On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the\u00a0 interlocutors originate.<\/p>\n
The women shifted between Bislama and language as required, using the former to fill in any gaps that a pre-modern, agrarian vocabulary might expose when discussing life in town. The dialogue, to these ignorant ears, went something like this:<\/p>\n
“Language language language language language mobile<\/em><\/strong> language language language text<\/strong><\/em> language language language credit<\/strong><\/em> language language language westem mani nomo<\/strong><\/em>!”<\/p>\n It didn’t surprise me that ‘mobile’, ‘credit’ or ‘text’ required substitution. But it is telling indeed that this language had no word for ‘money’ and, even more interesting, ‘waste.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the interlocutors originate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[317,375,553,629,637],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-commentary","category-soft-core","tag-language","tag-money","tag-snippets","tag-vocabulary","tag-waste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}