{"id":3603,"date":"2015-04-08T16:50:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T15:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/?p=3603"},"modified":"2015-04-08T16:50:07","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T15:50:07","slug":"introduction-to-tok-pisin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/introduction-to-tok-pisin\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to: Tok Pisin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Halo!\u00a0Nem blo mi em Nat.\u00a0Gutpela lo meetim yu! <\/em><\/p>\n

Or, in English: Hello! My name’s Nat. Nice to meet you!<\/p>\n

Today we’re having a short introduction to Tok Pisin<\/strong> (literally, ‘Talk Pidgin’), one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea<\/strong> (along with English and Hiri Motu).<\/p>\n

We recently recorded Tok Pisin for our uTalk<\/a> app (coming in the next update), with our delightful voice artists Rhonda and Patrick, and I was intrigued by how the language works. Tok Pisin grew up out of a country teeming with hundreds of other languages – even today, there are still over 800 languages spoken in PNG. Tok Pisin developed as the lingua franca<\/em>, a common tongue everyone could use for trade and communication. Nowadays, it is a language of instruction in schools and the mother tongue of over a million people, with millions more speaking it as a second language.<\/p>\n

Beyond a doubt, Tok Pisin is a complex language with plenty of grammar rules to learn, but I am reliably informed that after a few weeks of immersion you would start to pick up the basics, and even during our recording session I was recognising some logical constructions in the language. For example, we have:<\/p>\n

hausik<\/em> (house sick – hospital)<\/p>\n

haus moni<\/em> (house money – bank)<\/p>\n

haus krai<\/em> (house cry – mourning house)<\/p>\n

haus kaikai<\/em> (house eating – restaurant)<\/p>\n

\"Papua<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you pick up a few basic elements, it all seems to make a little bit more sense:<\/p>\n

Wara<\/em> is ‘water’, so you can see how solwara<\/em> (‘salt water’) means ‘sea’.<\/p>\n

Liklik<\/em> is ‘small’, so you can see that liklik prais<\/em> (‘little price’) is ‘cheap’.<\/p>\n

Liklik maunten<\/em> (‘little mountain’) is a ‘hill’.<\/p>\n

And:<\/p>\n

Ples blong<\/em> means ‘the place of’, so ples blong waswas<\/em> is a bathroom.<\/p>\n

Ples blong silip<\/em> is somewhere you sleep.<\/p>\n

Ples blong kaikai<\/em> is a dining room, or somewhere you eat.<\/span><\/p>\n

My favourite construction is the suffix\u00a0–pela<\/em> (apparently from the English ‘fellow’), which modifies nouns and adjectives.\u00a0So although wan<\/em> is simply ‘one’, if you’re qualifying a noun then it becomes wanpela<\/em>: ‘one doctor’ is wanpela\u00a0dokta<\/em>. Similarly ‘big’ is bikpela<\/em>, ‘this’ is dispela<\/em>,\u00a0‘good’ is gutpela<\/em>, ‘we’ is mipela<\/em>, ‘you’ is yupela<\/em>, strong is strongpela<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Knowing all this, can you work out what this sentence means? Tell us your suggestions in the comments, and we’ll reveal the answer tomorrow…<\/span><\/p>\n

Dispela wara ino gutpela blong drink.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’re finding that you’re as captivated as I was, and you’d\u00a0like to learn a bit more, get one of our Tok Pisin<\/a> products and start learning!<\/p>\n

Nat<\/p>\n

\n

(Answer: This water is not safe to drink.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halo!\u00a0Nem blo mi em Nat.\u00a0Gutpela lo meetim yu! Or, in English: Hello! My name’s Nat. Nice to meet you! Today we’re having a short introduction to Tok Pisin (literally, ‘Talk Pidgin’), one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea (along with English and Hiri Motu). We recently recorded Tok Pisin for our uTalk … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,794],"tags":[426,1066,52,1067,1068,1069,1070],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}