis reads as a plain and literal restatement of the original Greek/Aramaic with some pidgin terms substituting for the archaic structure. Some of the phonetics conventions the translators adopted may appear a little awkward for contemporary readers: by now, many of us have grown accustomed to pidgin phonetics which may look funny written but sound exact in our head. Since Pidgin varies over time and from place to place, the size and duration of the project makes it inevitable that some inconsistencies arise. Local terms that have become commonplace are not used – for example, the Standard English “inside” is used instead of “eensai,” and “like that” is rendered as “li’dat” rather than “lahdat.” “Peopo” kept stopping my eye as I scanned the content; most contemporary transcribers would render the phonetics as “peepo.” However, these minor criticisms pale into insignificance when compared to the magnitude of the accomplishment. As an endorsement on the back cover shouts, “We need a Pidgin Bible!”
Security Agency. Traveling with them in Europe are Kira, their 19 year old first born, and her younger brother, Tony. One evening in Paris, Kira and Tony meet a good looking French graduate student named Jacques. Kira is attracted but unfortunately, the family is leaving for Spain the next day. Jacques offers to follow them to Spain and meet Kira in a famous bar he knows of. Jacques is not what he seems and things go downhill for Kira. No spoilers here, but this story has more twists and turns than a curvy mountain road and somebody ends up dead. It is available in large print at the RVM Library as are two of the John Wells series.
