Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

So in the study of Marquesan one finds that the common objects have older names than those less usual. The missionaries had a hard time suiting a word to the devil. With their vision of him, horns, hoof and tail, they had to be content with kuhane anera maaa. Kuhane means soul or spirit, anera means heavenly spirit, and maaa means wicked, and also a firebrand or incendiary. So Great Fern, my Presbyterian neighbor, gave me his idea that the devil—Tatana, as Satan is pronounced—was a kind of cross between a man and a wild boar running along with a bunch of lighted candlenuts, setting fire to the houses of the wicked.

It is not easy to learn well the Marquesan language, but it is not hard to acquire a smattering of the Lingua Franca spoken by natives to whites and whites to natives. The language itself has been so corrupted by this intercourse that few speak it purely.

Amusing are the English words adapted or melted into the native tongue, and it is interesting to trace their derivation. They call any tin or metal box tipoti (pronounced “teepotee”). The first metal receptacles they saw aboard the first ships were the teapots of the sailors, and they took the word as applicable to all pots and boxes of metal. The dictionary says “Tipoti—petite boite en fer-blanc.”

Beef is Pifa (peefa). Poteto—pronounced potato—means ship’s biscuits or American crackers or cakes. The early whalesmen held out their hardtack to the natives and offered to exchange it for potatoes or yams. The natives took it that the biscuits were potatoes, and call them so to-day.

A curious and mixed meaning is that of fishuka, which one might think meant a fish-hook. It means a safety-pin, and is a sought-for article by the women. The Marquesans had fishhooks always, and a name for them, and so gave the English name to safety-pins, which appear like unto them.

Metau is a fish-hook, and a pin is piné (pee-nay). There are hundreds of queer and distorted words like these. Bread is faraoa, pronounced frowwa, which is flower, with an r instead of an l, as they have no l in their alphabet. In Tahiti, taofe is coffee. K and t and l and r are interchangeable in many Polynesian languages, and fashion has at times banned one or the other or exchanged them. Whims or even decrees by the pagan priests have expelled letters and words from their vocabularies, and some have been taboo to certain classes or to all. Papeete was once upon a time Vaiete, which means the same, a basket of water, the site conserving the streams of the hills. Vaiete was smothered under a clerical bull and forgotten along with other words thought not up-to-date.

I have heard an aged and educated American woman born in Honolulu call it Honoruru, and Waikiki, Waititi, as she had learned when a girl.

Coffee here is kahe, not unlike the Japanese kohi.

Area is the same word in Latin and Maori, and virtually in English. It means space, in all. Ruma, a house, is much like room, and poaka or puaka, a pig, is akin to the Latin porcus, and the Spanish puerca.

When the missionaries here sought to translate a beloved phrase, “The sacred heart of Jesus,” familiar in Catholic liturgy, they were puzzled. The Polynesian believes with some of the Old Testament writers that the seat of sentiment is in the bowels. “My very bowels yearned” is a favorite expression of Oriental authors.